School of Social and Political Science

Description

Organiser: Kath Weston (Kath.Weston@ed.ac.uk)
British Academy Global Professor, Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh
and Professor of Anthropology, University of Virginia
 
It has become commonplace to speak of the 'health' of financial institutions, of financial 'contagion' in a crisis, of 'ailing' parts of the financial industry, of 'stress tests' and 'living wills' for banks, of moves to 'sterilise' central bank monetary operations, and so on. What is the significance of routinely casting practices, products, and working relationships in the financial sector as medicalised concerns? What are the effects when bankers and policymakers appear in the guise of physicians or epidemiologists who offer medicalised rationales for their interventions? When the daily lives of people in particular communities become financialised in ways that are also subtly medicalised (e.g., taking out a home mortgage that turns out to be 'toxic')?  The aim of this workshop is to invert the terms of contemporary debates about the privatisation and financialisation of medicine with an invitation to explore some of the myriad ways in which finance itself has become medicalised.

This in-person workshop is open to all. No registration is required.

Full schedule: