pathway: Global Political Economy/Global Challenges and Transformations: Geopolitics, Inequalities and Mobilities

My research explores Mezzadra and Neilson’s (2013) “multiplication of labour” thesis via militant ethnographic enquiry alongside Barcelona’s present-day experiments in “sindicalismo social” (social unionism).

My research investigates the precise relationships between three major and inter-connected expressions of the post-2008 social movement cycle in Barcelona:

1) Amidst generalising precarity, a resurgent materialist politics expressing emergent social subjectivities that break from traditional working-class identities and their exclusions. In particular, the re-articulation of social reproduction as a sphere of class politics, via struggles over housing, care work and the public sector; and via new forms of “sindicalismo social“, including housing assemblies and unions, new self-organised labour unions in highly deregulated, often feminised and racialised sectors neglected by mainstream unions, and the revitalisation of mainstream unions via social movement alliances

2) The assertion of the politics of race, coloniality, gender and sexuality, and its relationship to the gendering, racialisation and bordering of contemporary class relations under hetero-patriarchal capitalist coloniality

3) The territorial and spatial dimension – that is, struggles over the production of space in, against and beyond austerity urbanism. For example, via the mobilisation of the neighbourhood and municipal scales, or around strategic, spatial circuits of financialised value accumulation such as property and tourism

In so doing, I mobilise and develop decolonial (Quijano 2000; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Dinerstein 2015), feminist (Bhattacharya 2017; Dalla Costa and James 1972; Federici 2012) and spatial (Clare 2018; Gray 2018a; Gray 2018b) perspectives within minor marxisms (Bailey et al. 2018).

I’m committed to collective knowledge production using militant, participatory action, decolonial and feminist research methods and epistemologies.

The objective of my research is to investigate the factors affecting use, in particular their social and cultural dynamics. In particular to understand, how social, economic and demographic factors like gender, income level, religion, caste, etc. interact with the use of bank accounts and other financial services. The results will give insights on the bottlenecks and factors responsible for a low level of financial service use in developing countries.

My research focuses on a critique of the global production networks conception of value, and in particular its overarching emphasis on the way in which they shape different opportunities for value capture. I posit that although this can identify several outcomes from developing economics engagement with global trade, a clearer understanding of how value creation is required. My thesis empirical work be developing this through the value-form approach to value theory through fieldwork in Eastern Europe.

The research I am engaged in is explicitly interdisciplinary; bringing together elements from global political economy and economic geography, my critique also emerges from an engagement with both economic history and long standing debate on value in political economy.