On New Thinking: Podcasting, praxis and pedagogy in political economy

Remi Edwards - Research & Impact Associate, SPERI

To do so, the first episode diverged from the core format, bringing together SPERI researchers – Liam Stanley, Natalie Langford and Andrew Hindmoor – to create a loose framework for future episodes. Asking ourselves ‘What is political economy?’, we identify “a series of academic approaches” that pose certain essential questions for a grounded, nuanced and normative analysis of our social world. This diversity of approaches is centrally concerned with understanding the politics of global capitalism through a lens of materiality – “with stuff, and who has access to stuff”. In other words, we are interested in the distribution of power and access to resources within the global economy that structure our everyday experience at various sites and scales. When understood in this way, political economy is not the name of an academic discipline, but a lens that enables us to “go beyond our surface level interactions with the world” to denaturalise social relationships, inequalities and the economic status quo.

Adopting this perspective enables us to apply these broad questions – around who gets what and how – to a vast array of social phenomena beyond disciplinary silos. Our approach in inviting guests to New Thinking was not oriented towards presenting a potted history or schematic overview of key research areas in ‘political economy’, but to apply political economic frameworks to unpack social questions – helping listeners to apply these tools in their own social and political analyses. Our first year of New Thinking covered queer activism in Ghana (Ellie Gore), firm-state relations in the pharmaceutical industry (Owain Williams), technocapitalism in urban centres (Sami Moisio & Ugo Rossi), agricultural labour in India (Shreya Sinha / Natalie Langford), value chains (Ben Selwyn) decarbonisation in China (Chris Saltmarsh), Adam Smith’s thought on corporations (Maha Rafi Atal), UN climate governance (Ben Clift & Caroline Kuzemko) and the human costs of caring labour (Shirin Rai). 

These are standalone conversations, but not scattered or disconnected. They relate in their common engagement with the core questions of political economy – helping us to see how economies are structured in ways that benefit some over others, and what could be done to challenge exploitation, climate breakdown, ill health and inequality. Guests drew connections between levels of analysis, demonstrating how non-elite people’s experience can tell us something profound about the workings of the global economy, or vice versa, grounding analysis of elite-level governance in implications for life under capitalism. New Thinking presented a worthwhile challenge to express contributions accessibly, avoiding jargon and overreliance on academic concepts and terminology; podcasting encourages us to democratise research communication. As we as scholars experience increasing workload and labour market pressures, podcasts offer a novel (less labour-intensive) medium through which to engage with broader social research. Podcasting can therefore enhance our scholarly praxis, generating theoretically-informed insights that are communicated across the discipline and beyond to encourage critical analysis of global crises and contemporary challenges with an eye on what is to be done.

Perhaps most rewardingly, we have found SPERI Presents… to be a highly useful pedagogic tool. When teaching Introduction to Global Political Economy, Natalie Langford and I supplemented the reading list with relevant podcast episodes from SPERI Presents…. We anecdotally detected a marked increase in student’s comprehension of topics when a podcast complemented the reading. This decentered our voices as lecturers, presenting research as a relational, interfacing process rather than cold words on a page or hard truths spoken at the lectern. This underscores the social production of research – something created by people – which is easily forgotten in today’s world of AI-driven information access, encouraging them to participate in knowledge production through debate and questioning. We encourage guests to focus on the tangible when discussing their contributions, locating their argument in spheres that feel familiar. This supports students and others to comprehend abstraction in the context of experience and the quotidian. We created a living document offering suggestions of what types of courses and topics the podcast could be incorporated into, available here.

I found preparing and hosting episodes deeply satisfying, hoping to employ political economy frameworks while broadening my own engagement with social research. In academic day jobs, we may slip into sub-sub-sub-disciplinary silos, presenting at narrowly framed conferences and workshops and submitting to journals that house micro-debates. After completing my PhD in April 2024 and focusing publication efforts on labour in value chains, hosting New Thinking has re-solidified my professional identity as a ‘political economist’ – an identity cultivated at SPERI, where I started as a research assistant in 2018, conducted my PhD research and later became Research & Impact Associate. I will soon leave the University of Sheffield for Queen Mary University of London to undertake postdoctoral research, though I have no intention of leaving behind my broadbased interest in political economy analyses. Despite our narrow research niche, we can engage with, learn from and amplify research beyond by drawing on the core and fundamental questions that unite our analyses. Questions of power, access, distribution, structure, agency, inertia and transformation.

In some ways, hosting New Thinking has been the culmination of my time at SPERI. It has been a chance to mobilise the tools I have gradually learned to use while representing the institute that has been my early-career intellectual home. Thank you to the SPERI podcast committee – especially our Executive Producer Chris Saltmarsh – and all the guests and discussants for such rich conversations. While I will miss New Thinking, SPERI and my colleagues, I’m thrilled that the podcast will continue with Josh White at the helm; he brings sharp analysis and charisma on the mic so I can only imagine he will take it to new heights.