Debt: 5000 Years and Counting
Call for papers for conference being held 8-9 June 2018.
Call for papers for conference being held 8-9 June 2018.
David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) challenges historians, anthropologists and other social scientists to analyse the relationship between debt, money and human society on the broadest historical and geographical scales. Where the study of debt and money has often been confined to ‘economic history’ or technical specialisations such as numismatics, Graeber demands that we move beyond a narrow economism to ‘ask fundamental questions about what human beings and human society are or could be like’.
The goal of our conference is to pick up this challenge. We will consider what is at stake in the current moment as well as general tendencies, dynamics and lived experiences of previous cycles of credit and physical money. A public conversation that seemed to be opening up at the start of the global financial crisis but ‘never ended up taking place’ is still desperately needed. How could we help to stimulate this conversation through our own work on debt across time and space?
We invite paper proposals from scholars working on ‘debt’ within (and beyond) the disciplines of history, anthropology and other social sciences. Questions to be tackled include, but are not restricted to:
For this conference, we have adopted a format inspired by the set-up of the symposium ‘Dislocating Masculinities Revisited’, organised by the anthropologists Andrea Cornwall, Frank Karioris and Nancy Lindisfarne in 2014. The main idea is to make the conference simultaneously less hierarchical, more productive and, well, more fun.
We will ask our delegates to submit papers (max. 3000 words) that can be circulated in advance. At the conference itself, we will forego the standard 20-minute presentations. Instead, our discussions will be structured through non-hierarchical groups. Each participant will be a member of two groups: one organised on the basis of chronological expertise to encourage specialist discussions on particular periods and conjunctures, the other bringing together colleagues at different stages of their careers and representing different disciplines to stimulate general comparative exchanges. Discussions in the groups will be structured around conceptual and thematic questions arising from the pre-circulated papers, not the papers themselves.
In addition to these discussions, we will have several plenary sessions in the format of the pre-arranged debates on a set of key problems for the history and theory of debt. These debates will aim at both synthesising the group-based discussions and formulating new questions. There will also be a keynote lecture by David Graeber (LSE).
To submit a paper proposal, please, send it to debt5000conference@gmail.com. The deadline for proposal submissions is 1 November, 2017. Paper proposals should include a title, an abstract of max. 500 words, and a brief biography. The deadline for selected papers will be 1 May 2018.
We will ask our delegates to contribute a moderate fee (£30) towards the organisational costs of the conference.
The conference will take place at the Birmingham Research Institute for History and Cultures, University of Birmingham, on 8-9 June, 2018. It is organised by Ilya Afanasyev, Nicholas Evans and Nicholas Matheou.