On Pre- and Post-Disciplinarity in (Cultural) Political Economy

For some time now we have been working both individually and together on a new approach to political economy that does not fit neatly into the standard ways of thinking about political economy as a discipline. Instead, we describe our shared approach as pre-disciplinary in its historical inspiration and post-disciplinary in its current intellectual implications. Of course, we are not alone in refusing disciplinary boundaries and decrying some of their effects. Indeed, there are many signs of increasing commitment among social scientists to transcending such boundaries to better understand the complex interconnections within and across the natural and social worlds. We advocate the idea of a 'cultural political economy' and suggest how it might transform understandings of recent developments in political economy. Before doing so, however, we will situate our proposals for cultural political economy in the broader context of exciting recent developments in political economy