Patrick Brodie, "Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland" (Duke UP, 2026)

About this episode

Patrick Brodie discusses his book 'Wild Tides' which examines the impact of media infrastructure on Ireland's economy before and after the 2008 financial crisis.

In Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland (Duke University Press, 2026), Patrick Brodie maps the shifting fortunes of the Irish economy before the 2008 financial crisis up to 2020, outlining how the Irish state moved from rampant and irresponsible financialized development to incentivizing private media infrastructure and policy as instruments for economic recovery. Brodie contends that while the Irish state’s investment in creative and technological sectors of media was supposed to bring resources back into the country and stabilize the economy, it instead rendered the country even more vulnerable to future instability and transferred wealth into the hands of multinational corporations. Through ethnographic work and close engagement with the Irish state’s policy and planning across a number of key media infrastructure sites, Brodie unfolds the very real environmental and social impacts of Ireland’s naturalized model of financialized, foreign direct investment-led infrastructural development. Richly researched and comprehensively argued, Wild Tides reveals the multifarious, unexpected ways that financialization reaches into the daily life of a nation…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Patrick Brodie

Topics covered

• media infrastructure
• financial crisis
• Ireland
• economic recovery
• financialization
• multinational corporations

Keywords

• media infrastructure
• financial crisis
• Ireland
• economic policy
• financialization
• multinational corporations
• ethnographic work

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Duke University Press

Places: Ireland

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