The politics of economics with Kath Weston

Description

The Politics of Economics is a research network exploring how economics as a discipline impacts the world. The seminar series brings different perspectives together to discuss tensions and contestations of economic knowledge in the context of policy, expertise and political movements. The one-hour seminar consists of a conversation with one of our moderators followed by questions from our online audience.

In this seminar, Kath Weston (University of Edinburgh) will present ‘The Genesis Block: Cryptocurrency Creation Stories’.

Kath Weston is British Academy Global Professor at the University of Edinburgh and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. Her recent work focuses on embodiment and visceral engagement, integrating material from kinship studies, social studies of finance, political ecology, and science and technology studies. She has received multiple honours and awards, including the British Academy Global Professorship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Science Foundation grants, visiting professorships at Tokyo University and the University of Cambridge, and two Ruth Benedict Book Prizes. Her books include Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship; Traveling Light: On the Road with America’s Poor; and Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World. Her British Academy project, ‘Why Does Capital Flow?’, focuses on the renewed centrality of corporeal metaphors and organic analogies in accounts of economic and financial arrangements that have become increasingly digitized and ‘disembodied’.