Tag Archives: marxism

Emerging Geographies

Posted on by

CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS:

Emerging Geographies: Mapping, Tracking, and Tracing
Conference Date: April 18, 2008

Deadline for submissions **has been extended** to February 20, 2008

Maps of worlds are often depicted as stories already told, already written. If we acknowledge these geographies as emerging and in process, how can we map, track, and trace these worlds as they become entangled with and produce various scales of time and space?
Anatomy Map
Instead of assuming the regions of Cold War geography, emerging geographies encourage scholarship that investigates how the world looks from various locations and “out of the way” places to understand geographies as formed and contingent. We are interested in how histories are lived in the present, how they shape our current worlds, and are alive within these worlds. Emerging geographies track the longue durée and uncover alternative and layered histories. This tracking requires an engagement with histories that pays attention to complex, situated entanglements and the significance of details. Emerging geographies map the active ways in which social landscapes are constructed and regions are made. They ask: how do geographies come into being?
Continue reading →

Money, It’s A Gas

Posted on by

“Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.”– Pink Floyd, “Money”, Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

I really don’t mean for this blog to be one, long obsessive rant about the Fed Reserve. Really. But, I was excited to no end today to visit the Mu$eum of American Finance, in its new location at 48 Wall Street. I’ve been downtown for the past two days for job-related training, and have been staring at the NYSE building wistfully, wondering about the machinations the titans of global finance were scheming within. I drew up the courage to ask the guard at the front gate about the visiting gallery to the exchange. “It’s been closed since 9/11; go to the finance museum.”
My Gold Superfly Sneaks at the Finance Museum
So, I spent a good hour drinking in the museum’s exhibit on money. The history of money in this country, according to orthodox economists, doesn’t begin with labor, value, or the commodity. No sir. Money began with currency, and the exhibit smartly traces the history in a chronology that wraps around the three walls of the room. The story of money is so intertwined with the story of the state; I would so much love to diagram a timeline of both, charting hyperinflation with the American revolution, the Civil War with counterfeit currency, the silver movement with populism, and of course the Great Depression with the welfare state.
Continue reading →

Takes on Economic Crisis

Posted on by

Worried Bernanke

The Federal Reserve announced Tuesday morning the biggest one-day reduction of interest rates on record, by three-quarters of a percentage point to 3.5 percent. I read the news with great interest, having just digested a lengthy article on Ben Bernanke, the chair of the Fed as of 2005, in the Sunday NYT. I learned three things about the Fed.
Continue reading →