Across factory floors, family kitchens, neighbourhoods, and informal markets, the international economy is lived and negotiated in ordinary places. This episode introduces the theoretical concepts behind Ground Level, SPERI’s podcast series on Everyday Political Economy.
Ground Level’s host, Dr Frank Maracchione, speaks with Professor Juanita Elias about why everyday life matters for studying and understanding global political economy. Together, they trace the emergence of everyday political economy, highlighting feminist and social reproduction approaches that have reshaped the field, before turning to the relationship between the everyday and the international.
The episode sets the conceptual foundations for the series and asks a simple but powerful question: What does the global economy look like when we start from everyday life?
Concepts discussed: commodification, social reproduction, agency, violence, and resistance.
Speakers:
Juanita Elias is Professor of International Political Economy at the University of Warwick. Juanita has held significant leadership roles within Politics and International Studies. She has been editor of Review of International Political Economy, until recently, and is one of the editors of the innovative IPE teaching and learning website I-PEEL, international political economy of everyday life. She currently serves as chair of the British International Studies Association (BISA).
Dr Frank Maracchione, host of the Ground Level series, is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS University of London. Frank is a political economist studying Global China, specialising in how local sociocultural norms shape global political and economic processes.
Reading list:
Brassett, J., Elias, J., Rethel, L., & Richardson, B. (Eds.). (2015–2026). I-PEEL: International Political Economy of Everyday Life. https://i-peel.org/
Davies, M. (2006). Everyday life in the global political economy. In M. de Goede (Ed.), International political economy and poststructural politics (pp. 173–190). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800892_12
Elias, J., & Rai, S. M. (2019). Feminist everyday political economy: Space, time, and violence. Review of International Studies, 45(2), 201–220. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210518000323
Elias, J., & Rethel, L. (Eds.). (2016). The everyday political economy of Southeast Asia. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316402092
Elias, J., & Roberts, A. (2016). Feminist global political economies of the everyday: From bananas to bingo. Globalizations, 13(6), 787–800. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2016.1155797
Hobson, J. M., & Seabrooke, L. (Eds.). (2007). Everyday politics of the world economy. Cambridge University Press.
Maracchione, F. (2025). Decentring narratives of (de)globalization and crisis: Uzbekistan’s ‘everyday’ political economy amidst Russia’s war in Ukraine. Globalizations, 1–21. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2025.2533666
Rai, S. M. (2024). Depletion: The human costs of caring. Oxford University Press.
Scheper-Hughes, N. (1992). Death without weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil. University of California Press.
This episode is produced by the SPERI Presents… committee, including Chris Saltmarsh, Josh White, Frank Maracchione, and Andrew Hindmoor. This episode was edited by Frank Maracchione with support from Chris Saltmarsh. Music and audio by Andy_Gambino. Hosted on Acast. See https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
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