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Department of Geography

Staff Profile

Dr Paul Langley

Telephone: +44 (0) 191 33 41850
Fax: +44 (0) 191 33 41801
Room number: 222

Contact Dr Paul Langley (email at paul.langley@durham.ac.uk)

Biography

Paul Langley is Reader in Economic Geography. Paul studied at Newcastle University where he received his doctorate in 1998, having previously completed BA (Hons) Politics and History and MA International Political Economy. Before joining the Department in 2011, Paul held the posts of Senior Lecturer in Politics at Northumbria University and Professor of International Relations at University of York. During 2010, he was also a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University. Paul presently convenes the Culture-Economy-Life (CEL) research cluster in the Department.

Paul's research has contributed to the critical study of financial markets and financialisation in human geography and across the social sciences, most notably by exploring the interrelationships between everyday forms of saving and borrowing in the USA and UK and the wholesale markets of global finance. His research has received funding from the British Academy and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Paul is currently working on three main research themes:

Governing the Global Financial Crisis

Focusing on the interventions of central banks, treasuries and regulators in the USA and UK during 2007-10, this research theme seeks to further understanding of how the global financial crisis has been governed. In both academic and popular imaginations, the governance of the crisis is a somewhat functional and ahistorical story of the state coming to the rescue of the banks and markets. In contrast, this project stresses the contingency, changing character, and contestation of crisis governance. It is analyzing how specific interventions were assembled as the crisis was problematized and variously acted on; for example, initially as a crisis of 'liquidity', 'toxicity' and 'foreclosure', and latterly as one of 'capitalisation', 'risk', 'regulation' and 'debt'. Research under this theme is leading to the writing and publication of a monograph - entitled Liquidity Lost - which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2014.

Finance, Welfare and Security

Focusing on particular retail financial products (e.g. occupational and personal pensions, insurance, investments, mortgages), this research theme seeks to examine how the development of these products is constitutive in the market-based provision of personal welfare, wellbeing and security. It includes collaborative work on developments in the design of defined-contribution pensions in the USA and UK, and on the relationships between mortgage product innovation and tendencies to housing asset-based welfare in Europe. Research under this theme is leading to a number of funding applications, and to the publication of edited special issues in academic journals (Financial Subjects: Culture and Materiality, Journal of Cultural Economy, 2012; Consuming Finance, Consumption, Markets and Culture, 2013).

Cultural Economy

Contributing to current conceptual debates in human geography and beyond, this research theme seeks to further the development of a broad-based cultural economy approach. It includes concerns with how agency might be conceived of as distributed and assembled, how economics can be understood to have performative power, how the future is made present through calculative and anticipatory techniques of risk, and how the making of responsible and entrepreneurial subjectivities features in contemporary liberal government. Research under this third theme informs and develops through the research undertaken under themes one and two. It also features a range of interventions, such as my review article listed below for Journal of Cultural Economy 'On the materiality of markets', my piece in the Cultural Anthropology on-line debate 'Theorizing the contemporary' (http://culanth.org/?q=node/561), and my contribution to Paul Mason's Radio 4 Analysis episode 'Radical economics' (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y6qtb).

Supervises

Paul welcomes doctoral research students interested in working on topics that fall broadly within the remit of his research interests. He has previously successfully supervised students who have written theses on a wide range of topics, including occupational pensions in the UK, sub-prime mortgage markets in the US and UK, and ‘small states’ and ‘hot money’ in the global economy.

External Supervisions

Research Groups

Research Interests

  • Geographies of money and finance
  • Occupational and personal pensions
  • Consumer credit
  • Mortgage markets
  • Cultural economy

Publications

Journal papers: academic

Books: authored

Books: sections

Edited works: journals

  • Langley, P. & Leyshon, A. Financial Subjects: Culture and Materiality. Journal of Cultural Economy, 5 (4): 2012.

Supervises