About the Political Economy Futures Forum

The Political Economy Futures Forum (PEFF) is an interdisciplinary community of researchers committed to addressing big, enduring questions about the relationship between the economy and society. We share a common research interest in political economy and its potential to build democratic, equitable, and sustainable economies and organizations. PEFF represents a University-wide platform for promoting political economy research and its role in tackling current and future challenges.

As a College of Social Science Interdisciplinary Research Theme, we are a core strategic initiative at the University of Glasgow. PEFF is led and run by a team of early and mid-career scholars, and we aim to develop skills and capabilities for PGRs and early career researchers, as well as foster collaboration across the University. PEFF’s work is supported by the fantastic team at the COSS Research Office, with excellent support from Dr Madeleine Beveridge and Morgan Durfee in particular!

The Launch Event

We officially launched the Political Economy Futures Forum at a well-attended and dynamic event on 25 September 2024, which featured a welcome and framing by Dr Sean Vanatta (ESH), and introductions to the four research clusters from the cluster leads:

Supported by drinks and nibbles we also attempted some ‘structured networking’ –while this initially sounds somewhat painful to most academics, undertaking this collective exercise really added to the event. The idea behind the ‘IRT Key Words

Activity’ was to get to know each other, establish what political economy research means to our community at Glasgow, and find some common ground across departments (and Colleges!). We ended up adding 17 new terms to the 11 keywords we had started out with, setting both an ambitious agenda and demonstrating the wide variety of political economy research at Glasgow.

Semester 1 Recap

1) The PEFF Research Seminar

Following our launch event, the Advanced Research Centre became the weekly home of our ‘flagship’ activity, the PEFF Research Seminar series, which we hold every Wednesday afternoon from 3-4:30 – all welcome!

Designed to rotate through the four research clusters, the PEFF seminar will host a total of 20 interdisciplinary talks from our community by the end of semester 2 – no small feat! Thankfully, co-lead Sean has developed a fine-tuned email system to keep us on track, announcing upcoming talks and signposting to other relevant events happening beyond PEFF. You can sign up to these updates here.

The PEFF seminars are designed to be flexible, dynamic and encourage discussion and exchange. Speakers presented full papers and workshopped emerging findings, explored fellowship ideas and introduced policy work. Here’s an overview of what happened in semester 1:

Topics discussed cut across some of the big challenges we face, including aspects of the climate emergency (from justice concerns around climate adaptation to international norms on ecocide), question of employment and labour (from trade union campaigns for deprivatisation to negotiating neoliberal despotism), and the interplay and impact of economic forces on and in an increasingly polarised political landscapes (from the state of multilateral funding during crises, to the relationship between credit and voting, odious debt claims, and business support of populist movements and leaders). We would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to our fantastic semester 1 speakers for their insightful and stimulating contributions!

Equally, we would like to give a shout-out to the colleagues who acted as discussants and interlocutors for these seminars, offering their expertise, ideas, and suggestions, and ensuring interdisciplinary debate. Many thanks to: Dr Dania Thomas (ABSB), Dr Mindy Ptolomey (Education), (Law), Dr Giedre Jokubauskaite (Law), Dr Saurabh Lall (ASBS),  (SPS), and Brian Robertson (Unite, City of Edinburgh Council branch).

Thank you also to all PEFF community members for making the seminars what they are – a place to connect, exchange ideas, and learn about the cutting-edge work happening in and beyond the University. Analysis of preliminary data from our extremely sophisticated attendance measuring system (aka the sheet-of-printer-paper approach) has revealed that PEFF welcomed participants from the Schools of Education, Geographical & Earth Sciences, Health & Wellbeing, Law, Modern Languages & Cultures, and Social & Environmental Sustainability (Dumfries), the Adam Smith Business School (Accounting and Finance, Economics, and Management), and the School of Social and Political Sciences (Politics and IR, Economic and Social History, and Sociology).

2) Other PEFF events and looking ahead

We were and are also busy organising other events. During semester 1, co-lead Sean ran the first instalment of a grant writing workshop series, which will continue into semester 2. During the first workshop, colleagues from COSS focused on the initial ideation phase for identifying big grant ideas and overcoming challenges of forming interdisciplinary teams. Future grants workshops will focus on framing ‘the hook’ to draw in readers and reviewers, as well as trying to assemble PEFF-based teams to answer focused grant calls.

To round off a busy semester and ring in the festive season, we teamed up with the other two new IRTs, Peaceful, Secure and Empowered Societies and Global Health & Environment for the ‘Interdisciplinary Research Festive Social’ on 11 December 2024. There was no structured networking this time, just a mountain of cheese and friendly faces!

If you haven’t already, do sign up for email updates to stay informed about our research seminars in semester 2 and more grant workshopping happening very soon – there is still time to sign up to the workshop on 4 February. On top of that, planning for both more policy-oriented sessions and the big end-of-year event, the PEFF Symposium, is well underway. More info coming soon!

First published: 28 January 2025

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