RGS-IBG Annual Conference, Manchester: 26-28 August 2009
Call for papers
Boom, crunch, ouch: exploring possibilities in the spaces of financial disruption
Sponsored by the Economic Geography Research Group
Convenor: Michael Pryke (Geography, Open University)
The credit crunch, the ongoing recession, calls for the democratisation of
finance, the emergence of influential yet still mysterious new actors such as
sovereign wealth funds, the financialisation of geopolitics, the public scrutiny
of the black boxes that lie at the heart of key financial markets, the turmoil
caused as global financial markets crash into the everyday of pensioners,
home owners and others in the US, the UK and beyond, emergency meetings
called by the likes of the G20, calls for a new financial architecture....the list
goes on. Each addition signals a serious disruption to the neo-liberal project
that has for long placed ‘unregulated’ private financial markets at the centre
of how economies and their operation are to be understood. Significantly such
turmoil invites opportunities for alternatives to be voiced both politically and
conceptually. The credit crunch and the myriad spatial and temporal
entanglements it set in play, serve to disturb accepted ways of analysing and
understanding how financial markets and organisations operate. In sum, the
practices and culture of liberalised financial markets and the geographies that
result are now open to serious questioning.
With the credit crunch as its starting point this session invites contributions
that seek to make sense of what has happened and what is happening, and
that wish to broaden conversation about how, amidst all the disruption,
alternatives might be thought up and thought through. For there is a need for
something else; something other than a private sector financial market free-
for-all and the growing financialisation of the everyday, as well as alternatives
to existing ways of conceptualising financial markets, their practices and far-
reaching geographies. The invitation is broad for what the credit crunch has
confirmed is that existing and dominant ways of understanding ‘finance’ are at
best limited. The session thus wishes to further the discussion about finance -
its culture, its organisations, its markets, its growing influence on the
everyday…through to alternative forms of finance and money - in ways that
bring together not just the usual suspects (for this read ‘economic
geographers’) but others such as those from cultural and political geography,
social anthropology, visual culture, cultural studies, film theory…to name but a
few. In short, the session takes the credit crunch as an opportunity to disrupt
the way economic geography approaches finance and also to encourage
imaginative engagement with the practical and theoretical possibilities offered
by the scale and entangled nature of the present financial disruption.
To find out more about this session or if you wish to submit an abstract please
contact Michael Pryke at [log in to unmask] . Deadline for abstracts: 29
January 2009.
Thanks,
Michael
Michael Pryke
Faculty of Social Sciences,
The Open University,
Milton Keynes.
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