CALL FOR APPLICATIONS (*DEADLINE EXTENDED*):
IPK Cultures of Finance — Bruce Initiative Graduate Fellows
IPK Cultures of Finance – Bruce Initiative Spring Conference: April 12-14, 2012, New York University; Graduate Fellows Symposium: April 14, 2012
About the Conference:
The NYU Institute for Public Knowledge Cultures of Finance Working Group and the Bruce Initiative for Rethinking Capitalism at UC Santa Cruz are pleased to announce a joint conference, “Futures of Finance: Financial Capitalism as an Object of Knowledge and Site of Political Engagement.” The conference will focus on the open question of “the future of finance” from the specifically narrowed point of view of the relationship between how finance is conceptualized as a technical economic practice and how it is understood and narrated publicly as a logic of social relations.
The graduate student symposium will be held as part of the conference. The conference organizers wish to maximize the interaction between the presenters and the graduate fellows throughout the multi-day event. The aim is to have the graduate fellows help lay the groundwork for a network of finance practitioners and scholars whose work resists standard academic or disciplinary categorization. Accordingly, beyond participation in the conference and symposium, graduate fellows will be invited to remain involved in future conferences and graduate seminars jointly planned by IPK Cultures of Finance and the Bruce Initiative. Graduate fellows will be invited not just to develop their own work, but to engage in collaborative efforts to make pedagogy a priority and bring new productive energy to graduate curricula in economics, business, finance, and the social sciences.
We hope graduate fellows will use the conference discussions and presentations as interventions in the trajectory of their own work, and will be open to re-imagining the possibilities of their empirical or theoretic frames. To facilitate this, graduate fellows will serve as moderators and rapporteurs for the main conference plenaries and panels, and as members of the working groups drafting proposals for areas of future research. Rapporteur summaries of each event will appear on the IPK blog and/or conference website or as a post-conference document for all participants.
About the Graduate Fellows Symposium:
The goal of the conference is to create perspectives on finance, informed by technical practice and critical analysis, that can help to produce effective modes of regulatory, cultural, and political intervention. As invited senior scholars and finance professionals address these issues in plenaries and panel sessions, we seek complementary graduate student projects linking case studies, ethnographies, and other forms of empirical work or analysis to broader theoretic concerns.
Rather than submitting an abstract or paper, student applicants are asked to submit a one-page précis of a current research project, including, but not limited to fieldwork, an article, dissertation, or dissertation chapter. The organizers will identify similar projects (e.g. by theme, object, or theory) and pair up students. Each pair will be asked to articulate the ways in which interventions from the conference, including political contestations such as Occupy Wall Street, and other political, legal, ethical, or cultural aporias are shaping or guiding their research. What new questions or unexplored terrain emerges as a result of ideas discussed in the conference? What new limits or frontiers have become apparent? How does this impact the theoretical, empirical, and methodological stakes of the research project? At the beginning of the graduate student symposium, each student pair will be asked to draft a statement based upon these questions. Each pair will then jointly guide a discussion in which these issues are explored through the prism of each pair’s research projects. This discussion will feature the participation of the senior scholars and finance practitioners from the complementary panels of the main conference.
We invite the participation of graduate students from across the social sciences whose work explores new or emergent elements of the following three thematics: 1) Banking and Money 2) Financial Cultures and Debt Movements 3) Scholarly Disciplines and Financial Literacies. Within these broad thematics, student research may engage topics that include, but are not limited to: financial crisis; financial practitioners and workplaces; cultures of finance, legal and political domains of finance, e.g. regulation; technologies of finance; labor in finance; financial categories, e.g. risk and uncertainty; futures of capitalism; moralities, theologies, or ethical orientations of finance.
To apply, please send the following materials by February 26, 2012 (*deadline extended*): a one-page CV, a one-page project précis (including any references or endnotes), and a 250-word abstract. Please format all documents with 1” margins, size 12 Times New Roman, and single spacing. Selected participants will be notified by March 5, 2012, and will be requested to send a final draft of the one-page précis by March 18, 2012. Each student’s précis will be pre-circulated and all presentations and discussions—occurring both among students and with the invited participants of the main conference—will presume familiarity with the pre-circulated documents. Funding will be provided for Graduate Fellows’ travel to and lodging in New York. Please send your application to futuresoffinancegrad@gmail.com and send questions to Bridget Kustin (bkustin2@jhu.edu) or Robert Wosnitzer (rjw246@nyu.edu).
The conference website at http://rethinkingcapitalism.
