Moving to new generational beats: Lived experiences of capitalism, student-led (re)makings of knowledge, and the evolution of critical research agendas

Ian Bruff

doi:10.1177/0309816821997119

Abstract

Via a reflection on the evolution of a module on comparing capitalisms that I have been teaching for more than a decade, this article discusses the collective influence of new generations of students on how knowledge is (re)made. I deploy a conjunctural understanding of the term ‘generations’ in order to make sense of how students’ interpretations of the topics covered by the module have, across the 2010s, led me to increasingly question the field that was, in an earlier conjuncture, essential for my intellectual foundation and development. Their lived experiences of capitalism are more likely to be dominated by themes such as political, economic and social crises and conflicts, inequality, personal indebtedness and precarity, and in some cases activism. This has had profound and long-lasting effects on my teaching and research, discomfiting me in an ultimately beneficial way; most notably, through the recognition that future critical work on comparing capitalisms ought to move away from previous attempts to engage immanently with dominant, mainstream approaches and towards the articulation of a more confident, autonomous position. Hence, a key aspect of the development and evolution of critical research agendas occurs in and through educational exchanges in the seminar room.

Highlights

‘state of the art’ papers focus on extant scholarship in the given discipline or field, using this as the focus for any discussion of how the discipline or field has evolved
The changes that occurred in my worldview from the early 2010s onwards, towards a more openly critical and distanced perspective, can be traced to my own observations of the relative failure of the field to respond effectively to a period in history dominated by discussions of multiple crises, but this was because my students, informed by their own generational experiences of capitalism, increasingly forced me to confront the possibility that the problems in the literatures were more endemic and insurmountable than I thought
The emotional and temporal labour I have invested into this area of research means that I still instinctively feel that I learned much from creative forms of institutionalism that offer the fine-grained analytical detail that more critical, holistic research has sometimes been less able to do effectively. Though, and this is the main lesson to take away from authoring an article such as the present one, new generations of researchers will invest their emotional and temporal labour in different ways. All of this means that I am much more comfortable than even a few years ago with the notion that the Comparative Capitalisms (CC) field of study, which formed an essential basis for my intellectual foundation and development, ought to fracture into different areas of enquiry and become unrecognisable to my younger self

Summary

Introduction

‘state of the art’ papers focus on extant scholarship in the given discipline or field, using this as the focus for any discussion of how the discipline or field has evolved. The module has evolved significantly since 2009: it has become increasingly critical of capitalism and more global in scope, and has produced an approach that is explicitly cross-disciplinary and which foregrounds the political nature of all forms of research (by students as well as academics).

Results

Conclusion