When exactly did the nightly news finance report become longer (even more important perhaps) than the weather? When did we learn to “leverage” our assets?
Dr Fiona Allon, ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, will address our financialised contemporary condition and how it happened during a lecture at Flinders Victoria Square on Monday 20 February.
Through a series of almost imperceptible shifts, finance has moved from the margins to the very centre of the economy. At the same time it has also moved from the margins of everyday life to the core of our existence.
In work, welfare, education, housing, and even health and morality, individuals have been reimagined as “investors” in their own success and well-being, leveraging every opportunity to maximize value and return on investment as they take responsibility for risk/return calculations about social provisioning in the present, as well as long-term security in the future.
These trends are now referred to as “financialisation” and they go far beyond previous instances of “economisation” or “marketisation”.
Reconfigured as financialised “human capital”, human beings are now called upon to embrace distinctly financial metrics and modes of calculation.
As a consequence, new speculative future-oriented temporalities are shaping many spheres of existence, inaugurating a set of dynamics concerned not with equality and stability, but with inequality, instability, competition and risk.
Yet although “financialisation” seems to have become ubiquitous by stealth, it must be remembered that it is not just a natural state of affairs but is very much the result of deliberate policy, planning and politics.
Dr Fiona Allon is the author of Renovation Nation: Our Obsession with Home (2008) and Home Economics: Speculating on Everyday Life (forthcoming).
All welcome. Refreshments to follow.
For further information please contact michael.scott@flinders.edu.au
When: Monday 20 February, 5-6pm
Where: Flinders University, Victoria Square, Room 1, Level 1