The Cultural Life of Money and Finance podcast explores money and finance through the arts and humanities – asking new questions about finance, the global financial system, and financial behaviour in the twenty-first century. In a series of conversations with researchers and practitioners, we look at how money is being, and has been, thought about in different contexts – across historical, cultural, ethical, religious, social, and material settings.
The Cultural Life of Money and Finance project is based at the University of Leeds, and is led by Matthew Treherne, Rachel Muers and Mark Davis. The project is supported by the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute, and by the Leeds Creative Labs scheme at the Cultural Institute at the University of Leeds.
In this episode, Mark is joined by Leigh Claire La Berge, Assistant Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, about opportunities for arts and humanities to engage with money and finance through ideas of performativity and language, in particular how they have been utilised in social studies of finance. They also explore themes of temporality and invisibility, and how these are captured in the financial fiction writing of the 1980s and TV serials of the mid-2000s. Their conversation also touches on the importance of how money and finance are narrated, and the deeper political questions these narratives lay down, and why the arts and humanities might best serve utopian projects for a better financial system by empowering a literary studies of finance.
Leigh Claire is the author of Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art (2019) (available at https://www.dukeupress.edu/wages-against-artwork), Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (2015) (available at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/scandals-and-abstraction-9780199372874?cc=ca&lang=en&), and co-editor of Reading Capitalist Realism (2014) (available at https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9781609382346/reading-capitalist-realism).
For more information on the Culture Life of Money and Finance Project, please visit https://culturallifeofmoney.leeds.ac.uk, and follow us on Twitter @CulturalMoney.
The podcast was edited by Lisa Trischler.
