Abstract
The question of how financial geographers should be engaging with economics proper (if at all) is at the heart of Wójcik and Bratton's thought-provoking article. In this commentary, I argue for increased scholarly engagement with the archipelago of heterodox economic studies and for examining financial economics as an increasingly important ideological project that actively shapes modern-day financial policies and regulations. I further suggest that analyses of power should continue to lie at the heart of financial geographies.
Financial geographies have been one of the fastest growing bodies of literature within human geography, as the global financial crisis of 2008 and its devastating aftermath fueled significant interest in finance-related topics among a broad contingent of geography and urban studies scholars. While prior to the global financial crisis, finance was frequently perceived as the natural domain of economists, generating relatively little scholarly interest within geography proper (Christophers, 2009), the 2008 crisis acted as a catalyst moment for the field, causing an explosion of critical geographical scholarship on finance in its aftermath (Gibadullina, 2021).
During the postcrisis era, financialization emerged as the singular dominant theory in financial geographies: Wójcik and Bratton (2024) estimate that over 50% of financial geography articles published between 2016 and 2020 relied on financialization as their main theoretical framework. As demonstrated by Dymski (2015), geographers were among the first to “see” financialization, making significant contributions to this body of literature. And it was largely through this scholarship that financial geographies left their mark on the broader social sciences, gaining increasing interdisciplinary visibility and readership.
Wójcik and Bratton (2024) further examine where the theories and concepts in financial geography come from, finding that approximately half of the theoretical sources emanate from outside of geography and urban studies, highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of this field. Importantly, they document the changing nature of financial geographies’ connections with other disciplines, finding that since the 2000s geographers have strengthened their engagement with sociology, but significantly weakened their engagement with economics. Wójcik and Bratton (2024) find that the decreased engagement with economics occurred concurrently with the decline in the use of quantitative methods (particularly longitudinal analyses, regressions, and hypothesis testing), as ‘open-ended narrative styles of explanation’ entailing case-study methodologies came to dominate. The empirical analysis of publication dynamics in financial geographies is highly illuminating, suggesting that the financial geographies scholarship has undergone a significant theoretical and methodological shift in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Reflecting on these changes, Wójcik and Bratton (2024) advocate for a closer engagement with both heterodox and orthodox economics (particularly financial economics), writing that: If geographers rightly complained about economists appropriating geography through their new economic geography à la Krugman 25 years ago, and about neglecting 100 + years of research in economic geography (e.g. Martin, 1999), so we should be careful of neglecting decades of financial economics while studying financial geographies. (Wójcik and Bratton, 2024)
While Wójcik and Bratton (2024) explicitly acknowledge that ‘the hubris and complacency of economists … paved the way to the global financial crisis’ and that financial geographies flourished partly in response to this reckoning with mainstream economics, they provide five reasons for why financial geographers should, nonetheless, pay more attention to economics proper:
There are varieties of economics, which do not necessarily conform to the orthodox versus heterodox binary; There are traditions in mainstream economics that are also critical of the ‘too much finance’ phenomenon; Economics has changed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis with the rise of big data and the emergence of ‘third-wave economics’; Financial economics accounts for an increasing share of articles published on financial geography topics; Financial economists exert significant influence in the policy realm.
Wójcik and Bratton (2024) consequently argue that while financial geographers made substantive contributions to the financialization literature, because of their reduced engagement with economics, they have missed ‘top seats on other [research] boats’, including on topics related to quantifying financialisation, sustainable finance and decentralized finance.
In response to this rather empathetic call for a closer engagement between financial geographies and capital-E economics, I argue that financial geographies should develop stronger engagements with heterodox economics studies, which provide highly complementary analyses of finance, sharing many of the same ontological and epistemic commitments that financial geographers hold. I also caution against boarding boats with financial economists, advocating instead to closely study financial economics in the tradition of ideational political economy.
1.
The mutually growing engagement between geographers and sociologists and political economists documented by Wójcik and Bratton (2024) is worth celebrating and nurturing. However, I suggest that we should also be more closely engaging with the field of heterodox economics itself, as we have missed opportunities for productive engagements on scholarly debates that are very much the bread and butter of financial geographies.
