Module manager: Dr Jorg Wiegratz
Email: J.Wiegratz@leeds.ac.uk
Taught: Semester 1 (Sep to Jan) View Timetable
Year running 2025/26
This module is not approved as an Elective
How do we gain new insights in a crowded field like GPE? In a discipline that often relies on desk-based analysis, something as complex, varied and multifaceted as capitalism presents real challenges for those seeking to reframe the debate of GPE. This module delivers a range of non-standard (i.e. multidisciplinary) perspectives on GPE to help us explore capitalism from different entry points, original angles, and different tools to reorientate how we present analytical writing in GPE. As we go through the material we explore how non GPE accounts enrich our understanding of GPE issues and topics, to rethink GPE’s standard insights and assumptions and to render GPE strange. Literature, anthropology, film and case studies can open up new ways of exploring the preconditions, opportunities, challenges and pitfalls of GPE by linking it to wider manifestations of power through different disciplinary lenses. The module will draw from scholarship but also literature, film, personal experience and the research expertise of GPE scholars, to assemble the material and learning activities/exercises that students engage with and discuss. The core aim of the module is to study and discuss how disciplines other than economics and political economy analyse capitalism and thus reframe the phenomena of GPE. Of particular relevance are disciplines that use other methods than desk based analysis: ethnography, archives, spatial analysis, cultural studies etc. By doing so will help the students to generate new insights and understanding of mainstream GPE but also learn of the processes that police the discipline of GPE and the opportunities and risks of engaging outside the field into the personal, sensorial and emotionally saturated worlds of life under contemporary capitalism. The module will also focus on a limited number of book length studies to explore the craft or writing, researching and reading at a postgraduate level of political economy.
“Frontiers of Political Economy” celebrates interdisciplinary GPE and helps students to navigate, understand and benefit from this interdisciplinarity.
The module explores phenomena and dynamics of global and local capitalisms – and (cultural) political economy - via the perspectives, toolsets and insights of various sister disciplines of GPE . This includes anthropology, law, criminology, sociology, psychology, geography and history. It builds on the two core GPE modules that introduced students to (i) the major approaches and theories of global political economy, and (ii) the key trends and issues in major economic sectors of the global economy (structured around matters of markets, concentration, profits, wages, power, policy, state etc). These disciplines do not start from the vantage point and assumptions (e.g. statist, industrial etc) of (mainstream) GPE, and instead, have their own analytical tools, forms of enquiry, methods etc.
This module thus encourages students to explore the frontiers of global political economy via the analytical lenses and hands of scholars who are (typically) not GPE/IR scholars.
It thus introduces students to different ways of seeing, researching, unpacking, analysing and writing about capitalism, and requires them to think about and discuss how the material links with/complements their learning regarding GPE issues and theories in the other two modules which represent core debates in and around the GPE canon.
Further, the module aims to shed light on and unpack: key actors/protagonists, worlds and cultures of capitalism. Specifically, we use book-lengths accounts of key actors in/of global capitalism – the capitalist corporation, CEOs, traders, consultants, mining operatives, nannies of rich families, the rich, celebrities, etc. – and (b) the related phenomena and conceptual tools and debates that inform and dialogue/connect with these studies [such as agency, subjectivity, social reproduction, power, elite schools/networks, wealth, pressure, mental (il)health), workplace bullying, reward (and punishment) culture, careers, masculinity, race, gender, criminality, emotions, revolving door, (ir)rationality, risk, power, choice, biographical dynamics].
The module therefore draws on major works (major university presses books, often prize-winning; drawing on extensive field work) of sister disciplines of GPE, thus major (sometimes iconic) authors and their (at times ground breaking, much noticed) work. It thus allows students to become familiar with a wider set of approaches, entry points, angles, concepts and insights into capitalism and the agencies and worlds/milieus (and related phenomena) that characterise and (re)produce and drive capitalism. It gives them another set of ‘data’ (different from CiP module) that is, again, different from desk-based analyses that characterises a good section of the GPE scholarship.
This allows them to envisage and explore new dimensions of global political economy that resonate with their experiences and offer pathways to innovative GPE writing and research. It enables different ways of seeing, exploring, discussing and unpacking – i.e. analytically approaching – capitalism, e.g. at the decisive level of actors (corporations and their professionals/actors from exec level to floor level, marketeers, traders etc). and it introduces them to major works on capitalism, produced and discussed in sister disciplines.
1. Develop critical analytical and creative skills through extension of GPE debates into other disciplines
2. Understand various approaches, theoretical perspectives and data sets concerning (the study of) global political economy and capitalism.
3. Develop an understanding of the social, political, cultural, psychological, economic and legal layers/dimension/properties of capitalism and agency in capitalism.
4. understand and analyse capitalism in various regions of the world, at various scales and in comparative terms.
5. offer insights into the methods for interpreting GPE across a range of media (film, books, artefacts, icons, spectacular events) that are not always intrinsic to the canon of C20th GPE.
| Delivery type | Number | Length hours | Student hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fieldwork | 5 | 2 | 10 |
| Seminar | 11 | 2 | 22 |
| Tutorial | 2 | 1 | 2 |
| Private study hours | 266 | ||
| Total Contact hours | 34 | ||
| Total hours (100hr per 10 credits) | 300 | ||
Students will receive formative feedback in three key ways.
First during the course of class discussions they will engage with their tutors on their reading and comprehension.
Second students will receive formative and summative feedback either on their reports to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the sources they have identified and the methods used for data collation OR on the literature review that they have undertaken In both cases they will receive feedback on the research question that they have prepared for their final essay. This feedback will assist them in choosing and developing the critical framework and the conceptual underpinnings of their main essay.
After their final essay and reflective logs have been assessed, students will also receive feedback via turnitin.
| Assessment type | Notes | % of formal assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Project | 1 x Project Report | 50 |
| Reflective log | 1 x Reflective Log | 50 |
| Total percentage (Assessment Coursework) | 100 | |
Normally resits will be assessed by the same methodology as the first attempt, unless otherwise stated
The reading list is available from the Library website
Last updated: 30/04/2025
Errors, omissions, failed links etc should be notified to the Catalogue Team