Dashiell Anderson

Profile

I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Leeds. My academic background is interdisciplinary in economics, geography, English literature, philosophy, and law. I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. Travelling through the western U.S., I developed an interest in the cultural, economic, political, and social divides that exist between rural and urban people. During my undergraduate years at the University of Utah I became interested in cultural geography, social theory, and political economy. I developed these interests further during my M.A. in Economics at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where I began to apply my interdisciplinary interests to rigorous debates in the political economy of rural-urban divides. Before moving to Leeds to start my PhD, I completed a second masters in Comparative Law, Economics, and Finance at the International University College of Turin in Turin, Italy. During this time, I was able to both expand and refine my interdisciplinary toolset in understanding the intersection of capitalism and space that remains central to my research and teaching at the University of Leeds.

You can find my personal academic website here, and my CV here

Research interests

I am interested in a variety of topics pertaining to political economy, economic geography, and cultural geography. My PhD thesis critically exmaines the historical and material transformations of rural labour engendered through the process of capital accumulation in the US and UK. Critically engaging with both history and theory, my thesis offers critical appraisal for the historical and contemporary role of rural labour within different spatio-temporalities of capital accumulation. The purpose of this critical interjection is to uncover the dialectical relationship between rural labour and capital that is, and always has been, central to the mobility of capital and the persistence of capital accumulation.

At the core of my thesis is a fundamental question about the persistence of the rural-urban division of labour in wealthy and highly urbanized countries. I critically engage with academic literature in economics, geography, sociology, political science, and cultural theory to examine this point further, and to argue that the accumulation of capital in the US and UK remains highly dependent on a persistent rural-urban division of labour. My goal is ultimately to develop a manuscript that challenges conventional thinking about rural labour and rurality more generally, and which offers a constructive conceptual framework to explore the persistence of rural-urban divides through capitalist urbanization and the fragmentary tendencies of capital accumulation.

In addition to my PhD research, I have been a teaching assistant for numerous courses/modules in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds. You can find my University of Leeds teaching profile page here.

Qualifications

• Ph.D., Economics, University of Leeds, 2022-Present
• M.Sc., Comparative Law, Economics, and Finance, International University College of Turin, 2022
• M.A., Economics, The New School for Social Research, 2021
• B.S., Economics, University of Utah, 2019
• Honors B.A., English, University of Utah, 2019