PRICE: the workshop

1-3 JUNE 2016 University of Turku, Finland

Convened and Organized by the FiDiPro Research Group

Workshop Brief

In the context of persistent instability and indeterminacy in regard to price and pricing this workshop asks: what is price? Is price an algorithm, a sensation, an index, a measure, a value, a benchmark, a sign, a function of money, a financial instrument, a market device, a socio-technological engagement with the future? Recognizing that the problem of price is fundamental to capitalism and that this problem is mutating in the context of a proliferation of pricing technologies – from the apparently localized operations of devices such as surge pricing through to the ostensibly abstract techniques of financial instruments designed to continuously contest price – importantly, this workshop also asks what is at stake for the social sciences in the question of price? What can an interrogation of price surface for the social sciences? Would this include the changing relations between measure and value? The retreat of the state from price setting? Shifting relations between the future and the present? An intensification of capital accumulation? A rewriting of value? Transformations to money? Bringing together scholars from the disciplines of Geography, Sociology, Cultural Studies and Political Economy this workshop seeks not only to address these issues but also to consider what strands of thought are best equipped to engage with the question and problem of price including those associated with economic sociology, critical and social finance studies, pragmatic social theory, affect theory and the new cultural economy.

Confirmed participants: Fiona Allon (University of Sydney), Patricia Clough (Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York), Derek McCormack (University of Oxford), Rebecca Coleman (Goldsmiths), Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen (University of Tampere), Susanna Paasonen (University of Turku).