Research Seminar: 'Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First-Century Capitalism'

Finance is an increasingly important part of both our daily lives and of global efforts to meet sustainability challenges. More people globally are ever-farther in debt, retirements are increasingly tethered to the rise and fall of stock markets, financial crises are ever-more frequent, and various financial actors from banks to hedge funds to major asset managers own a growing array of the infrastructures we use on a daily basis.

Yet, whether despite or because of the dominant presence of finance in our economies and societies, financial markets are also increasingly held out as our best hope of resolving myriad sustainability challenges. Governments and international organizations have proposed means of rendering everything from climate breakdown to nature conservation to girls' schooling into financial assets as means of meeting yawning 'finance gaps' preventing us from reaching collective targets.

What are we to make of the omnipresence and power of finance?

This talk, and the book it is based on, present critical engagements with what has arguably become the most prevalent answer to this question — that we are living in an era of 'financialization'. We can talk about the concept of financialization as representing a genuinely interdisciplinary intervention. The talk traces out the genealogy of the concept, from popular and academic debates about the emerging so-called 'casino economy' in the 1980s, through to the adoption and formalization of 'financialization' debates in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

Yet, as much as the concept of 'financialization' has opened up important debates about the place of finance in capitalism and the relationship of financial actors, motives, and methods to broader social life, it has also closed down analyses of these trends in important ways. The conceptual career of 'financialization', then, opens up important questions about (inter)disciplinary knowledge, and about how we think about 'big' questions, power, and historical narratives.

Agenda

• 13:00 – 13:05: Welcome and introductions
• 13:05 – 13:20: Introduction to Fictions of Financialisation – Dr. Nick Bernards
• 13:20 – 13:30: Response 1: Dr. Mareike Beck
• 13:30 – 13: 40: Response 2: Dr. Chris Clarke
• 13:40 – 14:00: Open discussion

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Speakers

Dr Nicholas Bernards

Dr. Nick Bernards is a political economist with research and teaching interests in the past and present intersections of labour, finance, and global governance. His work is historically-oriented, with an emphasis on how long-run legacies of colonialism and uneven development have shaped the present context of sustainable development practice, and draws from a broadly historical materialist perspective.

Dr Mareike Beck

Dr. Mareike Beck is an Associate Professor in International Political Economy at the Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS), The University of Warwick. Her research agenda focuses on the drivers and socio-economic impacts of financialisation at the global and everyday levels through social histories of global finance; feminist political approaches to understand gender and inequality, and using creative and performative methods for knowledge exchange and impact

Dr Chris Clarke

Dr Chris Clarke is Reader in Political Economy at the Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS), The University of Warwick. Chris has published on a range of topics associated with International Political Economy and Finance. His first book is entitled Ethics and Economic Governance: Using Adam Smith to Understand the Global Financial Crisis and was published in the Routledge RIPE Series in Global Political Economy. Chris is currently writing a monograph on platform lending based on his Leverhulme funded research.

 

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