TV Drama

The project will produce two main outputs: the Capital City TV drama series and an accompanying learning website. Capital City will be based on and around the trading floor of an investment bank and will also follow a community of crypto-currency developers.



Instead of producing the script in the traditional fashion, Dr Joel Lazarus, the project's originator and leader, will conduct ethnographic fieldwork in 2016, allowing real people to tell their own stories. He will then work alongside finance sector workers, scriptwriters, and filmmaker Ben Cook to turn this research into the Capital City script.

Learning Website

The learning website will be co-produced by a team of humanities and social science scholars. It will introduce viewers to a wide range of theories and research from many ideological and disciplinary backgrounds. The point of the website is not to tell viewers what to think, but to give them the intellectual tools to think for themselves. The website says ‘If you’ve enjoyed this amazing drama then check out the way that people in the past and today have developed ways of thinking about the issues raised by it. Don’t worry! You can totally understand this stuff and here are the tools to help you’. The website will also facilitate online discussion and will encourage people to form local real life discussion groups.

The website is inspired by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills' concept of 'the sociological imagination' to describe the ability to go below the superficial tip of the reality iceberg and see the systems of social relations and power that structure our everyday lives. Put simply, having a sociological imagination enables us to see that our personal 'troubles' are always connected to and caused by wider and deeper social issues themselves produced by structures of power and systems of social relations. If we can't see this, we are trapped inside ourselves. The word 'theory' comes from the Greek 'theoria' meaning 'to see'. We need social theory to help us see and subsequently change our lives.

Why the Capital City Project?

"The problem is not to create scholars. It is to raise up those who believe themselves inferior in intelligence, to make them leave the swamp where they are stagnating – not the swamp of ignorance, but the swamp of self-contempt, of contempt in and of itself for the reasonable creature. it is to make emancipated and emancipating men.”

Jacques Rancière

Tackling the 'crisis of civilization'

The Capital City Project is an original, ambitious project that combines of drama, media, philosophy, and social science to address the fundamental challenge of our time – what Henry Giroux calls the crisis of 'civic illiteracy'. If literacy is the power to read and write the word then civic literacy is the power to read and write the world. If we can't understand what's going on in our lives, in our society, in history then we cannot seriously and positively transform our lives, our society, our history.

Whether we call it civic literacy or a 'sociological imagination', if we as individuals and communities can cultivate it, we can simultaneously begin to tackle the roots of all other coinciding crises – the financial crisis, the economic crisis, the ecological crisis, etc. What we are facing is no less than a 'crisis of civilization' itself , as Nafeez Ahmed has put it. We must use the incredible new technological powers we have developed to revive and democratise our civilization, our species.

However, first we must work on our individual and collective self-belief. Only if we believe that we can change our world can we begin to do so. So, before any notion of cultivating 'mass intellectuality', this project begins with the goal of encouraging people to believe that they have the intellectual power to understand their world.

I have written a paper in which I begin to try to develop a contemporary, radical democratic theory of and for 'transformative art'. You can read this paper here. Basically, I argue that, in the current widespread social conditions of 'reflexive impotence' (Mark Fisher) in which so many people don't believe that they can do anything to change things, artists and social scientists should come together to produce art that can cultivate self-belief and 'educated hope'. I argue that to do this in a radical democratic way means to democratise the very ways we co-produce art and culture and it also means giving voice to those unheard in our society in order to create what French philosopher Jacques Ranciere has called a 'dissensus', i.e. a disruptive force that exposes the artificial and contingent nature of the social order.

About Joel

Hi! I'm Joel. I'm 39 and live with my wife, Rajeka, and three kids, Lia-Anjali (11), Betty (7), and Rafi (nearly 4!) in Oxford, UK. I love cooking (vegan!), reading, poetry, football, cricket, and music. I practise Gojuryu karate. I blog at Agent of History.



When I left university aged 22, I went off to work for stockbrokers and investment banks trading Japanese stocks on trading floors in Tokyo and London. I enjoyed myself in Tokyo, but had a sad time in London. I met great people, but felt what I now understand as a profound sense of alienation. In 2003, I left the City and went to try to understand what the hell the world was about. I started off at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and then went to Oxford University. I studied things related to the so-called 'developing world' and the 'international development' industry. From 2007 to 2011, I wrote a PhD about the less-than-wonderful politics of the more-than-wonderful country of Georgia. I wrote a lot too about 'democracy promotion', about how Western states and NGOs were claiming to promote democracy, but were actually suppressing it. Since I finished my PhD in 2011, I've not been able to get a secure academic job. I've been teaching here and there at various universities instead.

From around 2011, I started getting interested and involved in community participatory education and 'critical pedagogy' (i.e. more radical, democratic theories and practices of learning). In 2012, I co-founded a community education project here in Oxford called 'PPE' (People's Political Economy). I still do community education work here and some in Birmingham too. This kind of work is amazing, but, because it involves building trust and solidarity in a group and because everyone lives busy and increasingly fragile and precarious lives, it does take a lot of voluntary time and commitment. This contrasts with the acute need for rapid and profound social change. It led me to try to develop a way to use new media technologies to empower millions of people to take control of their intellectual lives and political fates.

The Capital City Project is my response to this urgent question.