Workshop | Temporal and Generational Imaginaries of the Asset Economy

A common protest heard from the asset poor is one of ‘no future’. Here, income contingency and asset-based growth (in particular house price inflation) are understood to have combined to produce a specific temporal universe in which a distinctive politics of the future has opened out. In this universe, the asset poor have few mechanisms available to them to build up assets which will enable them to secure viable futures. This applies especially to young adults who are not in receipt of intergenerational transfers of wealth and are seeing their chances of asset accumulation rapidly diminish. By contrast, the futures of the asset rich are guaranteed and underwritten by institutional mechanisms ensuring the growth of their assets (especially housing prices and superannuation). In the context of these bifurcated asset-based futures, this workshop seeks to explore the temporal dimensions of asset-based inequalities. In so doing, it will highlight how assets have replaced the wage and the wage earner as the key mechanisms of social reproduction and how they are serving to link pasts, presents and futures in novel ways.

Date And Time

26-27 August 2018, 9.30am-5.15pm

Location

Room 650, Social Sciences Building

The University of Sydney

Registrations

https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/workshop-temporal-and-generational-imaginaries-of-the-asset-economy-tickets-69382036539

Program

Monday, August 26

9:30 Morning tea

10:00 – 11:15

Rebecca Coleman – Mindfulness Temporalities: Generation, Presents and Futures

11:15 – 12:30

Amin Samman – Eternal Return on Capital: Non-linear History after Piketty

Lunch

14:00 – 15:15

Xin Lui – Ecological Asset with/out Return

15:15 – 16:30

Ute Tellmann – Habitat as Pledge: A Material Political Sociology of Financialization

Dinner

Tuesday, August 27

9:30 Morning tea

10:00 – 11:15

Michelle Chihara – Behaving for the Gig Economy: The Fleet, the Property and the Human Capital

11:15 – 12:30

Dan Woodman – Beyond Generational Conflict or Class Continuity: A sociology of generations for the asset economy

Lunch

13:30 – 14:45

Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings – “Assetization, or the Logic of Neoliberal Capitalism”

14:45 – 16:00

Speculation, Finitude and the Subject of Life-Interest

Jane Elliott

16:00 – 17:15

Lisa Baraitser – Bearing Loss in Intergenerational Time

Dinner