I’m Dr Laura Basu, an academic and writer. I’m a visiting fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, and was economics editor for the media organisation openDemocracy until 2023.

My big-picture approach to economic analysis has shown how issues including Attention Deficit Disorder, environmental breakdown, political extremism, racism, and violence against women are bound up with the workings of the global economy.

My work has a strong focus on racial capitalism and decolonialism, including recent articles on borders, global inequality and Black Lives Matter. I have also commissioned series on ‘Decolonising the Economy’ and ‘The Reparative Economy’ featuring key voices from the global racial justice movement, and produced the podcasts ‘Decolonising the Global Economy’ and ‘Is Capitalism Racist?’

My work on gender includes the series ‘Advancing Gender Just Economies’, in partnership with feminist organisations ActionAid, Womankind Worldwide, FEMNET and the Fight Inequality Alliance, and my article linking recent attacks on abortion rights to the cost of living crisis. This piece has been set as core reading on multiple university courses as well as garnering popular audiences.

In 2022, I became an inaugural fellow of Culture Hack Lab’s Rhizome Fellowship. I have contributed to many think tank and policy publications, including Perspectives on a Global Green New Deal, in collaboration with Naomi Klein’s The Leap, and Compass’s Belonging, Place and the Nation.

I sit on the Advisory Board for the scholarly book series Alternatives to Capitalism in the 21st Century, published by Policy Press, along with renowned academics including Nancy Fraser, Silvia Federici, Arturo Escobar and Richard Wolff.

My article, ‘Attention Deficit Disorder: the anticapitalist condition’, joined intimate stories about my husband’s ADHD with an in-depth analysis of contemporary capitalism. The piece was one of openDemocracy’s best performing of the time and has become an anchor piece for the organisation. It was shared by acclaimed economist Richard Wolff and led to a long-form radio interview on the show This is Hell.

I have also interviewed and worked with notable figures including Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz,

Prior to joining openDemocracy in 2019, I won a Marie Curie award from the European Research Council to conduct research at Cardiff University into the role of the media in the 2008 financial collapse, and the subsequent global recession and ongoing years of austerity.

My book Media Amnesia: Rewriting the Economic Crisis was published in 2018 by Pluto Press and was widely praised, including by acclaimed economists Simon Wren-Lewis and John Weeks, and media scholars Robert McChesney and Natalie Fenton. My edited volume The Media and Austerity was also published in 2018 by Routledge, and is considered the key text on the subject.

I have held visiting fellowships at the Universities of of Southern California, Toulouse, Melbourne, La Trobe, Amsterdam and the West Indies, and given conference papers and guest lectures including at the landmark conferences of the European Sociological Association (ESA), the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy (IIPPE) and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE).

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