Keynotes
The first keynote held by Yuval Millo, Professor of Accounting at the Warwick Business School (WBS), was titled "Identity as infrastructure in financial markets".
A renewed focus on infrastructure 'the piping of financial markets' is gaining purchase in critical finance studies and Prof Millo began his keynote by raising some conceptual questions: How can we think through the remodeling of financial infrastructure in the current time? He proposed to develop a view of infrastructure as a process, an intersubjective yet oportunistic endeavor to jointly produce taken-for-grantedness. Drawing from his research on identification in financial markets, more specifically, from his current work on the introduction of Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs), he showed how such a view may help to understand the peculiar contradictions which underscore recent post-crisis attempts to re-organise the markets by creating a new infrastructure for identity.
You can find Prof Millo's powerpoint slides here.
The second keynote held by Lena Rethel, Associate Professor of International Political Economy at Warwick (PAIS), was titled "Capital market development in Southeast Asia: from speculative crisis to spectacles of financialization"
Where the first keynote urged us to revisit the technological basis for finance, Prof Rethel asked what may be learned from its high-profile industry events, its public meetings and conferences. Reporting from her own research in Southeast Asia she emphasised how conferences in particular have taken on a crucial role for the development of capital markets in the region, offering a place and time for financial communities to stage a spectacle of finance, where financial knowledge is valorised, consolidated, and exchanged. On the one hand, such events serve to 'raise the profile' of particular financial networks, but, on the other hand, they are also sights where different networks overlap in unlikely encounters, as such providing intriguing material to dissect 'high finance' as a multiplicity of circulating knowledges gaining pace and taking shape in the enactments of strategic spectacles, on congresses, on festivals and other industry events.
You can find Prof Rethel's powerpoint slides here.
