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AAG 2016 CFP: Things Fall Apart: The Loss of Value and What It Means

Toward an Expanded Theory of (De)valuation

Sarah Knuth, University of Michigan and Shaina Potts, UC Berkeley

Devaluation is the shadow haunting every capitalist fantasy of endless accumulation and an ever-expanding vista of enclosed value. Its threat compels capital ever forward, to constant overturning of existing techniques, fields, and geographies of production. And it drives bitter struggles within capital itself, as different actors, factions, and places strive to deflect the ravages of devaluation “elsewhere.” In this session, we invite papers that take on processes of devaluation emerging in the current moment: whether as a threat to capital or a tool for capital.

Radically new sources and forms of devaluation now threaten capital’s ability to reproduce itself. Novel threats range from abrupt environmental change and material risks and instabilities that overwhelm attempts to “bring them in” as engines for accumulation, to the destabilization effected by ever more frequent and generalized financial crises, to, ultimately, new forms of political volatility and systemic challenge. Simultaneously, capital’s response to these threats is conditioned by internal tensions such as, for instance, a heightened competition for “safe” assets among pension funds and other massive institutional investors.

At the same time, financiers and other actors are developing ever-more-sophisticated ways to turn devaluation into a tool and weapon, against states, against workers and against each other. Far beyond the blunt destructions of value effected through war, capital is expanding its fine-grained tools for effecting and making strategic use of devaluation, in many forms and fields: speculative accumulation by dispossession, competitive devaluation, manufactured obsolescence, distressed asset trading, geographical clearances and displacements. Most often, these strategies are about devaluation for some actors in the present, in order to secure higher values for different actors in the future. They are the dark side to every scheme that sells new sources of enclosed value, new forms and geographies of private property.

These contradictory transformations not only vary by kind, but by geographical and regulatory context, and have recently engaged many geographers. Related work on value, property, and materiality has fueled work that bridges traditional divisions between rural and urban geographers; scholars and activists working in the Global South and Global North; and political ecologists and geographical political economists  – particularly financial geographers (e.g., Ghertner and Lake 2015, Kay and Kenney-Lazar, Forthcoming). We aim to build on these important developing conversations.

We particularly invite papers that develop precise engagements with new forms of devaluation, consider connections between these forms and more established strategies, and/or consider these processes’ broader grounding in value theory. Relevant examples include strategic real estate depreciation and “obsolescence” to facilitate gentrification and urban redevelopment (e.g., Smith 1984, Weber 2002); speculative manipulations of official fixed capital depreciation rates (Hanchett 1996); transformations of property deterioration into an asset for “green” retrofit markets (Knuth, Forthcoming) and catastrophic risk of fixed capital devaluation under climate change into a financial asset (Johnson 2014); and distressed debt trading to profit off sovereign defaults in Argentina, Greece or Puerto Rico. Papers might take up topics including, but not limited to:

-       New, and newly-evident, kinds of devaluation threats: financial volatility, political challenge, environmental risks, intransigent materialities, new kinds of technology-induced obsolescence and “moral depreciation,” and so on.

-       Tools and methods for strategic devaluation, new and old: “shorting” stock, tools for betting against financial bubbles, “creditworthiness” manipulations, manufactured obsolescence, accelerated depreciation within tax codes, blight designations, land value write-downs, etc.

Please send abstracts to Sarah Knuth ([log in to unmask]) and Shaina Potts ([log in to unmask]) by October 10^th. To facilitate deeper conversation, we will ask for full papers in advance of the conference. Depending on participant interest, we are excited to consider potential publication venues for these papers.

*Note: we are currently developing adapted versions of this call for the Dimensions of Political Ecology and Urban Affairs Association conferences. Please let us know (by September 29^th for UAA) if you are interested in participating in these sessions as well/instead.*