Critical Economic and Political Thought

The group approaches the study of politics and economics from critical cultural perspectives including, but not limited to, history, literature, visual culture, performance and social activism. We share a concern with the interdependence and co-evolution of the semiotic and extrasemiotic, and their implications for the production of hegemony as well as its contestation in the remaking of social relations. We aim to de-naturalize economic and political imaginaries and, hence, contribute to the critique of specific forms of domination in local, regional, national, colonial or post-colonial contexts.

This engagement with economic and political ideas as well as phenomena and the analysis of their implementation, reception, contestation, and rejection in society allows the group to engage with wider questions of power, (in)equality, and dependency using the empirical tools of cultural studies. With this interdisciplinary perspective, we seek to add to traditional approaches in the fields of politics and economics to understand what insights can be gleaned from looking at expressions of culture within these realms.