Frank Maracchione is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Economics, Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. At Kent, he is part of a project on knowledge production about China in Global South countries, led by Dr. Jamie Gruffydd-Jones. Frank is also affiliated with the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI), where he works on the “Speri Presents…” political economy podcast.

He obtained his PhD in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield, where he completed my doctoral thesis entitled “Amir Timur in Shanghai: Locating Agency in Uzbekistan-China Relations”, thanks to a scholarship from the ESRC White Rose Pathway program. In his PhD, he critiques the notion of Chinese vertical normative power and propose, instead, an approach that centres Uzbekistan’s normative agency in its relationship with the People’s Republic of China.

Currently, Frank’s central interest is exploring the everyday political economy of South-South cooperation, focusing on communities and civil society, and the plural agency of micro-actors in the global economy. More generally, his research interests include the normative power of political actors from the Global South; the political economy of South-South cooperation, with a particular focus on China and Central Asia; and political communication and machine learning (Structural Topic Models).

Website: www.frankmaracchione.com. LinkedIn. Bluesky.