Moving to new generational beats: Lived experiences of capitalism, student-led (re)makings of knowledge, and the evolution of critical research agendas

Abstract

Via a reflection on the evolution of a module on comparing capitalisms that I have been teaching for more than a decade, this article discusses the collective influence of new generations of students on how knowledge is (re)made. I deploy a conjunctural understanding of the term ‘generations’ in order to make sense of how students’ interpretations of the topics covered by the module have, across the 2010s, led me to increasingly question the field that was, in an earlier conjuncture, essential for my intellectual foundation and development. Their lived experiences of capitalism are more likely to be dominated by themes such as political, economic and social crises and conflicts, inequality, personal indebtedness and precarity, and in some cases activism. This has had profound and long-lasting effects on my teaching and research, discomfiting me in an ultimately beneficial way; most notably, through the recognition that future critical work on comparing capitalisms ought to move away from previous attempts to engage immanently with dominant, mainstream approaches and towards the articulation of a more confident, autonomous position. Hence, a key aspect of the development and evolution of critical research agendas occurs in and through educational exchanges in the seminar room.

On practising politicized practice: What do we learn?

“…Yet we still affirm that these endeavours are often worth it, even if -as with Ian's module -in some respects they 'fail'. This is because they feed into future work, individual and collaborative, that extend and build upon what has gone before (such as what is discussed in Bruff 2021Bruff , 2022a. For example, it has led to Mel finding that she has been more troublesome than intended.…”

Building alternative scholarly folklores: an intellectual-institutional history of Global Political Economy

“…Second, at the same time, there is a value to the autoethnographic nature of this article, for it visibilises the sedimenting of personal micro-experiences into something of broader significance (cf. Dashper, 2015;Bruff, 2021). Third, it will be clear that the initial impulses to create a new journal came primarily from within the discipline of International Political Economy (IPE).…”