CfP for edited collection on Financial Times: Economic Temporalities in US Culture

We live in financial times. Since the financial crisis of 2007/08, banking practices, the gyrations of the financial markets, and private as well as state indebtedness have dominated our political, economic, and social debates. As various scholars have noted, financial activity produces present profits out of the management and the exploitation of the uncertainty of the future. Recent works such as Randy Martin’s Financialization of Daily Life (2001), Richard Sennett’s The Culture of the New Capitalism (2004) and Elena Esposito’s The Future of Futures (2011) have all in different ways drawn attention to a transformation in the financial markets’ deployment of time as well in our contemporary subjective temporal experience in terms of acceleration, uncertainty, and risk. Our book project Financial Times has a threefold goal: it intends to further the interrogation of financialization and temporal experience and focus on its U.S. contexts; it asks to what degree economic dynamics have replaced or interacted with political, social, as well as cultural agents in shaping the conditions for managing an open future; for this purpose, we also aim at taking a longer historical view than most other publications in the field.

Specifically, this volume explores how financial markets deploy time, structure the future, and interact with actors and institutions that may function according to very different temporalities. We interrogate the production and dissemination of agency in this financial age and ask how the temporality inscribed in financial transactions emerges from and simultaneously shapes individual and social practice, thereby changing non-economic economies and their logic of practice (Bourdieu). Our collection of essays draws on contributions from the March 2015 international conference “Financial Times: Economic Temporalities in U.S. Culture” (www.financialtimes-conference.de), but we are looking for articles that round out our volume in the following areas:
• financialization’s impact on everyday life in the United States, both on an individual and social level (habitus, subjectivity, agency), and how its impact is mediated by and manifested through specific temporalities
• Interrogations of visual approaches to finance’s temporalities, in photography, film, and in a wide scope of artistic practices,
• the political implications of economic temporalities, both nationally and globally.

Please send an abstract (500 words) and a short CV to Stefanie Mueller (s.mueller@uni-frankfurt.de) and to Christian Kloeckner (c.kloeckner@uni-bonn.de). The deadline for abstracts is July 31, 2015. Papers will be due at the end of the year.