In 2022 the journal History of Political Economy will host a conference on the question “when does economics become news?” The contributions to the conference will be collected in a special issue of the journal in 2023.
Economics is the social science most frequently subject of news, these include reports on the breakthroughts of economic research, features on the lives and ideas of economists, and analysis of current affairs through the prism of economists or economic research. The ambition of this collaboration is to replace a picture of breathtaking complexity with studies of key moments, key actors, and key institutional relationships that help us think economic journalism historically.
To address the main research question contributors will pose the question of “when” entangled with the question of “how economics becomes news.” Our attention is drawn to the practices of writing about economics, how publics of economics news have been imagined, how pre-existing genres of reporting were reworked to report on economic knowledge and what are the structural relationships between economic news and the polity.
We believe that understanding the media nexus is an essential step towards a fuller appreciation of the public life of economic knowledge.
Participants to the conference include: Roei Davidson, Julien Duval, Evelyn Forget, Manuel Gárate, Maria Grafström, Kelly Goodman, Marco Guidi, Tiago Mata, Paul Milazzo, Tomás Undurraga, Carl Wennerlind.