ICS Seminar Series – Max Haiven

Date: Thursday 25 February 2016
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EB.2.02, Western Sydney University, Parramatta South campus

Max Haiven

(NSCAD University, Canada)

Notes Toward Articulating Financialization and/as Settler-Colonialism

Abstract

With increasing intensity since the 2008 financial crisis, critical scholars have sought to understand the growing power of the global financial sector as not only an economic but also a political, social and cultural process. Yet while these analyses have done invaluable work of defining the emerging contours of a form of global capitalism predicated on speculation, debt, data and risk management they have, by and large, been less attentive to the ways financialization also represents a renovation of imperialism and colonialism. This presentation sketches the lineaments of such a research agenda, plotted along several moments in the history and present of the Canadian colonial-settler state. At stake here is the possibility of a genealogy of financialization that sees it as the product of the conflicts and confluences between different orders of expropriation, extraction and exploitation, and thus one capable of explaining the highly unequal racialised violences of financialization today. Such an approach might further help us imagine the possibilities of life after financialization, and the solidarities that might be required to bring those possibilities to fruition.

Biography

Max Haiven is an assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design where he teaches cultural studies and political economy. He is the author of Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2014), The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (2014) and Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (2014).