Futures of Finance and Society Conference

2018 marked the passage of ten years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers sparked both a global financial crisis and an outpouring of novel social scientific research on financial markets. 2018 also marks twenty years since the publication of Michel Callon’s ground-breaking essay on the embeddedness of economic markets in economics. In its third annual conference (conference convenors: Nathan Coombs and Tod Van Gunten), the Finance and Society Network marks these historic turning points by looking towards the future.

The insight that how we orient ourselves towards an uncertain future is as important as how we interpret our contested past resonates with core convictions in finance studies. What Karl Marx once called fictitious capital is no longer seen as epiphenomenal to capitalist production. As Jens Beckert has recently reminded us, capitalism is itself a perpetual escape into the future.

6-7 December 2018
University of Edinburgh