Postdoctoral Fellow: May - August 2019
Project: From knowledge production to methodological practices: The politics of economic methodology in international organisations
I recently completed my PhD at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, prior to which I held research posts at academic and development institutions in the Philippines and Singapore. Broadly, my work covers various aspects of regional (East Asian) and global economic governance, focusing on investigating technical expertise and knowledge production in related institutions.
My research aims to foreground the politics of economic methodology that underpins perceptions of technical authority and expertise in global governance. I am interested in examining financial and macroeconomic modelling as a particular kind of methodological practice that determines how we produce knowledge and how such choices determine the entities and factors included/excluded in representations of ‘the economy’. I am keen on exploring how knowledge limitations are disregarded or accommodated and co-opted in such models, which is crucial to understanding the growing demands for and limitations of technical rationalisation in global governance.
While at IASH, I will be working on developing this approach to the politics of economic methodology and applying it to the case of poverty metrics and methodology in the World Bank and UNICEF. This case is linked to the ERC project, ‘International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field’ (METRO) (link: http://www.metro-project.eu/), based at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh.