[Commlist] CFP: Money Talks: Futures for the Economic Humanities

CFP: Money Talks: Futures for the Economic Humanities


Web page: 
https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/future_of_money_in_the_humanities/conference-money-talks-futures-for-the-economic-humanities/ 
<https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/future_of_money_in_the_humanities/conference-money-talks-futures-for-the-economic-humanities/>


University of Edinburgh, 28–29 May 2025


Keynote Speakers:

Dr Devin Singh (Dartmouth College)

Dr Rachel O’Dwyer (National College of Art and Design, Dublin)


Over the past decade, growing numbers of researchers in the arts and 
humanities have turned their attention to questions of money, finance, 
and the economy. At the same time, social scientists have increasingly 
drawn on humanities-based methodologies in their analyses of economic 
phenomena. "Money Talks: Futures for the Economic Humanities" is a 
landmark conference dedicated to mapping this emerging interdisciplinary 
space and charting its multiple potential futures.


Much cutting-edge research into economics and the economy has coalesced 
around concepts and approaches conventionally associated with humanities 
scholarship. Theorists of money, for example, have sought to understand 
its nature and function historically (by investigating origins and 
patterns of development); philosophically (in light of money’s 
confounding of standard ontological and epistemological categories); 
literarily (as homologous to literary forms such as realism or 
modernism); narratively or hermeneutically (with attention to the 
powerfully charged myths and meanings bound up with monetary objects); 
materially and visually (considering the material cultures and semiotic 
dimensions of money); theologically (as an essentially sacred phenomenon 
that retains vestiges of its divine underpinnings); or performatively 
(in terms of money’s self-authorizing capacities, as spectacularly 
dramatized in recent years by the rise of cryptocurrencies).


Similar intellectual paradigms and frameworks have guided research into 
areas ranging from financial markets, central banks, digital and data 
economies, and accounting practices to cultural industries, labour and 
consumption dynamics, housing and construction sectors, and renewable 
and circular economies. This conference aims to bring together 
researchers working within and across such areas to explore common 
approaches and share empirical and theoretical insights. It will 
showcase the state of the art in the Economic Humanities and reflect on 
emerging tendencies and future directions.


The organizers encourage submissions from scholars based in arts and 
humanities disciplines, in social scientific fields (including 
economics, political economy, economic sociology and anthropology, 
economic geography, cultural economy, social studies of finance, and 
critical finance studies), and in all other relevant research areas. 
Creative or practice-based presentations are welcomed, as are papers 
exploring how arts and humanities research on money, finance, and the 
economy can have impact and influence beyond the academy.


Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

*
*

- Knowledge: What counts as economic knowledge, and how might such 
knowledge be expanded, deepened, enriched, and/or reconfigured?

- Theory: What meanings and assumptions are embedded in economic 
theories and models, and with what effects?

- Practice: How do cultural patterns of sense-making shape economic 
practices and the relation of economic models to real-world economies?

- Power: How is economic power exercised, and what capacity do 
humanities-based approaches have to critique, resist, or redistribute 
such power?

- Histories:**What forms have money, finance, or markets taken in the 
past, and how might these forms defamiliarize or denaturalize 
taken-for-granted economic assumptions today?

- Representation:How are economic phenomena represented (in literature, 
theatre, film, art, popular culture, the media, and/or everyday life), 
and how do such representations shape vernacular economic knowledges?

- Spaces:How are economic lifeworlds constructed relationally across 
global space, and in particular via interactions between the Global 
North and Global South?

- Temporalities: What does it mean to think the past, present, and 
future in economic terms, and how do such conceptualizations relate to 
questions of sustainability, climate transition, intergenerational 
justice, or political strategy?

- Identities: How does economic life intersect with aspects of identity 
(including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, religion, and 
dis/ability), and how are these intersections manifest ideologically, 
semiotically, and/or discursively?

- Values: What assumptions are embedded in prevailing conceptions of 
value and what resources (e.g. ethical, religious, imaginative, utopian) 
might be available to rethink them?

- Faith: How are money and other economic phenomena bound up with faith, 
belief, and the sacred, and what contributions can different faith 
traditions make to monetary and economic thought?

- Rationality: How should we understand recent challenges to 
long-prevailing assumptions of baseline rationality in mainstream 
economics (e.g. behavioural economics), and how might we expand and 
radicalize them?

- Method: What is at stake in bringing humanities methods to bear on 
economic questions, and how do we assemble rigorous and robust 
methodological frameworks for such research?

- Pedagogy: How is economic education currently constituted, and how 
might it be conducted differently?

- Futures: What new research paradigms should be pursued in the Economic 
Humanities, and how do they relate to the wider challenge of envisaging 
the economy of the future?


In addition to keynote lectures and panel presentations, the conference 
will experiment with an innovative "Laboratory of Economic Concepts," 
consisting of workshops focused on keywords from the economic lexicon, 
and drawing on participants’ varied disciplinary and intellectual 
perspectives to illuminate the terms’ genealogies, meanings, and 
potential reinventions.


Please send proposals for individual papers (max. 250 words) or 
three-paper panels (tomoneytalksconf /at/ gmail.com) byFriday 28 March 2025. 
Notifications of acceptance will be issued by Friday 4 April.


"Money Talks: Futures for the Economic Humanities" is supported by the 
College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of 
Edinburgh and the Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded Thinking the Future 
of Money in the Humanities project.


Organizers: Professor Paul Crosthwaite (Literatures, Languages, and 
Cultures) and Professor Rachel Muers (Divinity)


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