Science, superheroes and the Science and Entertainment Exchange

Exploring two case studies – Thor and Black Panther – the article reveals how the use of Science and Entertainment Exchange (SEEX) advisers can help inspire the next generation of STEM careerists and popularize a variety of formerly marginalized scientific concepts. Blending interviews with SEEX leaders, the science consultants who worked on the films and Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) producer, Jeremy Latcham, this article blends a production economy perspective with critical analysis to better understand how the ideology of science circulates within the MCU and how its films are working to disrupt outdated notions of science and scientists.

Urban Ingenuity in the System

This chapter shows how a cast of young architects and their reform-minded older colleagues strove to save the city by correcting the mistakes of high modernism and imbuing the urban core with humane proportions and highlights. It describes urban ingenuity that meant working within a layered, diverse, and at times chaotic bureaucracy that is laden with jaded and corrupt offices. It also refers to Leipzig's young chief architect Dietmar Fischer, who spearheaded a campaign to reconcile modern methods with historical substance. The chapter discusses preservationists that sought to save architectural relics as landmarks for local identity, such as their own offices in the mid-1970s. It examines financial, material, and labor shortfalls inherent in East Germany's industrialized mass-production economy that helped ensure Fischer's fusion of small-scale Plattenbau to remain a prototype without successors.

Financialisation and the limits of circuit theory

The theory of the monetary circuit aims to provide a highly stylised account of the workings of a modern monetary production economy. While there may have been a time when it succeeded in this aim, that time is over. The key development in the monetary sphere of capitalism over recent decades is the advent of financialisation, a phenomenon that circuit theory cannot explain other than by omitting some of its most important characterising features while indiscriminately dismissing those features that it does address as dysfunctional outgrowths. The fact is that a theory that has the aggregate monetary circuit as its methodological framework and whose sole focus is on the financing needs of firms is simply not flexible enough to accommodate the new reality of financialisation. To make that accommodation what is needed is a framework that is sufficiently elastic as to be able to encompass a broad range of socio-economic factors, most notably those associated with demographic change, as co-drivers of financialisaton. This article argues that a framework based on Marx’s commodity principle meets this requirement.