6th Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop. Call for Papers. 3-5 June 2020 Grenoble. We invite contributors to submit an extended abstract of 2-3 pages (incl. references) before Friday December 20th, 2019. Proposals should indicate topic, theoretical positioning, methodology and outline findings, if appropriate. Proposals must be submitted online via the official conference website: https://imsw2020.sciencesconf.org. Keynote Speakers: Marieke de Goede & Brett Christophers.
‘Flowing Markets’
Since it was set up in 2010, the Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop has become one of the main meeting places for scholars from sociology, organization studies, marketing, political science, history and geography interested in social studies of markets. The 2020 Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop will take place at Science Po Grenoble. “At the end of each street, a mountain…” Stendhal wrote of the capital of the French Alps, a city that seeks to add to its reputation as a major research and technology centre the noble aspiration of being the next “green capital” of Europe.
The Theme
For its 6th meeting, the IMSW sets out to explore markets through the prism of the circulation of goods, people and money. The inter-play between markets, capitalism and circulation was at the heart of the first political economy theories, whether classic (the free circulation promoted by A. Smith) or critical (Marx’s value-creation through the movement of money and merchandise). The ‘great history’ of our market societies has been described as the extension and unification of heterogeneous economic spaces, from local market place to global trade (Polanyi [1944]2001), while stressing the role of the emerging class of urban capitalist merchants in controlling foreign and long distant trade and taking advantage of the international division of labor (Braudel, [1979]1992).
By exploring the routes of circulation linked to market trade, the physical movement of goods and their representations (Caliskan, 2010), the materiality (or immateriality) of transactions in process (Callon, 2018), the spatiality and temporalities of trading spaces, the political distribution of capacities on the concentration and control of flows, etc., participants are invited to address some of the classic issues stemming from the social studies of markets – valuation, qualification, market boundaries – along with broader social and political concerns such as democracy, risk, inequalities. Such ideas remind us of the rich monographs of historians (Chagny & al., 2015; Fontaine, 2008) and anthropologists – i.e. Tsing’s mushrooms (2015), Guyer’s African currency commodities (2004), Brooks’ second-hand clothes (2015) – which describe composite chains of exchange (market and non market) and unravel the complex mechanics of valuation across heterogeneous orders of value (Zelizer, 2011). These themes also recall the numerous STS works offering fruitful insight into the infrastructure of technological zones (Barry, 2001), the classification of goods (Beckert, Musselin, 2013), the fabric of commensurability (MacKenzie, 2009; Espeland, 2001), in relation to transactions spanning/bridging various locations, scales and institutional spaces. By tracing the geopolitics of international flows – of capital (Christophers, 2013) or energy resources, finance and arms export (Mitchell, 2011) – recent works take up the issue of political power and democracy in a globalized world.
The conveners particularly invite contributions dealing with any of the following themes: Continue reading →
Estudios de la Economía 