I have some job news: in April I'll be moving to my alma mater, Goldsmiths, London, to lead the development of their new alternative PPE degree, and establish a new centre of cultural and political economy around it. It's a very exciting opportunity, and I'm really looking forward to collaborating with a large number of very interesting people from across the college. Part of the rationale behind the new degree and the centre is the perceived failings of economics, ordinarily understood, to respond to the changing economic landscape, as Johnna Montgomerie explains here. I think there's also a good case for Goldsmiths doing this sort of thing, given its wide range of critical and culturally-inflected thinking in politics, sociology, media and elsewhere. One obvious way in which it can differ from the (in)famous Oxford equivalent (the course which David Cameron, George Osborne and David Miliband all took) is to gradually highlight the entanglement of the three components, rather than leave them in their tidy disciplinary boxes. Hence, the Goldsmiths economics will be heterodox and historically-attuned; the politics will be critical and theoretical; and the philosophy will have continental and historicist elements. There will also be elements oriented around broader questions of 'capitalism', which draw all of these together. If there's a 17-year-old future George Osborne reading this right now, please sign up immediately, and save us all a lot of bother in twenty years time.
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