Description
Within IPE, there has been a call to engage with everyday actors, particularly with those groups that have been historically marginalised in the field. However, accessing the economic belief of these actors can be challenging. In this paper, I demonstrate the value of of Robert Kozinets’s (2019) ‘netnography’ as a tool for accessing everyday belief on the concept of ‘the economy’. I collected three months of social media data from April-June 2020, when two key took during the Covid-19 pandemic: the anti-lockdown and Black Lives Matter (George Floyd) movements. While I found over 115 discrete uses of ‘the economy’ in the more white aligned anti-lockdown group, I only found one use of the same term amongst the Black activists during the same timeframe. This is despite the fact that both groups make frequent use of economic ideas more broadly. More importantly, following a netnography practice of ‘immersing’ myself in the content of both groups , I am able to perceive how economic discursive objects such as ‘the economy’ can be used in a process of racialisation. That is, deployments of ‘the economy’ tacitly reproduces whiteness, making it a less accessible/useful term to communities of colour contesting racism and colonialism.
