Gender in the Global Political Economy

• Credit value: 15 credits at Level 5
• Convenor: Kai Heron
• Assessment: a 500-word learning journal (10%) and 2000-word essay (90%)

The history of the global political economy is a history of gendered, raced and classed capital accumulation at a world scale. Today, hierarchies of gender, race and class remain as important as ever. Men are paid more than women in most parts of the world. Reproductive labour is gendered, raced and often low paid. White Americans have seven times the wealth of Black Americans on average. Former colonies are poorer than former colonial powers. And an international division of industrial and agricultural labour ensures that our coffee, smartphones and other consumer items are produced as cheaply as possible, often at the expense of lands, oceans and workers in the Global South. But why?

This module gives you the theories and methods of analysis you need to make sense of these issues and more. You will study concepts and theories developed by feminist political economists, anti-colonial and indigenous scholars and revolutionaries, and Marxist and other theories of class and social inequality. Together, we will ask how our understanding of the global political economy changes when we put gender, race and class at the centre of our study of the capitalist economy’s past and present. The module will also develop your ability to use economic data and critically evaluate policy reports, activist publications and archival material to produce original political economic analysis.

Indicative module syllabus

• Introduction to the (Global) Political Economy
• How to Think Gender, Race and Class
• Accumulation by Dispossession: from Slavery to the New Enclosures
• The Colonial Relation: Then and Now
• Social Reproduction
• The State and Family
• Global Divisions of Labour
• Surplus Populations: Policing and Incarceration
• Sex, Work, and Sex Work
• Land, Nature, Race and Gender

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• document and analyse the gender, class and racial dimensions of the global political economy
• write analytically about gender, race and class in relation by combining political economic theory with detailed case studies
• work with political and economic data within informed theoretical frameworks
• demonstrate familiarity with key global scholars within the broad political economy canon and summarise and analyse their key contributions.