Lecturer in International Development.
I really enjoyed reading & reviewing Margarita Fajardo’s The world that Latin America created with Felipe Antunes de Oliveira. We argue the book makes a major contribution by taking Latin American development debates seriously, but leaves key political questions unresolved. Read the full review here.
Along with Erik Reinert, I’ve published A Modern Guide to Uneven Economic Development. In contrast to mainstream approaches to economics, this Guide addresses the complex reality of economic development as an inherently uneven process, exploring the ways of theorizing and empirically exploring the mechanisms with which the unevenness manifests itself. It covers a wide array of issues influencing wealth and poverty, technological innovation, ecology and sustainability, financialization, population, gender, and geography, considering the dynamics of cumulative causations created by the interplay between these factors.
I wrote a new article on decolonizing economics teaching with my collaborator Surbhi Kesar. It’s now open access in Review of International Political Economy, check it out: Standing in the way of rigor? Economics’ meeting with the decolonization agenda.
Here’s the abstract:
This article critically discusses the scope for decolonizing economics teaching. It scrutinizes what it would entail in terms of theory, methods, and pedagogy, and its implications for scholars grappling with issues related to economics teaching. Based on a survey of 498 respondents, it explores how economists across different types of departments (economics/heterodox/non-economics), geographical locations, and identities assess challenges to economics teaching, how they understand the relevance of calls for decolonization, and how they believe economics teaching should be reformed. Based on the survey findings, the article concludes that the field’s emphasis on advancing economics as an objective social science free from political contestations, based on narrow theoretical and methodological frameworks and a privileging of technical training associated with a limited understanding of rigor, likely stands in the way of the decolonization of economics. Indeed, key concepts of the decolonization agenda—centering structural power relations, critically examining the vantage point from which theorization takes place and unpacking the politics of knowledge production—stand in sharp contrast to the current priorities of the economics field as well as key strands of IPE. Finally, the article charts out the challenges that decolonizing economics teaching entails and identifies potential for change.
I’m very happy to finally have this open access article “Beyond financialisation: the longue durée of finance and production in the Global South” out in the Cambridge Journal of Economics (coauthored with Kai Koddebrock and Ndongo Samba Sylla). I summarize the article in this twitter thread.
Here is the article abstract:
One of the central premises of the literature on financialisation is that we have been living in a new era of capitalism, characterised by a historical shift in the finance-production nexus. Finance has expanded to a disproportionate economic size and, more importantly, has divorced from productive economic pursuits. In this paper, we explore these claims of ‘expansion’ and ‘divorce’ based on a longue durée analysis of the link between finance and production in Senegal and Ghana. As such, we de-centre the dominant approach to financialisation. Seen from the South, we argue that although there has been expansion of financial motives and practices the ‘divorce’ between the financial and the productive economy cannot be considered a new empirical phenomenon having occurred during the last decades and even less an epochal shift of the capitalist system. The tendency for finance to neglect the needs of the domestic productive sector has been the structural operation of finance in many parts of the Global South over the last 150 years. Therefore, one cannot put forward a theory of the evolution of finance under capitalism without taking these crucial historical insights into account.
The article is a part of a two-part Special Issue on ‘Financialisation in Developing and Emerging Economies: Manifestations, Drivers and Implications’ in CJE, edited by Carolina Alves, Bruno Bonizzi and Annina Kaltenbrunner. Read their introduction to the first part here.
I have a new article in the Review of International Political Economy with the fabulous co-author team of Ilias Alami, Carolina Alves, Bruno Bonizzi, Annina Kaltenbrunner, Kai Koddenbrock and Jeff Powell. The article (open access) outlines a research agenda for understanding international financial subordination by drawing on the heterodox traditions of dependency theory, Marxism, and Post-Keynesianism.
I recently started a podcast, along with my co-host Basile Boulay! The Hierarchies of Development podcast offers long format interviews focusing on enduring global inequalities. Conversations focus on contemporary research projects by critical scholars from across the world that help us understand how and why structural hierarchies persist.
We have two episodes out so far:
Episode 1: Environmental hierarchies
In the first episode we speak to Tejal Kanitkar (National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, India) and Leon Sealey-Huggins (University of Warwick, UK) about climate change and environmental hierarchies. Join us to learn more about the COP26, the racialised dimension of climate change, the issues around the concept of sustainability, and much more.
Episode 2: Labour hierarchies
In this second episode we speak to Rosa Abraham (Azim Premji University, India) and Lucia Pradella (King’s College, London, UK) about their respective work on the Indian labour market and the political economy of work in the Mediterranean region. Join us to reflect on some key contemporary issues surrounding work and migration, including the role of gender and imperialism.
Follow the podcast on your preffered platform to get information on the next few episodes (see here).
The podcast is supported by King’s College, London, the European Association for Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) and the Developing Economics blog, with special editing support from Jonas Bauhof.
What does it mean to decolonize teaching? This is one of the many questions we’re grappling with in Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ). Along with Ariane Agunsoye and Michelle Groenewald, I recently put down some thoughts in a two-part blog:
It’s the start of a new blog series by the great D-Econ blog team called Decolonising Economics: Teaching and Pedagogy.
I recently wrote an essay about Samir Amin for the popular magainze, Aeon. In it, I go through what I think are major lessons from Samir Amin that can help us understand imperialism, Eurocentrism, uneven development, and ideology better. I contrast his structural and materialist analysis of capitalism and imperialism with the culturalist views of Edward Said, as Said has received much more attention in both academia and in the public sphere. Read the essay here.
Read a Spanish translation of the article here (Letras Libres).
Along with my colleaborator Surbhi Kesar I recently wrote a blog post for Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ) on the ongoing industrial dispute in UK higher education, linking it the to wider structural problems of marketisation, privatisation, commodification, and decolonisation.
I had the privelege of publishing a review essay of two books in the most recent issue of Race and Class (2022). I review the important contributions and radical potential of Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire (2019) and Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa (2020), and outline some ways in which their analyses and frameworks could be expanded along anti-colonial Marxist lines.
Read the full review here.
ingridhk.com 