Dr Charlie Dannreuther

Profile

Before working at Leeds I held positions at the LSE, Warwick and Manchester where I developed an interest in exploring international political economy through small business policy. 

Until the financial crash I actively pursued engagement in policy debates. My work was recognised in UK government responses to Select Committees (on the value of social science research), in FCO publicity materials (Turkish Lisbon Agenda project) and in my appointment as expert for the Economic and Social Committee opinion on the EU Commission's proposal for a Single Market for a C21st Europe and in projects won with the TUC to help develop Trade Union capacity in Turkey for the FCO.

After the crash I chaired a 400 scholar EU wide network on the systemic causes of the financial crash that explored new phenomena (eg shadow banking) and old (variates of capitalism) through new lenses (eg agent based modelling) and established critiques against mainstream economic thinking (cultural political economy). Since then I have been exploring the economic production of non-quantitative forms of value and their expression in post crash politics. This has included projects comparing how value was constituted in social investment policies with open water swimming in an ISRF funded network project and a showing how the construction of human value used in the EU's Capital Market Union strategies chimed with practices used in C18th slavery (Dannreuther & Kessler 2017). 

My work is eclectic in approach and collaborative in nature but focused on exploring how subjectivities - who we think we are - are influenced by capitalist processes.

Throughout my career I have associated myself with EAEPE (European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy) for its pluralism and energy. I am also the POLIS Widening Participation Officer and Research Ethics Officer.

Responsibilities

• Research Ethics Officer
• Widening Participation lead

Research interests

I am interested in exploring how and why we understand the world as it is and how that informs our political behaviour.  My conceptual outlook is broadly in line with French Regulation school and specifically in exploring international modes of social regulation and their role in the renegotiation of the subject. But I have drifted away from looking at institutions now and am more interested in the ways we feel and relate to each other by exploring notions of touch and desire. 

My past work (especially with Lew Perren) looked at UK small business policy and showed how it was less driven by economic and technological change than by political leadership. This book (2013) used corpus linguistic techniques to capture the changing meaning of enterprise and small firms over 200 years of political debate in Hansard. The distance between the representation of small business in political discourse and the activities of people trading has led me to focus more on what is omitted elsewhere in political life. BREXIT has been a great example of political exclusion but so too has the representation of emotion in care, and places like the seaside. I have been researching the political economy of the seaside for the past three years and hope to bring this to publication soon. 

Qualifications

• PHD Manchester 1996
• Dip Cert Education 2014

Professional memberships

• EAEPE
• UACES
• PSA

Student education

I enjoy learning with my students and am constantly impressed by the quality of insights they bring at all levels, within and beyond the University classroom. As far as possible I like to share their ideas with a broader constituency to demonstrate both to the students and others their abilities. I have trained many policy officials on the EU in the past, mainly  for the European Policy Information Centre. My current teaching is focused on the EU and Britain’s relationship with the EU. Students from my final year course have been presenting their work to the House of Lords EU Select Committee for over ten years now and have submitted reports to official consultations such as the FCOs 2011 Review of the Balance of Competences. I am particularly interested in helping students to engage with real world problems without having to cover the costs and inconveniences of placement years. By organising work experience in module the pedagogic value of the experience can be made more explicit while the value of academic knowledge can be shown in a practical context.

I am immensely proud to be leading a new module "Engaging the Modern City - the Civic Researcher" FOAR5000M in its first year at Leeds. This module was initiated by The Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence (LITE) and funded by HEFCE to develop in degree work experience of aight PG students. The module will involve students partnering with world class civic institutions and organisations accross Leeds to create new projects. If you are interested please follow our website here.

Current postgraduate researchers

• Sara Kaizuka