Géographie critique : The Post-Crisis Geography of Risk Production
J’ai pas tout compris, mais c’est quand même super bien.
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Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting 2014, Tampa, Florida, April 8-12th
Organized by Ben Teresa (Rutgers) and Mark Kear (Simon Fraser University)
The Post-Crisis Geography of Risk Production
“Rather than a problem of transferring assets from outside to inside the boundary, rearrangement of power, inequality, and poverty are at stake” (Mitchell, 2007, p. 260).
Orthodox economic explanations treat risk as an object originating outside of financial markets. Indeed, the function of finance is purportedly to bring externally generated risks “inside” to be rationalized, repackaged, managed, spread and reallocated to those best able to bear them (Dymski, 1998; Ashton, 2011). The financial crisis of 2008 demonstrates that products designed to rationalize risk (e.g. CDOs and CDSs) can become sources of new, endogenously produced, forms of risk. This means that risk is not only an input to the financialization process, but an output to be (re)internalized and (re)rationalized by the financial system. Post-crisis manifestations of such endogenously produced risks—foreclosed homes, overmortgaged homeowners, high unemployment, and public debt crises at multiple scales—are being reworked into new platforms for speculation and sources of value.
The reworking of endogenously produced risks is an improvisational, contingent and variegated process that has received little attention from geographers. This session seeks papers that explore this process, both theoretically and empirically, addressing the production and reinscription of risk through processes of financialization in post-crisis geographies. In other words, how are the new forms and manifestations of risk produced during the financial crisis being reconceptualized, reworked and repackaged, and how are such processes transforming, deepening or challenging extant processes of financialization, spatially and otherwise? Answering this question will provide an opportunity to reflect on exactly what kind of crisis this was for capital (Mann, 2010).
Potential topics include:
• Credit repair and financial subject formation
• Anglo-American ‘poverty capital’
• REO to Rental
• Municipal bankruptcy
• Underwater mortgages and eminent domain
• Tax increment financing
Submissions need not be limited to these suggestions; we welcome abstracts with expansive interpretations of these topics and themes.
Please send proposed titles and abstracts of up to 250 words to Mark Kear (mkear@email.arizona.edu) and Ben Teresa (beteresa@rutgers.edu) by October 11th, 2012. Selected abstracts will be accepted by October 18th in order to allow participants to meet the earlybird registration deadline (October 23rd).
References
Ashton, P. (2011). The financial exception and the reconfiguration of credit risk in US mortgage markets. Environment and Planning-Part A, 43(8), 1796-1811.
Dymski, G. (1998). Disembodied risk or the social construction of creditworthiness?. New Keynesian Economics/Post Keynesian Alternatives. New York: Routledge.
Mann, G. (2010). Value after Lehman. Historical Materialism, 18(4), 172-188.
Mitchell, T. (2007). The properties of markets. In D. A. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa & L. Siu (Eds.), Do Economists Make Markets? (pp. 244-275). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
#géographie_critique #géographie_radicale
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