CAPITAL VALUES: Melinda Cooper on the Counterrevolution in Public Finance and Liliana Doganova on Discounting the Future
Wed, Apr 17, 2024
5:30 PM–7:30 PM
The Skylight Room (9100) at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave, NYC. Please register below to attend.
Watch the video recording of this event here, or below:
Join us for “CAPITAL VALUES” a double book launch and discussion of two new titles from the Zone Books Near Futures series, Melinda Cooper‘s Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance and Liliana Doganova’s Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology, followed by commentary from Daniela Gabor and Geoff Mann.
Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution and Liliana Doganova’s Discounting the Future analyze heretofore unexplored dimensions of our neoliberal common sense. Cooper maps recent American frameworks of public finance to explain its twin production of austerity and extravagance, along with the creation of unprecedented family dynastic wealth. Doganova reveals how market and policy efforts to shape the future, from forest management to drug research, have become trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. Both thinkers underscore the political construction of our current predicaments, from extreme inequality and reactionary family politics to inaction on climate change, and both insist that another politics is possible.
Cooper and Doganova will each present their books, which will both be available at the event, followed by commentary from Daniela Gabor and Geoff Mann. Near Futures series editors Wendy Brown and Michel Feher will introduce and moderate.
This event is sold out. A video recording will be posted here and on our Vimeo channel a few days after the event. If you’ve already registered for the event, please try to arrive early to secure a seat as seating is limited and on a first-come, first-serve basis. There will be an overflow room to watch the event if the room reaches capacity.
Free and open to the public, this event takes place in the Skylight Room (9100) at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave, with a reception to follow in the Committee on Globalization and Social Change (CGSC) Suite.
PARTICIPANTS’ BIOS:
Melinda Cooper is Professor in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. She is the author of Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, a book which sought to theorize the principle of family responsibility as a lynchpin between neoliberal and new conservative practices of government. Her research focuses on the interaction between neoliberal and new conservative philosophies of power.
Liliana Doganova is Associate Professor at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, Mines Paris, PSL University. At the crossroads of economic sociology and STS (Science and Technology Studies), her research explores valuation practices in the economy. She is the author of Valoriser la Science and co-author of Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Her new book analyzes the relations between temporality and valuation through a historical sociology of the technique of “discounting the future”. Her current research projects focus on forestry and drug pricing.”
Daniela Gabor is Professor of Economics and Macro-Finance at the UWE Bristol. In 2024, she is the Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., and Annette L. Nazareth Member at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Her research develops three related themes under the umbrella of critical macro-finance: money and central banking, climate and development macrofinance, and shadow banking. She tweets @DanielaGabor.
Geoff Mann is a Distinguished Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and currently a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His writes for the New York Review of Books,Dissent and the New Statesman, and regularly for the London Review of Books. His most recent books are In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution and Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (with Joel Wainwright).
This event is co-sponsored by the Committee on Globalization and Social Change (CGSC), and the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, with Zone Books, Near Futures Series.