Warwick Critical Finance

Lauren Tooker began by addressing the problematic of developing a reflexive critique of finance. While we might want to move beyond a form of critique that assigns the academic a seemingly objective view on finance from above, it is often hard to take on a more reflexive position, because it forces us to engage with the uncomfortable contradictions and ambiguities in the field. Financial resistance movements can be confronted by problems of gender and race; neoliberal imaginaries sometimes yield surprising democratic politics. To develop a sensitivity to such counter intuitive findings, Tooker suggests moving away from a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ towards more reflexive forms of ‘redemptive critique’. The challenge to build such a situated approach relates to a second challenge highlighted by Tooker - to conceive of ordinary agency. Despite the recent (re-)turn to the everyday in IPE, ordinary agency is often not taken seriously. The challenge is an approach that allows us to think with and alongside people,