Proposal for Teaching Political Economy Symposium, University of Sydney
A proposal under consideration for December 2025.
Valued and highly supportive colleagues at the University of Sydney have announced a Teaching Political Economy Symposium to be held in December 2025. Below is my submitted proposal which is under consideration. There are other exemplar practitioners that I could have listed below (such as RealVision’s co-founder Raoul Pal) who I left out for word count reasons, whose insights and resources are very much appreciated I thank Monash University and Swinburne Online colleagues for my tutoring / facilitation time period (2017-2025), in particular Dr Remy Davison. The perspectives below are mine alone and do not reflect either the above universities / joint ventures nor my valued academic colleagues. We’ll see what happens.
From Casino Capitalism to Weyland-Yutani’s Merger: How Teaching Political Economy, Geopolitics & World Systems Theory Has Changed My Life
Dr Alex Burns, Charles Sturt University (dralexgburns@gmail.com)
From 2017 to 2025, I tutored and facilitated Politics and Criminology units (undergraduate and postgraduate students) at Swinburne Online and Monash University using that Political Economy (PE) knowledge base (and relatedly, Geopolitics and World Systems Theory). My talk make three specific original contributions.
First, I outline an Early Career Academic (ECA) pedagogical approach informed by a long-term career in university Professional Services (2007-25) and an earlier period in Australian and United States commercial and internet publishing (1994-2008). I encountered the pivotal PE scholars Susan Strange (who coined ‘casino capitalism’ in 1986—I learned of exemplar Sir James Goldsmith in 1995), Charles Kindleberger, and Immanuel Wallerstein—first in the former Strategic Foresight program at Swinburne University of Technology (2002-04) with Professor Richard Slaughter, and at Monash University (2023—25) with Dr Remy Davison. Theory-building and rich immersion in both the dominant American and British approaches schools of thought (anomaly/puzzle-driven theory-testing versus historical-descriptive).
Second, I explain how this ECA pedagogical approach draws on practitioner-based, reflective situated learning from my experiences with the former Disinformation website (1998-2008) and in personal study / internet dialogue with event catalyst, global macro, and volatility arbitrageur driven portfolio managers, risk managers, execution traders, and researchers in buy-side hedge funds (2010 to present), which due to past adverse life experiences in a dysfunctional blended family, have been financial therapy oriented (Dr Brad Klontz). PE knowledge is thus transformed into generative, rules-based explicit knowledge: Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt’s infamous Turtle Traders experiment; Jack Schwager’s Market Wizards interview series; Anton Kreil’s relative value arbitrageur strategies (Goldman Sachs); Joel Rubano’s energy/oil trading, and Bond University (2017-18) experience with a Bloomberg Terminal. This enabled me to provide introductory overviews; real world scenarios; and to highlight social influencer strategies (exemplified by Peter Zeihan, George Friedman, Adam Tooze, ‘Downtown’ Josh Brown, and Daniel Yergin) as possible career pathways.
Third, this ECA tutoring and facilitation (both autistic / neurodivergent and “lived experience” trauma-informed) occurs in a still-unfolding regime shift into a post-liberal, multipolar, neo-authoritarian, trade bloc driven, nuclear tripolarity shaped global order. This is often framed as both strategic surprise and inherently unknowable. I contend that this is not true. It is very much in line with the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1973) and its World-3 simulation’s repeated forecast of “overshoot and collapse”; with Nikolai Kondratieff’s economic cycle / wave – which began in 1970 in its fifth duration (still unfolding today); and foreseen in the science fiction of J.G. Ballard (who I interviewed in 1994 for Perth’s REVelation Magazine, now a film festival), John Brunner’s “Dystopian Quartet”, and Neal Stephenson (we now live in The Diamond Age due to the Artificial General Intelligence-driven Bubble). We have 74 years to go until Weyland-Yutani’s merger occurs in 2099—in the Alien film series (1979 to present), notably the recent Alien: Earth (2025) and Alien: Romulus (2024). Get ready.