This conference is co-funded by the IAS under this year’s research theme of Planetary Futures.

Call for Papers

The convenors invite abstract submissions (up to 300 words), which explore the various ‘intersections’ between political, economic and social imaginaries of financial capitalism. They are especially interested in theoretically-driven approaches studying the role of different types of imagination in materially mediating currently experienced crises (economic, social, border, migration etc.), through producing and legitimating dominant visions and narratives of the future.

Sessions within the conference will debate the role of social imagination in addressing different ‘intersections’: How do the fictitious operations of financial markets shape our perception of the future? Are they opening up or rather foreclosing radical imagination? How is debt shaping individual as well as state imaginable trajectories? How do contemporary technologies of the future proliferate through real-estate imaginations? What futures are inscribed by the merger of financial and populist imaginaries in the West?

Contributions are welcome that engage with the following themes, amongst others:

• the social production of financial futures
• fictional expectations in financial markets
• economics and science fiction
• risk, debt and futurities
• theorising rationality/irrationality in financial crises
• fictitious capital
• future presents and present futures
• utopian/dystopian sociologies of finance
• the political economy of sociological imagination(s)
• real-estate utopias/dystopias
• microcredit and neoliberal imagination
• feminist finance and economics
• state debt and development
• empirical explorations of the social and/or financial imagination

Please email your abstract to reclaimingutopia@gmail.com by 21 May 2017.

The conference organisers will publish a selection of the papers as a special issue in the ‘Public Seminar’ and other prominent peer-reviewed journals.

Conveners

• Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (University College London)
• Chiara Bottici (New School for Social Research, New York)

Keynote speakers

• Professor Jens Beckert (Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne)
• Professor Ruth Levitas (Department of Sociology, University of Bristol)

More speakers TBC