Across factory floors, family kitchens, neighbourhoods, and informal markets, the international economy is lived and negotiated in ordinary places. The podcast series I host, Ground Level: Everyday Political Economy, is available on Acast, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Through a focus on familiar topics that relate to ‘everyday’ experiences, our aim for the series will be to provide an accessible entry point into the discipline of International Political Economy (IPE).
For a discipline that prides itself on asking normative questions and challenging power structures, IPE has an accessibility problem. The series posits that the traditional (‘regulatory’) focus on elites, markets, and structural forces has contributed to this problem. Throughout this 7-episode series, I wish to shift this focus from the abstract towards the tangible. Starting with an act/topic/anecdote that everyone can engage with, and working upwards to connect these with the wider IPE without sacrificing academic rigour.
Published episodes:
1) The International and the Everyday w/ Juanita Elias & Frank Maracchione – Listen here. (5 March 2026).
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.
Guest: 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).
2) Ageing and Care w/ Yingzi Shen – Listen here. (9 March 2026).
Supporting the most vulnerable, including children and the elderly, is one of the main forms of caring labour for social reproduction. The moral and economic choices individuals and families make every day when dealing with children, as well as old age, have broad implications for the global political economy of care.
These decisions unfold within a context where populations in wealthy economies are ageing, while birth rates are rising in many postcolonial societies. This demographic divergence contributes to the (re)production and entrenchment of gendered and racialised hierarchies.
Yet, children and the elderly are not only passive subjects or caring. They often become active carers and central agents of social reproduction labour. Today’s episode will centre on this more agential role of vulnerable populations by exploring the contribution of grandparents’ caring role to the formal labour economy.
Concepts discussed: social reproduction, care labour, urban/rural divide.
Guest: Dr Yingzi Shen recently completed her PhD at the School of Sociological Studies, Politics and International Relations, University of Sheffield. Her PhD research looked at the intergenerational cooperation in childcare in rural-to-urban migrant families in China and how it is affected by rural migrants’ limited access to welfare and social inequalities. Her research interests lie broadly in the nexus between care and migration, as well as ageing, family studies, and rural-urban inequalities.
3) Food & War w/ Nadine Bahour – Listen here. (12 March 2026).
Everyday life is often described as common, usual, uneventful, slow, and mundane, yet it can easily become unpredictable, anxious, and traumatic. This episode explores contexts in which war and political violence closely interact with everyday life.
To discuss the everyday political economy of state-mandated violence, we focus on survival. Where critical political economy frames survival as part of everyday resistance connected to labour agency, we move to discuss the political economy of actual survival as represented by gathering food when supply chains become instruments for violence and repression.
We discuss the political economy of survival by exploring the sources of food insecurity in Palestine and the food-related abuses employed by the Israeli state, first as part of its colonial project and after October 2023 as part of the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Concepts discussed: survival, social reproduction, genocide, violence, resistance, starvation, humanitarianism.
Hosts:
Dr Frank Maracchione, SOAS University of London.
Gwilym Evans, University of Sheffield.
Speakers: Nadine Bahour is the Research Program Coordinator for the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. Nadine is originally from Ramallah, Palestine, and her work studies the impact of settler colonialism on healthcare access and quality.
Future episodes:
4) RuPaul & Globalisation w/ Mariya Levitanus and Helton Levy (16 March 2026).
5) Commuting & Sustainability w/ Vicki Reif-Breitwieser and James Jackson (19 March 2026).
6) Cannabis & the State w/ Gulzat Botoeva, Adam Lloyd and Matt Bishop (23 March 2026).
7) Music Streaming & Surveillance w/ Eric Drott (26 March 2026).
Frank Maracchione 