SPERI Presents...

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.

References:
Andreas, P. (2011). Illicit globalization: Myths, misconceptions, and historical lessons. Political Science Quarterly, 126(3), 403–425. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-165X.2011.tb00706.x

Baird A, Bishop ML & Kerrigan D (2021) “Breaking bad”? Gangs, masculinities, and murder in Trinidad. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 24(4), 632-657. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2021.1931395

Baird A, Bishop ML & Kerrigan D (2023) Differentiating the local impact of global drugs and weapons trafficking: How do gangs mediate ‘residual violence’ to sustain Trinidad’s homicide boom?. Political Geography, 106.

Bishop, M. L. (2016). Negotiating flexibility at UNGASS 2016: Solving the “world drug problem”? SPERI Global Political Economy Brief No. 5, Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI), University of Sheffield. https://sheffield.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2022-10/Global-Brief-5-Negotiating-Flexibility-at-UNGASS-2016-Solving-the-World-Drug-Problem.pdf

Botoeva, G. (2014). Hashish as cash in a post-Soviet Kyrgyz village. International Journal of Drug Policy, 25(6), 1227-1234.

Botoeva, G. (2015). The monetization of social celebrations in rural Kyrgyzstan: on the uses of hashish money. Central Asian Survey, 34(4), 531–548.

Botoeva, G. (2021). Multiple narratives of il/legality and im/morality: The case of small-scale hashish harvesting in Kyrgyzstan. Theoretical Criminology.

Chouvy, P. A. (2016). The myth of the narco-state. Space and Polity, 20(1), 26–38.

DeVillaer M. R. (2024). Buzz kill: The Corporatization of Cannabis. Black Rose Books.

Dillis, C., Biber, E., Bodwitch, H., Butsic, V., Carah, J., Parker-Shames, P., Polson, M. & Grantham, T. 2021. Shifting geographies of legal cannabis production in California. Land Use Policy, 105, 105369.

Seddon, T. (2016), Inventing Drugs: A Genealogy of a Regulatory Concept. Journal of Law and Society, 43: 393-415.

This episode is produced by the SPERI Presents… committee, including Chris Saltmarsh, Josh White, Frank Maracchione, and Andrew Hindmoor. This episode was edited by Frank Maracchione with support from Chris Saltmarsh. Music and audio by Andy_Gambino. Hosted on Acast. See https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.

Host: Dr Frank Maracchione, SOAS University of London.

Speakers:
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.

Reading list:
Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Levitanus, M., & Kislitsyna, P. (2024). “Why wave the flag?”: (in)visible queer activism in authoritarian Kazakhstan and Russia. Central Asian Survey, 43(1), 12–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2023.2234955
Levy, H. (2023). Globalized Queerness: Identities and Commodities in Queer Popular Culture. Bloomsbury Publishing.
N-ost - border crossing journalism. (2023). Behind the Mask: Contemporary Drag Culture in Kazakhstan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtgXoysv5Tw
Pereira, P. P. G. (2019). Reflecting on Decolonial Queer. GLQ, 25(3), 403–429. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-7551112
Schramm, C. (2012). Queering Latin American coloniality and the cross-cultural production of racialised sexualities. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 33(3), 347-362. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2012.673476
Sultanalieva, S. (2023). ”Nomadity of Being” in Central Asia : Narratives of Kyrgyzstani Women’s Rights Activists (1st ed. 2023.). Springer Nature Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5446-7

Corrigendum: In the episode, we incorrectly mentioned January 2026 as the signing date of Kazakhstan’s anti‑LGBTQ law. The correct date is 30 December 2025.

This episode is produced by the SPERI Presents… committee, including Chris Saltmarsh, Josh White, Frank Maracchione, and Andrew Hindmoor. This episode was edited by Frank Maracchione with support from Chris Saltmarsh. Music and audio by Andy_Gambino. Hosted on Acast. See https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.

Material discussed in the episode:
Bahour, N., Anabtawi, O., Muhareb, R., Wispelwey, B., Asi, Y., Hammoudeh, W., Bassett, M. T., Mills, D., & Tanous, O. (2025). Food insecurity, starvation and malnutrition in the Gaza Strip. Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal, 31(4), 281–284. https://doi.org/10.26719/2025.31.4.281
Gisha. (2012). Reader: "Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip - Red Lines". Gisha - Legal Centre for Freedom of Movement. https://www.gisha.org/UserFiles/File/publications/redlines/redlines-position-paper-eng.pdf
Ross, A. (2021). Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel. Verso Books.

