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Dear List Members

 

The event was previously advertised for 4 pm. I will now start an hour later, at 5 pm.

 

 

 

You are warmly invited to

 

 

Speculative Communities and Contemporary Politics

Dr Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, UCL

 

Wednesday 20th November 2019

5 - 6:30 pm

Room DLG19

Rhind Building

City, University of London

 

 

Abstract

Capitalist societies have always relied on their capacity to anticipate, imagine and speculate on the future in order to navigate its uncertainty. But what happens to our power of imagination in the epoch of Trump and Brexit, when uncertainty becomes radicalised, and the traffic between reality and fiction accelerates? Our current moment is marked by speculation: growing impatience with promises of all sorts, cynical rejection of evidence, and immersive surrender to the chaos of the present. This talk discusses how finance today nurtures a speculative engagement with uncertainty across social, political and even intimate life. We ‘connect’ with others on the basis of a shared precarity, to endorse rather than try to control uncertainty, and to wager on it. The talk offers a conceptual framework that departs from reductive views of finance as a source of individuation, social segmentation, and a cause of populist backlash, which have dominated critical scholarship of capitalist societies in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. It argues instead for the need to study financialisation as a profound generative force in the constitution of today's ‘Imagined Communities’, shaping their social bonds and political aspirations, their desires and myths. The talk discusses the implications of the proposed theory for the study of contemporary forms of financialised populism, and for political sociology more broadly 

 

The Jeremy Tunstall Global Media Research Centre

Department of Sociology

City, University of London

 

 

 

 

 

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