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April 25, 2025

Call for Papers: 2025 Lauren Berlant 3CT Graduate Student Conference

Power and Personality in Contemporary Capitalism

 

Conference dates: November 7–8, 2025
Deadline for paper submissions: Friday, June 13, 2025
Submit paper proposal

The conversion of the real economy into a maze of financial assets, separating ownership from management from operation, has accentuated the impersonal experience of capitalist domination. Capitalist profits have never before depended so heavily on the abstraction of and from productive and reproductive processes. Yet, capitalist power has rarely been so personal: we live in a time of ruling “strongmen” and their acolytes.

In the 1980s, profit frontiers moved out of manufacturing and into real estate and financial services. Decades of neoliberal governance have subsidized capital gains and gutted economic assistance programs. Today, getting rich requires owning appreciating assets, and the often-private entities responsible for managing those assets wield a stunning amount of power, with the ability to move staggering sums of digital cash around the world in a matter of seconds. Value resides in increasingly impersonal, abstracting financial instruments.

But what’s inside managers’ portfolios? Private finance is pouring into the care economy, gobbling up basic services and pensions, and staking massive real estate claims. All these basic, necessary things—and the workers and consumers who rely on them and make them function—have been turned into numbers on a spreadsheet. The very sectors through which abstraction of the asset economy has progressed are those sectors that are most concrete in everyday life. The impersonal has expressed itself all too personally.

Indeed, assetification has paralleled the personalization of capital’s influence. The family and the sovereign (male) self are being reinscribed in a privatized, fraying social fabric. The richest Americans use “family offices” to manage their mind-boggling private wealth. Self-dealing and grift have become dominant cultural and economic modes. In the ultra-online “manosphere,” superstar influencers peddle self-improvement slop and misogyny alongside digital assets and get-rich-quick schemes. Meanwhile, President Trump and his lackeys use the office of the executive to grow their personal fortunes and settle personal scores. This charismatic state capture by right-wing personalities is, of course, hardly specific to the US.

How can we productively theorize this simultaneous depersonalization and hyper-personalization of capitalist life? How might the asset economy impact possibilities for democratic governance? In other words, how does this configuration of economic power affect the collective exercise of political power? Does the asset economy have an affinity for reactionary politics? What are the specificities and/or similarities in the global trend of mass privatization and state capture? How does the privatization of social reproductive work affect the personal? What cultural and discursive forms are reflective of these new trends of capital accumulation and governmental power?

This conference is organized by Kaya Colakoglu, Max Hancock, Alec Israeli, and Olivia Jenkins.

To apply, submit an abstract (max. 300 words) and a CV via this Google form by Friday, June 13, at 11:59pm CT.

We invite contributions from graduate students from a wide range of disciplines including, but not limited to, history, anthropology, political theory, philosophy, sociology, and economics. Travel support will be available for a limited number of presenters without access to institutional funding.

We are especially interested in papers related to the following topics:

  • The political economy of asset management
  • Privatization and financialization
  • Geographies of capital ownership
  • Care labor, service work, and the digital precariat
  • The law and legalities of “personhood” and “personality”
  • The digital economy and cryptocurrency
  • “Just in time” production and logistics
  • The libertarian right and its histories
  • Ties between neoliberal and conservative political formations
  • Labor organizing strategy and tactics in the asset age
  • Contemporary performances/theories of masculinity/femininity
  • The culture and economy of “influencing”
  • The administrative state (and its erosion)
  • Theories of capitalist domination
  • Analyses of developing inter- and intra-class political conflict

Questions for the organizers can be sent to ccct@uchicago.edu.