Co-organised by the Human Geography and the Cultural Anthropology departments, the next kitchen session will be centred around Koray Çalışkan’s visit to Frankfurt on the 18th and the 19th June. Please find below a detailed description of the programme.
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The Elements of a Sociology of Digital Economic Geographies
Monday, June, 18th 2018, 18:00
Seminarhaus SH 0.109
The lecture is part of the new MA STS and jointly organized by the Institut für Kulturanthropologie und Europäische Ethnologie and the Institut für Humangeographie.
Koray Çalışkan is associate professor of politics at Bogazici University. He received his Ph.D. with distinction from New York University with which he won the Malcolm Kerr Social Science Award from MESA. His book Market Threads came out from Princeton University Press and focused on markets in Egypt, Turkey and the US. Currently he works on wind energy markets and political regimes.
On Tuesday, June 19th, 10 -12 am, PEG 2.G202 (Besprechungsraum des Instituts für Humangeographie), there will be an opportunity to continue our discussion with Koray on 1) marketization 2) ethnographies of global stuff and 3) political transformation in Turkey.
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The Elements of a Sociology of Digital Economic Geographies
Koray Çalışkan
This paper aims at describing the universe of new economic geographies, built by blockchains and funded via digital monies such as Bitcoin. Following the 2008 Crisis and in part as a result of it, trust in conventional banking has plummeted to a new low. In response to this development, economic actors have begun to pursue new initiatives, often bypassing the state and banks. Since 2008 and for the first time in history, people are issuing their own digital money with the help of blockchain technology, and without a central authority. Companies and a few communities had previously experimented with their own monies, yet none of them had 1) found a way to do this with no central authority, 2) managed to address issues of trust conclusively, at least in theory. Blockchain technology seems to be successful on both fronts. This paper analyses new markets of ICOs in critical conversation with recent developments in social research on non-digital market geographies. It shows that new digital markets of ICOs require social theory to go beyond analogical thinking and imagine new concepts to represent a novel relationship of exchange, production, valuation, redistribution, and representation.