*****This event has been cancelled. We will reschedule for later in 2024***************

Speculation: Alternatives to the Financial Everywhen

Facilitator: Dr Caroline Schuster (Associate Professor, School of Archaeology and Anthropology and HRC-RSHA Internal Fellow)

An HDR Masterclass in two sessions.

As the climate emergency escalates, there are mounting concerns that large swaths of Australian costal, riverine, and agricultural communities are becoming “uninsurable.” There is already precedent for such a financial move; last year, major insurers quietly stopped issuing new policies for property cover in California and Florida.

Insurance and other financial instruments that speculate on our increasingly unimaginable environments have asserted the ‘right to buy the future.’ This masterclass will tackle the train-wreck of temporalities and ontological figurations that characterise the financial everywhen amidst deeper histories of environmental damage and futures of mounting weather perils. We will engage diverse scholarship in anthropology, theological critique, cultural studies, and digital humanities to think through the analytical possibilities and limitations of thinking with speculation. No background in economics is required to participate.

Session 1
The first session of this workshop will begin with a close reading of the suggested texts.
One of these is a webcomic produced by Caroline Schuster with collaborating artists Enrique Bernardou and David Bueno in Paraguay.
Session 2 
(Optional) In this session, participants will take inspiration from the speculative possibilities of graphic ethnography to create their own comic or zine engaging alternatives to the financial everywhen.
Stick figures welcome! Participants for this session must have completed session 1.

Suggested reading list:

Bear, Laura. "Speculation: a political economy of technologies of imagination." Economy and society 49, no. 1 (2020): 1-15.

Guyer, Jane I. "Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time." American ethnologist 34, no. 3 (2007): 409-421.

Vaughn, Sarah. "Gridlock: Vigilance and early warning in the shadow of climate change." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11, no. 2 (2021): 506-520.

CómicsClub! (Caroline E Schuster, Enrique Bernardou, and David Bueno). “The Fences: a webcomic on collective debt and ruination in Paraguay,” The Australian Journal of Anthropology, (2024, in press).
https://curatorium.webflow.io/taja-journal/form-content/fences/el-cercado-the-fences

Optional recommended:

Bahng, Aimee. Migrant futures: Decolonizing speculation in financial times. Duke University Press, 2018. (selections)

Maia, Filipe. Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism. Duke University Press, 2022. (selections)

Neale, Timothy, Alex Zahara, and Will Smith. "An eternal flame: The elemental governance of wildfire's pasts, presents and futures." Cultural Studies Review 25, no. 2 (2019): 115-134.