Paul Crosthwaite and Rachel Muers are organising a landmark conference for the economic and financial humanities in Edinburgh this summer.

Over the past decade, growing numbers of researchers in the arts and humanities have turned their attention to questions of money, finance, and the economy. At the same time, social scientists have increasingly drawn on humanities-based methodologies in their analyses of economic phenomena. “Money Talks: Futures for the Economic Humanities” is a landmark conference dedicated to mapping this emerging interdisciplinary space and charting its multiple potential futures.

 

The organizers encourage submissions from scholars based in arts and humanities disciplines, in social scientific fields (including economics, political economy, economic sociology and anthropology, economic geography, cultural economy, social studies of finance, and critical finance studies), and in all other relevant research areas. Creative or practice- based presentations are welcomed, as are papers exploring how arts and humanities research on money, finance, and the economy can have impact and influence beyond the academy.

 

Much cutting-edge research into economics and the economy has coalesced around concepts and approaches conventionally associated with humanities scholarship. Theorists of money, for example, have sought to understand its nature and function historically (by investigating origins and patterns of development); philosophically (in light of money’s confounding of standard ontological and epistemological categories); literarily (as homologous to literary forms such as realism or modernism); narratively or hermeneutically (with attention to the powerfully charged myths and meanings bound up with monetary objects); materially and visually (considering the material cultures and semiotic dimensions of money); theologically (as an essentially sacred phenomenon that retains vestiges of its divine underpinnings); or performatively (in terms of money’s self-authorizing capacities, as spectacularly dramatized in recent years by the rise of cryptocurrencies).

 

Similar intellectual paradigms and frameworks have guided research into areas ranging from financial markets, central banks, digital and data economies, and accounting practices to cultural industries, labour and consumption dynamics, housing and construction sectors, and renewable and circular economies. This conference aims to bring together researchers working within and across such areas to explore common approaches and share empirical and theoretical insights. It will showcase the state of the art in the Economic Humanities and reflect on emerging tendencies and future directions.

 

The organizers encourage submissions from scholars based in arts and humanities disciplines, in social scientific fields (including economics, political economy, economic sociology and anthropology, economic geography, cultural economy, social studies of finance, and critical finance studies), and in all other relevant research areas. Creative or practice- based presentations are welcomed, as are papers exploring how arts and humanities research on money, finance, and the economy can have impact and influence beyond the academy.