Authors

Jeremy Morris¹;  ¹ Aarhus Universitet, Denmark

Discussion

Inspired by the recent ‘everyday’ turn in international political economy and in particular, feminist theory that focus on the triad of space, time and violence (Elias and Rai 2019). Everyday political economy as I understand it is an attempt to collapse the gap between studies of the ‘logic of governance’ and the ‘logic of action’ where the everyday is a source of agency and potential change (ibid; Hobson and Seabrooke 2009). 

Most social accounts of transformation involve theory-building about political-economic shared rationalities along the axes – maladaptation, incorporation, atomization. However this misses another, perpendicular axis of connexion, engagement, and resistance. We should not call this a ‘rationality’, more a shared conatus or complementary set of libidinal drives, echoing the work of poststructuralist political economists such as Cameron and Palan (2009). 
Following Maffesoli (1989), I try to show how linking ordinariness to the normally macro-scale concepts of political economy grounds social relations in an illuminating way. Thus a knowledge object (PE) usually read in the abstract, is made ‘real’ phenomenologically. EPE then brings questions of order, and navigation by people of the space between subordination and autonomous social action to the forefront against the backdrop of 'mobilization' and conflict.