Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.

Time04


Insuring inbetween governing and being governed, for crisis of today and catastrophic future 
Convenors:
Marissa Smith
Irmelin Joelsson (University of Oxford)
Formats:
Panels
Stream:
Time
Location:
Examination Schools East School
Start time:
20 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
Session slots:
1

Short Abstract:

As new forms of insurance backed by international financial institutions and development organisations are implemented throughout the world, we ask how the roles and practices of different organisations and communities, acting as international, national, and local are reinforced or redefined.

Long Abstract:

This panel explores financialisation as hedging in contexts where institutionalised insurance programs are being newly implemented or reformed. We explore how future-oriented expectations and idealisations, as well as past- and present-grounded critiques, of these programs and their effects, are involved in the way that parallel practices as well as the programs themselves thus become involved in wider politics and economics. What kinds of "risk" are articulated and assigned? What forms of "infrastructure" are assumed and assembled? What communities define, take up, redefine, and broker concepts and practices such as "investment," "asset valuation," "viability," and "catastrophe?" To the extent that these programs are directed towards reform and/or development, who and what are reforming what aspects of what kind of actors, institutions, and social forms?

With the global expansion of - whether it is state or corporate, private or financed by development aid - insurances (not the least in "developing" world) are we also experiencing an ontological shift of temporality in relation to the concept of crisis? While crisis has been perceived as a short-term episode of hardship, now hedging is often against an imminent risk. Does insurances, then, engender an altogether restructuring of individual financial behaviour against a new horizon where the proliferation of risks is a mode of state, corporate, and self-governance?

As new forms of insurance backed by international financial institutions and development organisations are implemented throughout the world, how are the roles and practices of different organisations and communities, acting as international, national, and local reinforced or redefined?

Accepted papers:

Session 1