The Moral Economy of Markets: Constituting and Resisting Relations of Power (2018-2019)
The creation of capitalist markets has been, and continues to be, a transformative process, involving the displacement of peoples from their homelands as well as the disruption of traditional norms, cultures and institutions. Such markets have brought disparate worlds together across geographies, identities and sociocultures, linking projects of market-driven modernization in intimate ways.
This project team explored the experiences and narratives of those thrown into various states of vulnerability, objectification and precarity by the voracious spread of market logic. In particular, the team examined the following key questions:
- How do vulnerable populations reconfigure territories and lives with and against the incursions of marketizations and what can be learned from their experiences?
- In what ways do individuals and communities navigate, operate outside of and/or defy the market’s system of dependence and precarity to find creative means of resilience, sustainability and wellbeing?
- What lessons might be gleaned from modes of persistence, resilience and resistance that inform responses to planetary disasters, escalating inequalities, the disintegration of traditional communities, the expulsions of peoples and species and the deadening of land and seas?
- What alternative narratives exist that may point the way toward a more equitable, just and sustainable future? And what might the role of markets be in this future?
In Spring 2019, the team hosted numerous public lectures featuring prominent scholars of ethics, economics, cultural anthropology, history and literature. In collaboration with several international partners, the team also began creation of an interactive website (designed as a connection hub for a wide range of scholars and scholarship as well as a repository for curricular materials) and prepared a special issue on “moral economy of markets” for a peer-reviewed journal.
Timing
Fall 2018 – Fall 2019
Team Outputs
The Moral Economy of Markets: Constituting and Resisting Relations of Power (poster by Aaron Cohen, Kathryn Howley, Prassana Malavika Rajagopalar, Alexander Martin, Niranjan Menon, Hira Shah, Allayne Thomas, Rachel Wall, Xiangyu Zheng, presented at Bass Connections Showcase, Duke University, April 17, 2019)
This Team in the News
Dirk Philipsen and the Wellbeing Revolution
Meet the Members of the 2018-19 Student Advisory Council