Wednesday, April 19 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm
Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society 5701 S. Woodlawn Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60637
Recent critical engagements with financialization have generally understood it as a shift in the modus operandi of corporations and developed economies more broadly. By contrast, the public sphere has been seen as a site of critical discourse that resists financialization. Based on ethnographic work, Alex Preda will challenge that view, arguing that the public sphere has absorbed and transformed finance into a set of dramatic performances, to which audiences are asked to relate emotionally. This transformation, he will argue, plays a key role with respect to how legitimate moral issues are circumvented by financial institutions.
Alex Preda is a sociologist at King’s College London whose principal research relates to global financial markets. He is the author of Noise: Living and Trading in Electronic Finance (2017) and Framing Finance: The Boundaries of Markets and Modern Capitalism (2009), as well as coeditor of the Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance (2012).