Dr. Randy Martin, Chair of Art and Public Policy at Tisch School of the Arts. Thursday, October 24th (time TBA).  

“Risk Remade: Social Logics of the Derivative”

Making money for its own sake has been the watchword of capitalism for centuries. But money-making entails risks and those risks needed to be kept at bay. Finance would play the part of this sentinel. By the early seventies, the world’s financial architecture came undone, giving way to new methods for pricing and profiting from risk. Risk made its way from  investment banking to everyday life as governments got out of the business of social security and increasingly shifted the burdens of life’s uncertainties onto the domestic population, who were now charged with managing their own existential and monetary portfolio. The advent of derivatives, financial instruments that price and bundle risk attributes, came to operate in many ways that money standards once had to facilitate flows and movements of capital. But finance did not simply colonize daily life, the seventies also culminated in myriad expressions of decolonization, some of which can be read through risk based practices of bodily movement such as postmodern dance, hip hop and skateboarding, which emerge from the ruins of abandoned urban, industrial and leisure spaces that are repurposed and re-imagined. If the derivative bears a new form of social wealth that can be imagined to different ends, these other ways in which populations incorporate risk offer a glimpse at what the wealth of society might entail seen from the perspective of those who traffic in embodied forms of creativity and innovation that money now claims as its purposes and ethos.

Dr. Martin has taught and performed in theatre, dance, and clowning. He is the author of many books on economics and culture, including The Financialization of Everyday Life (2002). His latest book is Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor, and the Professional Turn.

Martin recently spoke at the inaugural meeting of The Brooklyn Commune Project. Watch the video. See further bio information.

Dr. Jim Stanford, Economist, Research Department of CAW (the Canadian Auto Workers union). Friday, October 25th (time TBA). Presentation title and abstract coming soon.

Dr. Stanford is founder of the Progressive Economics Forum, author of Economics for Everyone (2008), and a columnist for The Globe & Mail and Rabble.ca. He holds economics degrees from the New School for Social Research in New York, the University of Cambridge and the University of Calgary.

Also see Stanford’s website, Twitter account, and a video of Stanford addressing AMPA 2012.