Location: University of South Florida (Tampa, Florida)
Date: March 9, 2018
Hosts: Scott Ferguson & William Saas
Sponsors: Modern Money Network: Humanities Division
Co-Sponsors: Modern Money Network, Department of Humanities & Cultural Studies (University of South Florida), Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity
Submit proposals (250-word abstract, brief bio, and CV) to sferguson@usf.edu by January 15, 2018.
Keynote Speaker: Mathew Forstater
Money on the Left is an interdisciplinary conference designed to inaugurate a new scholarly organization and project: the Humanities Division of The Modern Money Network (MMN). Leveraging the vast theoretical and methodological repertoire of the humanities, MMN’s Humanities Division discloses the ways that modern money and cultural expression together shape the world in order to imagine a just and sustainable future.
Crucially, the Humanities Division grounds humanistic inquiry in the insights of neochartalism, or Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Whereas orthodox Liberal political economy envisions money as a private, finite, and decentralized exchange instrument, MMT insists that money is a boundless public utility that can be mobilized to serve all. Affirming MMT’s capacious understanding of money, the Humanities Division critiques Liberalism’s damaging influences on collective thought and practice, while disclosing fresh social, cultural, and environmental histories rooted in MMT’s complex and salutary perspective. With this, the Division seeks to not merely describe money’s previous articulations, but also transform its perceived historical conditions and potentials across the globe.
The Humanities Division’s first conference invites individual presentations that revisit money’s historical role and significance on the left. Money has long stymied leftist imaginaries. Equating the monetary instrument with private exploitation and fiscal policy with redistributive reform, leftist political culture too often reifies Liberal political economy’s bankrupt foundations and forecloses money’s problems and powers of collective provisioning. Money on the Left redresses this fraught legacy by problematizing and recuperating the left’s past engagements with money. Drawing upon diverse disciplines and methods, the conference aims to develop rich neochartalist inquiries into discourse (word), aesthetics (image), and informed activity (praxis), and to do so across heterogenous sociohistorical contexts.
Applications to participate as a presenter in the conference must be submitted via e-mail to Scott Ferguson (sferguson@usf.edu) by January 15, 2018. In your e-mail, please include: (1) an abstract for your paper, not to exceed 250-words; (2) a brief bio; and (3) an academic CV. Scholars hailing from or studying underrepresented communities are strongly encouraged to submit proposals. Please contact Scott Ferguson or William Saas (wsaas@lsu.edu) with questions regarding submission.