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).
While IPE presents itself as attentive to power and inequality, its dominant analytical focus has remained on states, firms, and formal markets, often treating everyday life as background or illustration. Feminist and decolonial scholarships have challenged this orientation by foregrounding social reproduction, care, and the uneven ways in which global economic processes are lived and negotiated. This series takes those interventions as a point of departure.
Across seven episodes, the analysis proceeds from everyday practices, including care, consumption, mobility, media use, and survival, and traces their connection to broader dynamics like war, globalisation, state regulation, and the green transition. What emerges is an account of the global economy that is grounded in the spaces where it is reproduced and contested, and attentive to forms of agency that are often obscured in more conventional approaches.
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.
Guest: 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.
4) RuPaul & Globalisation w/ Mariya Levitanus and Helton Levy – Listen here. (16 March 2026).
Shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race have brought queer TV into the mainstream of global media. Scholars of everyday political economy highlight how both producing and watching television shape global queer identities. Dominant media channels promote specific, standardised ways of being queer, often celebrated as victories of LGBTQAI+ visibility, yet at the cost of erasing alternative expressions.
Global media tend to privilege urban, Western narratives, marginalising rural, local, and Global Majority experiences. Queerness is often framed as progressive only when detached from place, tradition, or indigeneity. Popular formats, particularly in drag, have commodified queerness, smoothing over linguistic and visual differences for global appeal.
Still, alternative forms of queer expression continue to surface across TV, art, digital platforms, and community spaces, offering more grounded and resistant modes of visibility.
Concepts discussed: commodification, globalisation, queerness, visibility and invisibility, resistance.
Guests:
Dr Mariya Levitanus is a Lecturer in Counselling and Psychotherapy at the University of Edinburgh, as well as a queer activist and psychotherapist from Kazakhstan. Her earlier research explored the everyday narratives of queer individuals in Kazakhstan, while her current work focuses on Russian queer and trans* migration to Central Asia following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Dr Helton Levy is a London-based journalist, lecturer, researcher, and visual artist. They work as lecturer in digital and visual media at London Metropolitan University. They are the author of Globalized Queerness, and The Internet, Politics, and Inequality in Contemporary Brazil: Peripheral Media. They have published widely on digital activist cultures, social media discourse, queer media, and Latin American studies.
5) Cannabis & the State w/ Gulzat Botoeva, Adam Lloyd and Matt Bishop – Listen here. (19 March 2026).
Drugs, alcohol, and other recreational substances are central to everyday social life and form a significant, contested and repressed sector of the global economy. Importantly, it is a market that states seek to disband or regulate through domestic and international political institutions.
Through their encounter with state institutions, substances become a central political issue at all levels of policymaking: from youth policy to the fight against organised crime, from local neighbourhood councils to international security forums, from small artisanal production to global agricultural supply chains.
In this episode, we focus specifically on the political economy of grassroots cannabis production and its interaction with the state to understand how morality, values, and (il)legality shape the political economy of recreational substances.
Concepts discussed: state, legality, illegality, regulation, moral political economy, racial capitalism.
Host: Dr Frank Maracchione, SOAS University of London.
Guests:
Adam Lloyd is a postgraduate researcher in Politics at University of Sheffield, focusing on the political economy of cannabis legalisation in North America, exploring the broader socio-economic and policy implications of cannabis reform.
Dr Gulzat Botoeva is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Swansea University. She investigates illegal economic activities ranging from drug trafficking in Central Asia to illegal gold mining and small-scale hashish harvesting in Kyrgyzstan.
Dr Matthew Bishop is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at University of Sheffield. His research focuses on the political economy of development, with particular attention to small states and peripheral economies, and the political economy of drug policy in the Americas.
6) Commuting & Sustainability w/ Vicki Reif-Breitwieser and James Jackson – Listen here. (23 March 2026).
Every day, millions of people travel to and from their main occupation. Commuting is a central part of daily life, but it is also political. Managing the public transport network is an important part of the job of local officials, for example the mayor of London. Public transport policies are likewise a key element of any progressive strategy for sustainable development, including in the UK, where electrification and nationalisation are reshaping mobility.
Everyday political economy has long discussed commuting through Marxist and feminist analyses of labour alienation, particularly in relation to caring jobs undertaken by those socialised as women. We take a different perspective, focusing instead on the global dimensions of the everyday political economy of transport electrification in public and private transport, and exploring the everyday realities of electrification supply chains.
Concepts discussed: green growth, green extractivism and mining, green transition and China’s role, electrification policies, electric vehicles, indigenous and everyday resistance.
Host: Dr Frank Maracchione, SOAS University of London.
Guests:
Vicki Reif-Breitwieser is a postgraduate researcher in Politics at University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on conflict and violence associated with extractive industries in Latin America. Her PhD thesis interrogates the relationship between extractivism and the green transition with extensive fieldwork in Argentina.
Dr James Jackson is a Hallsworth Research Fellow at University of Manchester having completed his PhD at SPERI. His work examines the politics of the electric vehicle transition and the intersection of fiscal, monetary and climate policy. He has published widely on the politics of the electric vehicle transition in Germany and the UK, and he is currently writing a monograph on the subject.
7) Music Streaming & Surveillance w/ Eric Drott – Listen here. (26 March 2026).
Scholars argue that streaming platforms have turned music into a technology of surveillance. Thanks to music streaming, now more than ever before, music accompanies us as we move across the physical, social and geographical spaces that define our everyday lives.
Music has been traditionally imagined as a means of self-expression. More often than not, it is used to channel our emotions and deal with our everyday lives. Music becomes a soundtrack to the routine, to the mundane, to the banal, but also of the special and most eventful moments of our lives.
Today, with the help of our guest, we will start from this idea, but we will problematise it by outlining how streaming platforms use and commercialise the relationship between music and everyday life, collecting and selling behavioural data.
Concepts discussed: commodity, commodification, decommodification, consumer surveillance, social reproduction, crisis of social reproduction, self-care, protest music, resistance.
Host: Dr Frank Maracchione, SOAS University of London.
Guest: Professor Eric Drott, Professor of Theory at the University of Texas in Austin. His research spans several subjects, including contemporary music cultures, streaming music platforms, music and protest, genre theory, digital music, and the political economy of music. His first book, Music and the Elusive Revolution (University of California Press, 2011), examines music and politics in France after May ’68. His second book, Streaming Music, Streaming Capital (Duke University Press, 2024), examines the political economy of music streaming platforms. He is also co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Protest Music with Noriko Manabe.
Frank Maracchione 