Can we imagine communities that weaponise uncertainty and volatility to resist financialized capitalism? Join us for a conversation and celebration of the German launch of Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World, a new book by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (University College London).
with
Manuela Bojadzijev (Professor of Globalized Cultures, Humboldt University)
Manuela Bojadzijev is a professor at the Institute for European Ethnology and the Berlin Institute for Migration Research (BIM) at Humboldt University Berlin. She is researching globalized and digitised cultures and, together with the author Carolin Emcke, she curates an online-archive on the history and presence of forced migration to Germany at Berlin’s House of World Cultures (funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation and the Berlin House of World Cultures).
Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou is a sociologist and writer. He is associate professor of sociology at University College London, where he leads the Sociology and Social Theory Research Group, and an editor at the British Journal of Sociology. His public writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, Roar Magazine and other publications. His current book project, Real Fake, is an intellectual history of distortion technologies and myth-making in financialized capitalism.
Boaz Levin is an artist, writer and curator who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Levin is the co-founder, together with Vera Tollmann and Hito Steyerl, of the Research Center for Proxy Politics. In 2017, he was co-curator of the Biennale für Aktuelle Fotografie, which is staged at exhibition venues in Heidelberg, Mannheim, and Ludwigshafen. He is currently co-curator of the 3rd Chennai Photo Biennale, which will open in December 2021. He is the author of On Distance, ed. Laura Preston (Berlin: Atlas Projectos, 2020). Levin is editor of Cabinet Magazine's Kiosk platform.
Bahar Noorizadeh is an artist, writer and filmmaker. Her research examines the historical advance of speculative activity and its derivative politics in art, urban life, and finance and economics. She is the founder of Weird Economies, an online art platform that traces economic imaginaries extraordinary to financial arrangements of our time. Her work has appeared at the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennial 2021, Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Program, Transmediale Festival, DIS Art platform, Berlinale Forum Expanded, and Geneva Biennale of Moving Images among others.
Quinn Slobodian is the author of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018), which has translations published or forthcoming in nine languages. A frequent commenter on contemporary politics, he is a visiting associate professor at Brown University for 2022 and Marion Butler McLean Associate Professor of the History of Ideas at Wellesley College. He is also an associate fellow at Chatham House and co-director of the History and Political Economy Project. 