Understanding Financial Security: (Dis)orders of Credit
(Dis)orders of Credit
Peace Research Institute Oslo 27-28 January 2011
Call for papers
Keynote speaker: Urs Stäheli (Hamburg University)
The workshop series 'Understanding 'financial security' in an age of uncertainty' is funded by the Research Council of Norway.
Credit plays a central role in understanding the causes, scale and consequences of the 2007-2009 financial crisis and ensuing sovereign debt crisis. Credit channels in the form of credit derivatives, leveraged hedge funds and securitised mortgages were critical to how the crisis spread globally, and how it was ultimately alleviated through central bank credit operations. At the same time the crisis also put into focus the importance of epistemic credit and credibility to the functioning of contemporary liberal governance. This workshop enquires more deeply into the historical trajectory, present conditions and different expressions of credit.
Credit has long been a major technology to govern uncertainty, be it in quantitative and probabilistic credit ratings, or in credible narratives and story - narrative accounting of a different kind.
The workshop seeks to address questions such as: How does credit relate to risk and uncertainty in numerical and narrative accounting? What is the narrative and affective structure of the 'futures' mobilised in contemporary governance? What makes the real existing fictions of money, credit or the state credible, when do they fail and become 'non-performative'? What cycles of fetishisation and dissociation do different parts of society and academia go through during and after the credit crisis? Can credit be said to be itself the product of a particular historical period, eg. Romanticism? How is the crisis affecting the liberal relationship between public credit and public fact? We welcome contributions engaging with the phenomenon of credit from across the human and social sciences, as well as literature and psychotherapy.
Abstracts of 250-300 words should be sent to Nina Boy (nina(AT)prio.no) by 15 October 2010.
Successful submissions will be funded for accommodation and travel.
Possible paper topics: - Credit, fictionality and knowledge - Credit and (financial) security - Public credit - Credit, narrative and affect - Credit, confidence and crisis - Credit, conceit and cheat in the game - Forms of debt - the 'other' side of credit - Credibility and expectation in economic governance - Credit, contract and collateral - Poetic and political (dis)orders of credit
Nina Boy, Doctoral Researcher Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) / Lancaster University Security Programme
For more information, please see here.
