Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation (CRESI)

CRESI is the home of economic sociology at Essex, carrying out pathbreaking research on economic sociology, economic justice, and the political economy of economic inequalities.

We have a strong interest in critically challenging regimes of power that compound wealth concentration and perpetuate different forms of racial capitalism and worker exploitation.

Our centre is led by scholars who have made pioneering contributions to the political economy of corporate power, critical scholarship on global philanthropy, feminist political economy, the sociology of power and ignorance, cultural economy, and political anthropology.

Our research interests include the following:

• The finitude of earth's resources (land, water, energy)
• Human rights and economic justice
• Feminist political economy
• Welfare regimes and pensions
• Racial capitalism, slavery and forced labour - historical and contemporary
• The pharmaceutical industry
• Work and employment
• Gender budgeting and fiscal sociology
• Economies of knowledge and epistemic injustice
• Bazaar economy and commons
• Urban studies and enclaving

We emphasize the value of collaborative research within the Department of Sociology and Criminology, as well as interdisciplinary research with researchers and staff in other parts of the University.

We have close links to the Human Rights Centre, the Centre for Ideology and Discourse Analysis (CIDA), the Essex Business School, the Centre for Global South Studies (CGS), and the School of Life Sciences.

A number of different theoretical approaches and substantive areas of focus are strongly represented within the Centre. These include:

• Network theory and science and technology studies (STS)
• Feminist political economy
• Political ecology
• Global justice, reparations and mutual aid
• Human rights theory, racial justice and economic justice
• Post-Marxist theory
• Urban and political anthropology
• Neo-Polanyian approaches
• Sociology of consumption
• Economic history
• Cultural economy and history
• Bazaars and popular economies
• Urban studies and enclaving

Through our research, our regular seminars, and conferences, we stimulate dialogue between these approaches, contributing new insights to research on global economic inequality, global philanthropy, tax justice, racial capitalism, urban economics and political anthropology, and economies of care.

• Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy by Dr Maitrayee Deka, 2023
• The Unknowers - How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Professor Linsey Mcgoey, 2019
• No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy, by Professor Linsey McGoey, 2015
• The Middle Class in Mozambique: The State and the Politics of Transformation in Southern Africa, by Dr Jason Sumich, 2018

• Building Walls to Tame Time: Enclaves and the Enduring Power of Failure by Dr Jason Sumich, published in Economy and Society in 2022
• Enclaving: Spatial detachment as an aesthetics of imagination in an urban sub-Saharan African by Dr Jason Sumich, published and shortlisted by the Journal of Urban Studies for the best article of 2021
• It Isn't Charity because We've Paid into it: Social Citizenship and the Moral Economy of Welfare Recipients in the Wake of 2012 UK Welfare Reform Act by Dr Darren Thiel, published in Qualitative Sociology in 2022

 Our most notable appearances:

• The Billionaires Who Made Our World, a Channel 4 TV documentary on Bill Gates, featuring Professor Linsey McGoey, 2023
• An interview with Dr Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki featured on the Engaged Scholarship Narratives of Change blog, 2022
• Billionaires, Viruses & Vaccines: Private Philanthropy in the Fight against COVID, a YouTube webinar by Professor Linsey McGoey, organised by Northwestern University’s Weinberg Center for International and Area Studies in 2020
• The Role of Philanthropy in Sustainable Development, a keynote speech and debate by Professor Linsey McGoey at the University of Antwerp in 2019

Our events:

CRESI hosts regular seminars featuring internationally renowned speakers and guests, as well as facilitating visiting student and professorial research visits from scholars across the world.

Many of our webinars and seminars are organised in close collaboration with student groups, including the Essex Students’ Union, the Black Social and Political Society (BSPS), and a student-led webinar on resource use and democracy in Bolivia.

To view all upcoming CRESI events, please visit the Department of Sociology and Criminology events calendar.

• Delhi's Electronic Bazaars are One of the City's Last Non-Elite Commercial Spaces, an article by Dr Maitrayee Deka in the Conversation, 2024
• As the Michelle Mone PPE scandal deepens, ministers can no longer feign ignorance, an article by Professor Linsey McGoey in The Guardian, 2022
• Game On, an article by Professor Linsey McGoey on global financial trading and the GameStop controversy, London Review of Books, 2021
• Why Billionaires Like Bill Gates Can’t Fix the Problems They Helped Create, a guest essay by Professor Linsey McGoey in the New York Times, 2021
• Does Philanthrocapitalism Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Poorer? an article by Professor Linsey McGoey on income inequality and philanthropy, Evonomics, 2016 
• No Such Thing As a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey, a book review by Andy Beckett in the Guardian, 2015
• What is 'strategic ignorance' and how the powerful profit from it, according to a Canadian author, an article on the work of Professor Linsey McGoey on BBC Brazil - written in Brazilian Portuguese, 2019

Global Ideas is a podcast hosted by CRESI on critical debates from voices in different parts of the world working and creatively thinking about how to live together in times of crisis. In our first podcast, we spoke to academic and poet Dr Soibam Haripriya, who works at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIITD) on critical thinking and creative writing.

We spoke about the politics of working with different writing genres at a time when there is increasing censorship and shrinking spaces to develop ideas and collaborations. More specifically, it examines the intersection of poetry and scholarship to critically analyse violence and intimate conflicts.