Dr Geoff Goodwin

Profile

Before joining POLIS in January 2022, I taught at the London School of Economics, University of Oxford, and University College London, and was also a Research Associate at FLACSO, Quito.

I draw on various academic disciplines to research and teach political economy, including politics, economics, anthropology, geography, and history, and I use a range of qualitative methods, especially interviews, observation, and archives.

I first became interested in political economy when I read Michal Kalecki and Karl Polanyi while studying economics at the University of Leeds. Their work helped me see that economics is always political and this view was reinforced when I travelled to Latin America after I graduated and witnessed mass protests against neoliberal policies. It was also in Latin America that I began to understand the centrality of history to political economy and this remains a key part of my research and writing. 

Responsibilities

• Co-Director - Centre for Global Development
• Deputy Director - Internationalisation

Research interests

My research has primarily focused on water, land, and socioenvironmental change in Ecuador and Colombia, and I have a wider interest in the history and political economy of Latin America. 

My doctoral research explored how Indigenous peoples navigated and reconfigured land reform in Highland Ecuador in the late twentieth century and how this continued to shape politics in the early twenty-first century. I’ve published two articles in the Journal of Agrarian Change based on this research, including this open-access article which explores how Indigenous peoples responded to the escalation of land commodification during this period.   

A core issue that emerged during my doctoral research was the use, distribution and management of water and this has become a central focus of my post-doctoral research in Ecuador. I’ve paid particular attention to role of community water organisations in managing and distributing water and contesting and shaping water laws, policies, and institutions. You can read a blog about my research on water politics in Ecuador here and my recent reflections on left politics in Ecuador here.

I expanded my research in Ecuador into Colombia with the support of a British Academy Small Research Grant and have since started investigating the history and politics of water in Bogota.  

The Covid-19 pandemic encouraged me to pay closer attention to water history and politics in England, and I’ve become particularly interested in public drinking water fountains and bottled water markets in London, where more than one billion single-use plastic water bottles are purchased every year.  A short article about my research on London’s drinking water fountains is available here. I’m in the early stages of integrating this research into a comparative study of the history and politics of water in London and Bogota. 

I’ve also recently started a project on public drinking fountains in Kolkata, India in collaboration with colleagues at Presidency University, Kolkata.  

Infrastructure is another key theme in my research and I’ve recently co-edited a book,  which explores multiple Latin American infrastructures from diverse disciplinary perspectives and conceptualises infrastructure as a relational and experimental process.  You can read a blog about the book here. 

All of this feeds into my wider interest in the past, present, and future (s) of capitalism. I’ve primarily contributed to critical debates about capitalism by reformulating the work of Karl Polanyi and connecting his concepts and ideas to other critical scholars from the North and South.  My latest article in this vein is available to download here. I’m currently working on a book that will bring together and extend my writing on Polanyi and elaborate a new theoretical framework to analyse capitalism. I’m also interested in comparing capitalism across the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ of the capitalist world economy. I’ve recently published this article that compares political-economic change in Britain and Ecuador during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

I’m an Editor at Radical Americas and Associate Editor at Oxford Development Studies.

I’m an active member of the interdisciplinary network water@leeds. 

Qualifications

• PhD - Political Economy (University College London)
• MA - Economics (University of Leeds)

Student education

I’m committed to interdisciplinary teaching and critical pedagogy. I’m a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, having completed my training at the London School of Economics. 

I’m particularly interested in supervising PhD students in the following areas:

- Water/rivers

- Land/food

- Environment/socioecological transformation

- Infrastructure/materiality 

- Social movements/activism

- Capitalism/post-capitalism 

Current postgraduate researchers

• Mel Fatric Rhai Yan
• Elizabeth McGowan
• La Ode Machdani Afala