Conference website: https://www.regionalstudies.org/events/2022-rsa-cee-programme/

Special Session SS05 at the 2022 RSA CEE conference in Leipzig, Germany (14-17 Sept 2022). 

Session organisers:

• Marek Mikuš, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany
• Leonardo Pataccini, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland / University of Latvia
• Martin Sokol, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Arguments centred on infrastructure have become increasingly influential across social sciences. While infrastructure is primarily understood as embedded technical support systems that provide services to populations and organizations, social scientists document that infrastructures themselves are integrated into larger ecologies of other infrastructures, social organization, work routines, norms and standards, communities of users etc. (Niewöhner 2017). Infrastructures can be thus seen as extended and technologically mediated material assemblages that continuously produce social and socio-technical relations in both planned and unplanned ways (Harvey et al. 2017). Scholars working on finance deploy the concept as a heuristic for making visible “hard” infrastructures in finance as well as the socio-technical and organizational arrangements and processes surrounding them (Bernards and Campbell-Verduyn 2019; Krarup 2019). They further developed the notion of the infrastructural power of finance to draw attention to the ways in which state actors such as central banks and treasuries come to depend on financial actors, markets and practices for the execution of their policies, with obvious implications for regulation (Braun 2020; Gabor and Braun 2020). A related line of enquiry focuses on entanglements between financial infrastructures and security (de Goede 2020), which have been recently taken to a new level with unprecedented sanctions against Russia’s access to particular financial markets, assets or payment systems. This special session invites analyses of these two dimensions of the relationship between infrastructure and finance in Eastern Europe – a region in which this line of enquiry is still underdeveloped, although existing scholarship already points to distinctive financial infrastructures such as foreign-led banking systems.

First, the session invites analyses of the infrastructures of Eastern European finance. The term is interpreted such as to cover a wide range of infrastructural phenomena – technological instruments and systems (e.g. trading platforms, payment systems, credit registries), mechanisms and techniques (e.g. credit scoring, government debt issuance techniques), and institutions and institutional frameworks (e.g. exchanges, markets.).

Second, the session invites reflections on the infrastructural power of finance in the region as well as its limits – the ways in which financial instruments and markets become prerequisites for monetary, security and other policies, but also the ways in which states may reassert their power vis-à-vis finance and deploy it for their purposes.

GCEG 2022 Dublin  –Special Session 04_09

Financialisation: Disruptions, Displacements and Discontents

Session organisers:

• Leonardo Pataccini, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland / University of Latvia
• Martin Sokol, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
• Jennie Stephens – Northeastern University – j.stephens@northeastern.edu

Session description:

Financialisation, a shorthand for the increasing power of finance over society and the economy, continues to reshape economic geographies in numerous ways and at multiple scales. From housing to health care, from education to innovation, from firms to governments, from labour markets to financial markets, from retail banks to central banks, the process of financialisation has fundamentally altered wealth and power relations. In doing so, it has created significant disruptions, displacements and discontents. Financialisation appears to be deepening social and territorial inequalities, while making contemporary capitalist economies more prone to crises which in turn reinforces the concentration of wealth and power among those with financial assets, i.e. the pandemic has worsened economic inequities and strengthened multiple problematic financial mechanisms. Furthermore, the subjugation of economic process to the financialised logic of short-term financial gain accelerates climate change, reinforces fossil fuel reliance, and deepens climate vulnerabilities around the world.

TUESDAY 7th JUNE 2022 – Trinity

Financialisation I: Central banks and monetary policy                Chair: Jennie Stephens

• Sokol M. – Financialisation, Central Banks and the New State Capitalism
• Pataccini L. – Examining the Transmission Mechanism of Monetary Policy in the Euro Area in the Light of Financialisation
• Cohen D.; Martine A.; Rosenman, E. – Walls of Capital: Quantitative Easing, Spatial Inequality, and the Winners and Losers of Canada’s Pandemic-Era Housing Market
• Eichacker N. – Financialization, Structural Power, and the Global Financial Crisis for Europe’s Core and Periphery

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Financialisation II: Climate justice, higher education & neoliberalism                 Chair: Martin Sokol

• Stephens J. – Climate Justice and the Financialization of Higher Education
• Green L. – The Financialising Univer[city]? Financial Restructuring and Urban Real Estate Development in UK Higher Education
• Discussion

WEDNESDAY 8th JUNE 2022 – UCD

Financialisation III: Housing and real estate                   Chair: Leonardo Pataccini

• Alexandri G. – From Housing Financialisation to Housing Affordability Pressures in Athens and Barcelona; Exploring Comparatively Social Ruptures and Urban Transformations
• Kors T.; Rainer G. – Financialization of (Holiday) Real Estate in a Traditional Tourism Town. The Case of Garmisch-Partenkirchen
• Crevoisier O.; Theurillat T.; Merckhoffer A. – The Changing Role of Real Estate in Swiss Urban Development: Evidence and Theoretical Reframing
• Pósfai Z. – Dependent Housing Financialization in Hungary – Post-2008 Shifts

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Financialisation IV: Hegemony and subordination         Chair: Zsuzsanna Pósfai

• Fernandez, R.; Pataccini L.; Sokol M. – Monetary Policy, Varieties of Capitalism and Subordinate Financialization: What Explains Divergent Economic Geographies of (Semi-)Peripheries in East-Central Europe?
• Benceković S. – Mapping the Postsocialist Bankscapes: Sub-National Banking Geographies in Croatia
• Handke M. – Financialization and Financial Flexibility in Indebted COVID-19 Risk Societies
• Ouma S.; Mkalama B.; Ndemo B. – Hegemonic Venture Capital: A (Re)View From Africa

Photos from Event