EH.N: Call for Papers, Interdisciplinary Conference on Metaphors of Money, U of VA, 10/31/2009

[Alexander Field]

(I am posting this at the request of Simone Polillo - AF)
 
Call for Papers, Interdisciplinary Conference on Metaphors of Money
“Before Liquidity, Beyond the Crash.” University of Virginia, October
31, 2009.
“In fact, we are all builders and purveyors of unrealistic
simplifications. Some of us are self-aware: we use our models as
metaphors. Others, including people who are indisputably brilliant and
seemingly sophisticated, are sleep-walkers: they unconsciously use
metaphors as models”
— Paul Krugman, 1992 Ohlin Lectures
In order to signify the metaphorical process, the paradigms of money,
silver and gold are imposed with remarkable insistence.
                                                                       
— Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy
 The current financial crisis has generated much concern and anxiety in
academia and with the public at large about the viability and future of
capitalism. But whether financial crises lead us to re-think our
approaches to and ideas about money and the economy, whether they
initiate a shift in paradigms or simply reinforce the models and the
metaphorical language that inform previous understandings, remains an
open question.
 “Before Liquidity, Beyond the Crash”is a one-day conference on current
conceptions of money, to be held at the University of Virginia on
Saturday, October 31st, 2009. We see the recent burst of the financial
“bubble” as an opportunity to question the language of liquidity and
flows employed in our basic models and metaphors for money. The keynote
speakers for the conference will be Franco Moretti, literary critic
(Stanford), and Philip Mirowski, philosopher of economic thought (Notre
Dame).
 We are looking for papers that attend to the “coinage” of new
metaphors and the ways in which a metaphor for money may be worn smooth
and unremarkable by use. Presentations may range through history and
across disciplines and address any or all of the following questions:
        What do metaphors of money based on liquidity and flow
obscure?
        What alternative metaphors for money are on offer?
        What does genealogical work tell us about our current
predicament?
·               What has money become a metaphor of? 
·               What was the metaphor of money as liquidity supposed to
achieve?
 We seek contributions from Anthropology, Economics, English, History,
Philosophy, Sociology, and related fields and will favor proposals that
appeal to a multidisciplinary audience. The efficacy of
interdisciplinary analysis lies in an emphasis on intellectual history
and rhetoric.
Please send an abstract to Brad Pasanek, English (bmp7e at virginia.edu)
and Simone Polillo, Sociology (sp4ft at virginia.edu), by July 15th, 2009.
We will notify you shortly thereafter of the status of your submission.
Final papers should be no longer than 15-20 pages, and presentations no
longer than 15-20 minutes.