Event Description
The Department of History and the Institute for New Economic Thinking present a new speaker series: The History and Sociology of Emerging Economies. Our inaugural talk will focus on post-industrialism, and its effect on individuals: specifically homeowners and employees.
Adrienne Brown, PhD, (U. of Chicago) will share her research on the intersection of perception and valuation, particularly the practice of “redlining,” or real estate valuation that denied services and loans to certain areas based on the racial or ethnic composition of neighborhoods. The presence of African Americans has historically been understood as a dampener of property value, despite evidence suggesting this to be inaccurate. But the equation of blackness with financial risk supported the creation of mid-century redlining maps, which steered wealth and mobility out of black neighborhoods and decimated urban areas. Brown’s research requires us to attend to the history of perception, typically the domain of humanists, as it intersects with the history of valuation, typically the domain of social scientists. Jason Jackson, PhD, (MIT) will explore the rise of the “sharing” economy, a recent shift that generated new forms of economic insecurity associated with neo-liberalism and globalization. It is in this context of precariousness that we are now witnessing the rise of platform firms and the ‘sharing’ economy. These firms are depicted as ‘disrupting’ traditional markets through efficiency enhancing technologies. However, they also represent a new mode of capitalist organization characterized by radically reformed employer-employee relations and novel techniques of market governance by algorithms, thus raising new questions about the implications for the distribution of power and wealth in the global economy. |