Given human geography's intellectual foundations rooted in Marxian political economy, there is significant common ground shared between financial geographies and Marxian economics. For instance, there has been a revival of heterodox economics literature on unequal exchange and dependency theory (with several of these papers having been recently published in
Financial geographies could also strengthen their engagement with post-Keynesian economics, with which geographers appear to converse even less. Research on money was one of the key research agendas within financial geographies in the 1990s, but it was overtaken by research on finance (e.g. financial institutions, financial elites, and financial centers) in the 2000s. Recently, however, there has been a resurgence of geographical work on money, including analyses of central bank policies and taxation. How monetary and fiscal policies shape macro-economic outcomes in various parts of the world is of central concern to post-Keynesian economics. Geographers could thus expand their analyses of uneven economic development to monetary phenomena by conversing with this literature.
Finally, there are opportunities to deepen the connections between financial geographies and ecological and feminist economics. Financial geographers have made significant contributions to the literature on green finance by examining the financialization of nature, exploring how financial actors navigate climate change risks, and imagining alternative climate futures (Lai, 2025), all of which have significant implications for the field of ecological economics. Similarly, financial geographers have made important contributions to understanding how gender, racial, and class dynamics reinforce financial inequalities, which should be of direct interest to the field of feminist economics. Repeating Dymski's (2015) plea for a closer engagement between financial geographies and heterodox economics, I believe that there could be significant benefits gained from these cross-disciplinary connections.
2.
While I enthusiastically support Wójcik and Bratton's (2024) call for a closer engagement with heterodox economics, I have significant reservations about extending the same welcome to orthodox economics (particularly to financial economics). First, economics remains the most insular discipline of the social sciences, with economists rarely citing anybody outside of their field. Jacobs (2013, 82), for instance, finds that economists cite each other 81% of the time compared to 51% for geography and 52% for sociology. This lack of interdisciplinary engagement emanates from what Fourcade et al. (2015) termed the ‘superiority of economics’, which refers to the widely held belief among economists that their discipline is superior to other social sciences and that little can be gained from interdisciplinary knowledge. Fourcade et al. (2015), for instance, find that 57% of economists disagree with the statement that ‘In general, interdisciplinary knowledge is better than knowledge obtained by a single discipline’.
The discipline of finance seems to experience similar issues of insularity, potentially to an even greater extent, with recent research highlighting how interdisciplinary work in finance is penalized (Brooks et al., 2025). One significant reason for the insularity of economics has to do with a highly homogeneous methods culture centered around parsimonious, closed-model theorizing that rarely accepts other forms of knowledge (Peck, 2012). Nonetheless, I agree with Wójcik and Bratton's (2024) argument that financial geographers should be engaging with this literature, since financial economists have the ears of policymakers and their research findings go largely uncontested. If geographers are to seriously engage with financial economics, we should study it in the tradition of ideational political economy (Peck et al., 2025), examining its historical evolution and societal impact as an increasingly influential ideological project. Drawing on Berman (2022) and MacKenzie (2006), geographers could examine how financial economics has impacted the world of finance and shaped financial regulation. In the traditions of critical data studies and strategic positivism (Wyly, 2009), we could critically interrogate the models, data, and empirical findings produced by this literature (and potentially contest them).
Financial economics is also well-known for its prevailing conflicts of interest, as economic authors in the fields of finance receive an estimated 40% of their income from consulting activities (Weyl, 2017). Several cases of prominent economists being ‘intellectually captured’ by financial organizations became public in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis (Mirowski, 2013), highlighting the existence of a revolving door between the discipline of economics and Wall Street. Given this reality, we should keep in mind that the scholarship produced by the field of financial economics (more often than not) also reflects the material interests of the financial sector and its actors. For geography scholars researching finance, the conflicts of interest present in economics should generate self-reflective questions about how to maintain access to industry informants, while keeping an appropriate distance from the financial actors that we are researching, and avoid being ‘seduced’ by high finance (Hall, 2012).
As researching finance has significant barriers to entry, requiring some knowledge of the financial industry and possession of some technical skills, we should continue nurturing interest in financial topics among human geography students, equipping them with the necessary technical skills and industry knowledge through courses, summer schools, and conferences. We could also recruit disgruntled finance majors or former finance professionals who have left the field, but possess the needed insider knowledge, training them in geographical ways of thinking. The growing lack of quantitative skills within financial geographies documented by Wójcik and Bratton (2024) presents a real concern, especially given the many exciting opportunities to analyze financial data with geographical questions in mind. The FinViz initiative launched by
Reflecting on the historical trajectory of this body of literature, I think that financial geographies should continue centering questions of power at the heart of their analyses, and we should not be afraid to make our research political, given our disciplinary history as a radical social science. Having entered the age of polycrisis, there are opportunities for more radical economic interventions. We should thus join forces with heterodox economics scholars (broadly conceived) and use our research in support of advancing global economic and financial justice.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.