Cultures of Speculation: How to integrate imaginaries of the yet-to-come into our ethnographies
This two-day workshop brings together scholars who have advanced the concept of speculation and explored it empirically. It convenes researchers both from the "anthropology of the future" and the "anthropology of capitalism" to examine speculation ad both an anthropological concept and an empirical object of study. During the workshop, all invited participants will present short position papers and engage with emerging projects from the project Cultures of Speculation, hosted at the University of Bern. The event will conclude with a roundtable relfecting on the broader conceptual and methodological stakes of studying speculation ethnographically, which will be open to a wider academic audience on Tuesday evening.
The event is intended as an open and generative forum for dialogue across intellectual approaches and ethnographic queries.
Key themes:
- Speculation and future oriented economic practices
- Post-2008 transformations of capitalism
- Popular investing and everyday financialization
- Flexible work, precarity, and aspiration
- Infrastructure, planning, and future-making
- Risk, uncertainty, and anticipation
- Speculation as governance
- Affect, morality, and economic life
- Gender, class and racial inequalities in speculative economies
