Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, You are listening to an upstream interview which is part of the Economics for Transition Project.

Today we're speaking with Dr. Keeley McBride, a professor in the Politics Department at the University of San Francisco. Thank you for joining us.

Let's start by, if you could just tell us a little bit about your background and what drew

you to your research about the sharing economy? Well my background is I study

politics and basically from the time I was an undergraduate I was really, really interested in how we think about economics and how we structure economics ends up constraining people's

self-conception, how it ends up creating particular cultures. I was really

interested in watching the evolution of culture along with

the evolution of capitalism. Like it was something that I was I could observe

intuitively and it wasn't until I started studying political

economy and political theory as a graduate student that I had a vocabulary to

really attach to that so that was exciting for me.

And so the relationship for you between economics and politics is really natural.

For me, it was really important to learn the history of economics because so much of what we talk about

economics today it's sort of taken as self-evident and it's not until you look

at economics more broadly and historically that you realize oh this is just a series of choices we make.

Because I think particularly in the United States, people say things like, well, that's just the

way the market works. And it's kind of taken as absolute truth.

And so to even understand that all economics actually is politics was a major revelation for me personally.

And what about the sharing economy and your research about the sharing economy?

What drew you to that area?

Well, it was sort of happens dance because I started talking with a friend in

Philadelphia who'd been doing research on the solidarity economy and we

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