What are the connections between the ever-worsening global environmental crisis, the global political economy and our everyday lives? How can we understand efforts to mitigate climate change and do our everyday actions make a difference? What are some of the everyday products, services and activities that we consume and how are they contributing to environmental degradation?
In this blog series, we present outcomes from a teaching and learning project which brought together students located in three countries – the UK, Malaysia, and Australia – to reflect on these questions. Students were tasked with working together in groups to produce a short blog that linked their everyday lives to the global political economy of climate change. This was a project grounded in the I-PEEL approach to teaching International Political Economy – one that asks students to develop their understanding of IPE by starting with everyday objects and practices that link us, in one way or another, to global capitalism. Funded by the Monash Warwick Alliance, this was a cross-campus project involving students from Warwick and Monash’s campuses in Victoria and Malaysia; it was therefore also a cross-cultural project involving students located in very different parts of the world with very different experiences of the effects of climate change. Students were grouped together to co-author blogs with mentoring from Warwick and Monash academics. This was a not-for-credit, groupwork project run over a short period of time that enabled students to think collectively about a pressing global issue, learn how to write collaboratively, and how to operate virtually across multiple continents and time zones, testing their time management skills to the limit!
The results of this project are published as part of this series. The blogs cover three broad themes, which touch on not only the climate crisis, but more broadly questions of sustainability, environmental degradation and human and social development, highlighting the complexity and interconnectedness of the political economy of the environmental crisis. The three themes are:
- Fashion, with blogs on shoes, tote bags, Bluetooth headphones and blue jeans.
- Consumption, with blogs on avocados, donating and plant-based milks.
- Leisure, with blogs on beaches, concerts and travel.
These essays on the everyday political economy of environmental crisis are the outcome of the second phase of the ‘Global Groupwork’ project. The first phase resulted in essays being published in a special section of the undergraduate student journal Reinventions. Those essays had a focus on a different global crisis – COVID-19 – providing a quite different vantage point for thinking about how the everyday of ‘living through COVID-19’ connects to the global political economy. A team of Warwick and Monash academics have been involved in supporting and mentoring students through this process – and through these collective efforts we hope to have developed a useful pedagogical intervention into how IPE can be taught beyond the conventional classroom and outside of the structures of formal assessment regimes. The academics involved in this project were: Tom Chodor, Juanita Elias, James Brassett, Samanthi Gunawardana, Ruben Kremers, Batrisyia Najwa Azalan, Helen Nesadurai, George Nikolaidis, Lena Rethel, and Marek Rutkowski.
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