Political Economy of Anticipation
While the future has been an object of human contemplation for millennia, and planning of one form or another has been a component of most human societies, more recently the future has become a formalized object of capital accumulation. With mixed results, sectors like banking and finance have been formally anticipating futures for decades. More recently, anticipation has spread into other sectors and fields of the socio-economy through the practices and discourses of risk management. What has not received enough attention is how these mechanisms and institutions are constructing particular capitalistic futures, or at a minimum limiting the possibility for alternative economic futures. How do these processes play out unevenly across the socio-spatial landscape, and what new economic spaces do they create? Is it possible that as Franco Berardi has recently said, “our future has passed”? Or if we reject this position, how might anticipation of alternative political economies facilitate their material construction?
Potential papers may engage, but will not be limited to, thes:
- The intersection of economic and philosophical
- Anticipation and the time-space of capitalism
- Anticipation in credit, debt, and financial derivative markets
- Anticipation in carbon and natural resource markets
- Big data, digitalism, and the future
- Critical engagements with economic probability and possibility
- Risk management and economic pre-emption
- The anticipatory state and economic planning
- Visions of market-based and (neo)liberal utopias
- Alternative economic temporalities
Given sufficient interest, a journal special issue on anticipatory political economies will be considered.
Conveners
Chris Muellerleile - Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Research Fellow Centre for Research on Globalisation, Education and Societies Graduate School of Education Visiting Scholar, Geographies of Political Economy Research Group, University of Bristol.
Relevant information
- Please contact Chris Muellerleile (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) with indications of interest, abstracts will be due on June 15, 2015
- Click here for further information on the conference
- The registration is now open: https://webapps.unitn.it/
Apply/en/Web/Home/convegni - Session’s speakers should register and pay the conference fee:
- Early registration (before 1 September 2015): € 150
- Late registration (from 1 September 2015): € 200
Important dates
- Early registration: Before 1 September 2015
- Deadline registration: 20 October 2015
At the page first-international-conference-on-anticipation from the right side you can find links for the registration, a list of accommodations, and instructions about how to reach Trento.
