ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change
Call for Papers

Finance in question/finance in crisis
University of Manchester, 12-14 April 2010

This international conference about finance is distinctive in that it invites analysis by, and encourages debate between, researchers from many disciplines who represent different kinds of political and cultural economy as well as social studies of finance. The emphasis is on finance in question as much as finance in crisis because, well before the onset of crisis in 2007, there were many unresolved issues about the role of finance in present day capitalism. The conference aims to re-examine received ways of understanding finance and to consider what changes to financial arrangement may follow from present strains.

As with other major conferences, there will be multiple themes and an opportunity for academic researchers to present papers and propose sessions. Themes so far proposed include: money, capitalist calculation, market devices and techniques; financial crisis, social relations and trust; the limits of prescience and the irrelevance of many economic knowledges; finance, restructuring and labour; politics/markets/moralities; states, re-regulation and governance of finance.

There will be media and practitioner sessions as well as plenary panels where distinguished academics will be set to answer big questions about what and who is in crisis, why did nobody see it coming and whether more democratic control of finance is possible. Plenary academics include Michel Aglietta (CEPII), Andrew Gamble ( Cambridge) Donald MacKenzie (Edinburgh), Doreen Massey, Philip Mirowski (Notre Dame), Onora O’Neill, Mike Power (LSE), Saskia Sassen (Columbia) and Wolfgang Streeck (Max Planck)
Please submit either (a) proposal for individual papers, or (b) panel proposal including 3 papers by 11th December 2009 Guidelines and Proposal Forms are available here and should be sent to:

CRESC Conference Administration
178 Waterloo Place, Oxford Road, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL
Tel: +44(0)161 275 8985 / Fax: +44(0)161 275 8985
Email: CRESC.AnnualConference@manchester.ac.uk

This conference is co- hosted by CRESC and the IWGF at the University of Manchester; and by the Australian Working Group on Financialization at the University of Sydney