Economic geography for and by whom? Rethinking expertise and accountability

Abstract

This commentary builds on Doreen Massey's thinking on the economy and relationality to ask: who gets to produce economic knowledge and whose lives does research make visible as economic matters of concern? These questions have been thrown into sharp relief as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pandemic has highlighted the need for better infrastructures of care, it has also demonstrated that the mission of ‘saving the economy’ from the ravages of COVID-19 has not centred the concerns of those who have experienced the crisis most acutely. Drawing inspiration from the various economic subjects who continue to make, re-make, and articulate the economy through regular shocks and crises – workers, caregivers, and people marginalized by identity or geography – this commentary makes a case for a public economic geography that rethinks who is taken seriously as an ‘expert’ on the economy, and to what publics the field speaks. This, at its heart, is a radical rethinking of accountability, calling on economic geographers to ask: what should research do for whom, and how?