On July 11th 2018 I delivered the same lecture twice to the Sixth Form Applicants Open Day at the University of Birmingham School. The lecture was entitled 'The Politics of Statues', and I focused in particular on the statues that the students were likely to see around them in Birmingham and how they relate to patterns of political protest that have developed around public artworks in recent years.

I spent June 15th and 16th 2017 at the Work in Progress Workshop at the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham. Whilst there, I delivered a paper of my own ('Literary Themes and Economic Models: The Novels of Daniel Defoe and the Framing of Market Agency') and I also acted as discussant for a paper delivered by Huw Macartney ('All Bark and No Bite: Bank Culture and the Political Economy of Fines').

Along with my Department's Widening Participation Officer, Shahnaz Akhter, I launched the Colonial Hangover project at a Schools Day event we ran for Year 12 students on January 17th 2017. The project will run for the whole year and will invite the participating students to reflect on the images of empire that they continue to find around them on a day-to-day basis. It picks up on an increasing sense that the British Empire might well have been formally disbanded, but that assumptions about empire continue to shape our everyday experiences. This has perhaps never been more amply demonstrated than in the vision of Britain's place in the world that animated the Leave campaign at the 2016 EU referendum and that now provides the dominant imagery for Theresa May's preferred account of what a post-Brexit Britain might look like.

Assisted by our undergraduate student research assistants Taznema Khatun and Jonas Eberhardt, we also put on a Colonial Hangover conference on June 30th 2017. This was designed to allow our schools competition winners to present their work - both essays and spoken word pieces - in an environment in which they could interact with our undergraduates and learn more about university life from the latter's presentations. It proved to be an exhilarating day in which all of the students took the opportunity to really talk about themselves, their experiences of the legacies of empire and what it means to live in a society that continues to be dominated by assumptions of white privilege. Recordings from the day will shortly be available.

A recording of the January lecture is able to be downloaded here.

On October 29th 2016 I delivered a presentation to an Undergraduate IPE Masterclass in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham. I was joined at the Masterclass by Drs Sophie Harman and Megan Daigle. We were asked to talk to a recent paper that we had written, but less about its contents and more about the process through which we came to put the paper together in the first place. This was then to be used as guidance for the students as they work towards their own projects for the year. The paper I chose was from my Professorial Fellowship research and was entitled, 'Crusoe, Friday and the Raced Market Frame of Orthodox Economics Textbooks'. My presentation focused on why I have become so interested in understanding the silences that develop in economic theory when the market frame is taught through a basic model in which full contracting equality before the law is ascribed to Crusoe and Friday. The reality of Defoe's original novel was very different, and everywhere other than in economics textbooks the 'Crusoe' and 'Friday' signifiers continue to evoke the racialised hierarchy through which the novel's characters capture the essence of the early eighteenth-century colonial economy.

The audio recording of the whole session is available here. My presentation starts 14 minutes into the recording and ends at 26 minutes.

On June 23rd 2016 I delivered a paper to the Work-in-Progress Workshop held at the University of Birmingham. The paper is entitled, 'The Changing Look of the Market Model in Mainstream Economics: Gérard Debreu and the Influence of the Hilbert Programme'. A copy of the paper, preliminary though it remains, can be downloaded here.

I also acted as discussant at the same event to two further papers: Huw Macartney, 'The Culture of US Banking: Legitimacy, Inequality, and the Rule of the Market'; and David Bailey, 'Challenging the Age of Austerity: Disruptive Agency after the Global Economic Crisis'.

On October 29th 2015 I delivered a presentation to an Undergraduate IPE Masterclass in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham. I was joined at the Masterclass by Adrienne Roberts from the University of Manchester and Liam Stanley from the University of Sheffield. The topic we were asked to address was 'How To Do Research in IPE', and I illustrated my arguments via an ongoing paper that seeks to put the historical back-story of gunboats, royal intrigue, European imperial wars and the transtalantic slave trade back into David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage.

The session was filmed by technicians at the University of Birmingham, and the recording can be viewed here: https://bham.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=c4848b2b-8b04-4a19-9e9b-4110c446cd03. Huw Macartney from Birmingham introduces the Masterclass from the start of the recording until 02:15, and I then speak from that point until 15:30.

This is a link to the recording of a paper I delivered to an undergraduate masterclass delivered to International Political Economy students in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham on December 5th 2014. The presentation is entitled, 'How I Came to IPE and Where I Think It Should Go'.

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/watson/podcasts/?podcastItem=how_i_came_to_ipe.mp3