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Pathways to Impact

I intend to make as much as possible of the impact and public engagement side of my Fellowship, but I am also aware that it takes time to develop the necessary networks to make this happen. I am always keen to hear from people who are interested in my research for their own purposes and would encourage anyone in this position to make contact with me on my Warwick email address, matthew.g.watson@warwick.ac.uk.

The main pathways to impact that I will be seeking to open up during my Fellowship are as follows.

(1) Community Education and Outreach Groups

I already work closely with community education groups, seeking to take political economy education beyond the confines of the university. To talk about the political economy of the global financial crisis, for example, is in so many instances to talk about the political economy of people's lives. I am willing to work either in an advisory capacity to help set up new learning and teaching relationships of this nature or to be actively involved in delivering the sessions. I will be running annual Widening Participation Days at Warwick throughout the lifetime of my project to ensure that my findings are able to influence the thinking of young people of school age. Overall, my objective is to try to combine impact and outreach. As part of this strategy, if the situation presents itself I will be attempting to create a massive open online course to see whether MOOCs can be used to produce impact.

(2) The Arts and New Media

I have been active earlier in my career engaging with film and documentary makers and recording short films for distribution on new media sites. Increasingly I have also been able to engage playwrights, theatre makers and actors and to swap ideas with them. I am happy to talk with anyone who would like to use me and my work in any of these ways, whether generally in relation to the dominance of market ideology in modern society or specifically in relation to my understanding of the relationship between economics and the global financial crisis. I am also keen to extend these activities to any other area of the visual or performing arts.

(3) Activist Groups, Think Tanks, Journalists and Opinion Formers

My concept of 'uneconomic economics' has important implications for ongoing discussions about renewing the economics curriculum and, more broadly, for what should be taught as economics. These discussions are already a matter of public debate, often being tied to whether it is possible to imagine political alternatives beyond the current context of austerity. I am available either for comment or for extended face-to-face meetings on these or any other related topics. I also welcome the opportunity to show how specialist knowledge of the origins of economic ideas assists in talking about the economy today. There is much to be learnt from exploring how society has become trapped into using ideas about the market that were initially developed to talk about very different institutions operating in very different contexts.

(4) Society at Large

Please do get in touch if my work might be of interest to you or your organisation even if you do not think that you fit into any of the categories above.


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