Further readings:

Abusalim, J., Bing, J. and M. Marryman-Lotze. (2022). Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Devereux, S. (2024). Was There a Famine in Gaza in 2024? IDS Working Paper 613. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. https://doi.org/10.19088/IDS.2024.042.
El Masri, Y. (2024). 12: Food-Making in the Sisterhoods of Bourj Albarajenah Refugee Camp: Towards Radical Food Geographies of Displacement. In: Hammelman, C., Levkoe, C.Z. and Kristin Reynolds. (Eds). Radical Food Geographies. Bristol University Press. https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529233445.ch012
IPC - Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. (2025). GAZA STRIP: Famine confirmed in Gaza Governorate, projected to expand | 1 July – 30 September 2025. 22 August. https://www.ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ipcinfo/docs/IPC_Gaza_Strip_Acute_Food_Insecurity_Malnutrition_July_Sept2025_Special_Snapshot.pdf
Nimer, F. (2024). Food Sovereignty in a Palestinian Economy of Resistance. Al-Shabaka’s Palestine, 27 August. https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/food-sovereignty-in-a-palestinian-economy-of-resistance/
Pearce, F. (2025). As War Halts, the Environmental Devastation in Gaza Runs Deep. Yale Environment 360, 6 February. https://e360.yale.edu/features/gaza-war-environment
Roy, S. (2023). The Long War on Gaza. The New York Review of Books, 19 December. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/12/19/the-long-war-on-gaza/
Seidel, T. (2021). Settler Colonialism and Land-Based Struggle in Palestine: Toward a Decolonial Political Economy. In: Tartir, A., Dana, T., Seidel, T. (eds) Political Economy of Palestine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68643-7_4

This episode is produced by the SPERI Presents… committee, including Chris Saltmarsh, Josh White, Frank Maracchione, and Andrew Hindmoor. This episode was edited by Frank Maracchione with support from Chris Saltmarsh. Music and audio by Andy_Gambino. Hosted on Acast. See https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.

Hosted by: Dr Frank Maracchione, SOAS University of London.

Speakers: 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.

Reading list:
Chan, K. W., Cai, F., Wan, G., & Wang, M. (2019) Urbanization with Chinese characteristics: the Hukou system and migration. London: Routledge.
Liang, J., Huang, W., & He, Y. (2024) Report on the cost of shengyu in China 2024. Yuwa Population Research. Available at: https://www.yuwa.org.cn/article/reports?id=2.
Lin, Q. and Mao, J. (2022) ‘“A new job after retirement”: Negotiating grandparenting and intergenerational relationships in urban China’, China perspectives, (1), pp. 47–56. doi: 10.4000/chinaperspectives.13520
Liu, J. (2023) ‘Filial piety, love or money? Foundation of old-age support in urban China’, Journal of Ageing Studies, 64, pp. 101104–101104. doi: 10.1016/j.jaging.2023.101104.
Liu, J. Y. (2017) ‘Intimacy and Intergenerational Relations in Rural China’, Sociology (Oxford), 51(5), pp. 1034–1049. doi:10.1177/0038038516639505.
National Health and Family Planning Commission. (2018) Report on the development of China’s migration population 2018. Beijing: China Population Publishing House.
Shen, Y. (2025) Caring through intergenerational support: Childcare practices in rural-to-urban migrant families in China. PhD thesis, University of Sheffield.
Tronto, J. C. (1993) Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for An Ethic of Care. Georgetown: Taylor & Francis Group.
Tronto, J. C. (2013) Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York, NY: New York University Press.
World Health Organisation. ‘Ageing and health in China’. Available at: https://www.who.int/china/health-topics/ageing.

This episode is produced by the SPERI Presents… committee, including Chris Saltmarsh, Josh White, Frank Maracchione, and Andrew Hindmoor. This episode was edited by Frank Maracchione with support from Chris Saltmarsh. Music and audio by Andy_Gambino. Hosted on Acast. See https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.

Speakers:
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).

Dr Frank Maracchione, host of the Ground Level series, is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS University of London. Frank is a political economist studying Global China, specialising in how local sociocultural norms shape global political and economic processes.

Reading list:
Brassett, J., Elias, J., Rethel, L., & Richardson, B. (Eds.). (2015–2026). I-PEEL: International Political Economy of Everyday Life. https://i-peel.org/
Davies, M. (2006). Everyday life in the global political economy. In M. de Goede (Ed.), International political economy and poststructural politics (pp. 173–190). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800892_12
Elias, J., & Rai, S. M. (2019). Feminist everyday political economy: Space, time, and violence. Review of International Studies, 45(2), 201–220. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210518000323
Elias, J., & Rethel, L. (Eds.). (2016). The everyday political economy of Southeast Asia. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316402092
Elias, J., & Roberts, A. (2016). Feminist global political economies of the everyday: From bananas to bingo. Globalizations, 13(6), 787–800. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2016.1155797
Hobson, J. M., & Seabrooke, L. (Eds.). (2007). Everyday politics of the world economy. Cambridge University Press.
Maracchione, F. (2025). Decentring narratives of (de)globalization and crisis: Uzbekistan’s ‘everyday’ political economy amidst Russia’s war in Ukraine. Globalizations, 1–21. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2025.2533666
Rai, S. M. (2024). Depletion: The human costs of caring. Oxford University Press.
Scheper-Hughes, N. (1992). Death without weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil. University of California Press.

This episode is produced by the SPERI Presents… committee, including Chris Saltmarsh, Josh White, Frank Maracchione, and Andrew Hindmoor. This episode was edited by Frank Maracchione with support from Chris Saltmarsh. Music and audio by Andy_Gambino. Hosted on Acast. See https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.