News broke last week that Progress in Political Economy (PPE) received its second prize in consecutive years in the form of the 2018 Special Achievement in International Studies Online Media, which was awarded to Adam Morton and Gareth Bryant as joint editors of the blog by the Online Media Caucus of the International Studies Association (ISA).
Last year PPE also received the 2017 Best Blog (Group) Award from the Online Media Caucus of ISA, which is supported by Sage. Announced at the ISA’s annual convention, which this year was in San Francisco, the so-called “Duckies” have become a crucial and well-established fixture in the calendar of academic events. We are extremely grateful to Sara Meger for accepting the award on our behalf. Big thanks are due to the award jury that cited the blog’s “thoughtful application of scholarly insights to current events and relevance to ongoing scholarly and policy debates” that was deemed “particularly worthy of recognition”. We also congratulate the award winners in the other categories as well as those who made the shortlist, including Natasha Heenan for her review of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, published on PPE.
There is a collective ethos that defines PPE. We are entirely dependent on the copy given by academics-activists-students that seek to engage wider audiences with their work, aiming to appeal across the academic, social movement and policy-making communities. The Feminist Global “Secureconomy” Series epitomises that endeavour, which was curated by Sara Meger, Amanda Chisholm and Saskia Stachowitsch. We have benefited from similar series whether that be those on Scandalous Economics; Debating Economic Ideas in Political Time; A Political Economy of Australian Capitalism; Radical Economics Pedagogy; or the newly launched Five Minute Honours Thesis series, to name a few. The PPE blog is also a repository for the Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN), which enters its tenth anniversary workshop in 2019.
The mantra we run with on PPE is that the blog is “only what we make of it”. It is indebted to the design work of Burak Tansel; the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney for its support and backing; and the collective input of its authors and its editors.
Walter Benjamin once opined that “every morning brings us the news of the globe and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories”. The normative stance of Progress in Political Economy is to buck that morning experience and offer an alternative to mainstream separations of politics, philosophy and economics—the standard “PPE”—shaping the academy and its relays with dominant policy frames.
Thanks to all for constituting the blog and for reading in our joint endeavour to make the case for heterodox Progress in Political Economy (PPE)!
