Programme overview

"Money talks...", so they say. But what is money? Does it "make the world go round"? In this module we ask these questions and find out that things aren't as straightforward as they might appear: it turns out that there are a lot of different ways of understanding what money actually is, each of which has big implications for how we think about politics and the world around us.

From high finance and global monetary relations all the way to hip hop iconography and student debt, money does indeed talk, and this module finds out about what it's saying.

Programme content

We spend the first half of the module looking at some of these ways of understanding the nature of money as explored by various people from anthropology, sociology, economics and political science. The second half is spent applying those ways of understanding to contemporary issues of the political economy of money. We look where the power to make money lies, how that power shapes both domestic and international political relations, and how people are resisting the world of dollars, euros and pounds through online and community currencies.