Geographical Political Economy
Research Projects
The Group's research has made significant intellectual contributions to a range of debates within geography and the social sciences. Current research is providing agenda-setting contributions to the following areas of inquiry:
- explanations and critiques of geographies of neoliberalism;
- reconceptualizations of geographical scale;
- understanding changing configurations of statehood;
- pioneering the global production network approach to economic globalization;
- the development of a critical resource geography;
- sharpening understandings of nature's commodification and its biophysical limits;
- environmental governance and the production of new ‘spaces of nature’;
- reconceptualising the social ‘embeddedness’ of economic life;
- delineating and explaining emerging geographies of the temporary staffing industry;
- the role of geography and geographers in public debates;
- the intellectual gains promised through a relational urban political economy.
The results of our research are disseminated in a variety of ways, mainly through high quality publications and conferences.
Research Projects
Current Projects
- Vancouver’s Media Industries
- The Globalisation of Retailing
- Assessing the use of Living Labs in Urban Sustainability Research
- Sustainable Urban Laboratory: The Oxford Road Corridor
- Producing the Extractive Frontier: the making of geology, property and space in the Nigerian tin mining boom, 1902 - 1920
- Geographies of Energy Transition: security, climate, governance
- Energy Geographies Working Group, Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers
- Geographies of Temporary Staffing Unit
- Imagining urban futures programme.
- Mapping the knowledge economy: Geographies of knowledge in the oil exploration and production industry (US National Science Foundation).
- To the Ends of the Earth: Europe and the global expansion of mining investment at the end of the 19th century (European Commission, Framework 6).
- Building transnational networks; the rapid expansion of European retailers into Southeast Asia.
Past Projects
- The Economic Geography of the UK
- Rescue Geography: Developing Methods for Public Geographers
- Sustainability Science and Urban Regeneration
- Sustainable Landscapes: Conservation and Energy Policy
- How Sustainable is Urban Regeneration? Exploring the Provision of Open Space, 2005
- The political ecology of conservation planning
- DEMOLOGOS
- Making the connections: global production networks in Europe and East Asia.
- Living and labour in the city.
- Mineral Investment and Land-Use/Land Cover Change (US National Science Foundation).
Research Strands
Corporate Networks
The focus of this strand is on understanding and explaining the following:
- Corporate organisation, governance and restructuring;
- Global production networks;
- Restructuring in the service and cultural industries;
- State/market boundaries.
Governance
The focus of this strand is on understanding and explaining the following:
- Regulation and commodification;
- Urban and regional economic development;
- The regulation of firm activities;
- Shifting geographies/scales of state activity.
Nature and Resources
The focus of this strand is on understanding and explaining the following:
- Neoliberalism and the ‘production of nature’ in contemporary capitalism;
- Environmental governance and the social regulation of resource access and environmental services;
- ‘green’ Marxian political economy and the theorization of capitalism-environment relationships;
- the spatial and temporal dynamics of extractive industries and the emergence of new resource geographies;
- political economies of environmental change at multiple geographical scales.
Work and Employment
The focus of this strand is on understanding and explaining the following:
- The geographical unevenness of global capitalism;
- ‘Local’ labour market restructuring;
- The expansion of temporary staffing;
- The restructuring of the employment relationship;
- The possibilities of living wage campaigns.
Research Collaboration
As a group we are committed to inter-discplinary and international scholarship.
International Networks
Research Collaborators outside the UK
- Trevor Barnes (University of British Columbia, Canada).
- Tim Bunnell (National University of Singapore).
- Kim England (University of Washington-Seattle, US).
- Derek Gregory (University of British Columbia, Canada).
- Philip Kelly (York University, Toronto, Canada).
- Rob Kitchin (National University of Ireland, Maynooth).
- Phillipe Le Billon (University of British Columbia, Canada).
- Yong-Sook Lee (National University of Singapore).
- Weidong Liu (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China).
- Eugene McCann (Simon Fraser University, Canada).
- Robert Wilson (Syracuse University, US).
- Andrew Wood (University of Oklahoma, US).
- Henry Wai-chung Yeung (National University of Singapore).
Research Collaborators within the UK
- Stefan Bouzarovski (University of Birmingham).
- Michael Bradshaw (University of Leicester).
- David Demeritt (King’s College, London).
- Nick Eyre (University of Oxford).
- Andrew Jonas (University of Hull).
- Andrew Jones (Birkbeck, University of London).
- Phil Jones (University of Birmingham).
- Rob Krueger (Worcester Polytechnic Institute).
- Linda McDowell (University of Oxford).
- Diane Perrons (London School of Economics).
- Neil Wrigley (University of Southampton).