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.
The module aims to decentre students understanding of the global political economy from the dominant Eurocentric assumptions (and the desk-based theorising) that underpin much of contemporary commentary and analysis.
Key features of western international/global political economy (actors like: corporate leaders, workers, and consultants; gender; urban spaces; futures) are presented in their global historical and social context to complement, nuance and challenge mainstream understandings in GPE around agency, labour, time and knowledge production, and capitalism generally.
In addition to offering critical perspectives these approaches provide a systemic way for students to learn how to gain confidence in their personal perception of events/experiences under (everyday) capitalism through the critical investigation of amongst others: cultural artefacts; the ethnographic observation of human behaviours/worlds and the contextualisation of political economy phenomena in relation to broader forms of meaning expressed in literature and the moving image.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Practical | 11 | 1 | 11 |
| Seminar | 11 | 2 | 22 |
| Private study hours | 267 | ||
| Total Contact hours | 33 | ||
| Total hours (100hr per 10 credits) | 300 | ||
A formal formative assessment opportunity will be provided for each summative assessment task, which is specifically pedagogically aligned to that task. As part of this, each student will receive feedback designed to support the development of knowledge and skills that will be later assessed in the summative task.
| Assessment type | Notes | % of formal assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Coursework | Coursework | 100 |
| Total percentage (Assessment Coursework) | 100 | |
Normally resits will be assessed by the same methodology as the first attempt, unless otherwise stated
Check the module area in Minerva for your reading list
Last updated: 19/09/2025
Errors, omissions, failed links etc should be notified to the Catalogue Team