Intersections of finance and society, 2023.
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 14-15 September.
The programme for this year’s conference is now available here. There are limited places available for those not on the programme who may wish to attend. If you would like to join the conference, please register here.
With inflation and interest rates on the rise, the age of expansionary monetary policy is over. At the same time, the global pandemic and a war on the European continent demand new policy responses that will have major repercussions. These developments take place in a global financial system that has undergone radical transformations over the past decade. Finance has become intertwined with the logic of the platform economy and social media to an unprecedented extent, giving rise to new patterns of financial intermediation and shifts in the relative status of financial centres. As climate breakdown worsens, politicians and publics increasingly look to the financial sector to offer alternative, more sustainable ways of investing – a responsibility that the sector has so far largely failed to live up to. Building on the success of previous conferences, this year we seek to interrogate established and emergent social, organisational, and political forms shaping finance and society. Besides providing a platform to discuss new theoretical and empirical research, contributors are expressly invited to propose and debate existing and novel solutions for improving financial stability, expanding fintech inclusion, mitigating climate breakdown, and tackling the inequalities associated with financialisation.
Keynotes
- Derisking the Zeitenwende
Daniela Gabor, UWE Bristol - From fintech to finlife
Karen Lai, Durham University - Finance and empire
Quinn Slobodian, Wellesley College
Author-meets-critics roundtables
- Crack-up capitalism: Market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy
- Quinn Slobodian, Anton Jäger, Angela Wigger
- Welfare for markets: A global history of basic income
- Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora, Daniela Gabor, Solange V. Manche
- Financialisation and local statecraft
- Andy Pike, Aretousa Bloom, Sabine Dörry, Andrea Lagna, Jenny McArthur
Panels:
- Financial subjectivities
- Asset struggles I and II
- Geographies of finance
- Financial cosmologies
- Financial infrastructures I and II
- Strategic finance
- Finance and climate
- Assets, tokens, games
- Histories of finance
- Banks in normative macro-finance
- Valuation in the digital economy
- Central banking
- Interrogating financial governance
- Financial rationalities
- International money and finance
- Historicising European financial regimes
- Power in the digital economy
- Real estate finance and society
- Breaking down the finance-carbon nexus
The conference is organised through the Finance and Society Network (FSN), in association with Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and with financial support from the Regional Studies Association. For more information, please visit the event webpage here.