Together with best wishes for 2015, the Department of HSS welcomes you to a Seminar by Dr.Anush Kapadia, UK. Please find the details below-Speaker: Dr.Anush Kapadia, City University, London, UK.Title: The elements of finance.Time: 3.00 pmDate: 7th January 2015 (Wednesday)Venue: Seminar Hall, Department of HSS.Abstract:This paper analyzes the fundamental reasons for the observed hierarchy in all financial systems. Why are financial systems hierarchical? The answer offered here is mutualization at scale: balance sheets with access to larger economic catchment areas impart liquidity discipline or elasticity on smaller balance sheets, thereby setting the terms on which the latter operate. Hierarchy then sets the logical limit to the constructive power of law, politics, culture etc. viz. finance. Yet because hierarchy is an abstract, functional requirement, the concrete institutional form that expresses this function is indeterminate a priori. This openness is a key predicate of the constructive power of law and politics in finance, allowing us to conceptualize systems that are democratic even while they attend to the specific logic of financial systems.

About the Speaker:Dr Anush Kapadia has an A.B. (summa cum laude) in Political Science from Amherst College, and a Ph.D in Anthropology from Columbia University. Since Autumn 2013 he has been a Lecturer at City University, London. He works on the politics of financial systems, aiming to understand the design and construction of key financial markets as the site of macro-political battles. His forthcoming work examines the evolution of financial market construction in four contexts: post-reform India, postwar America, post-crisis Europe, and the emerging global reserve system. He is also initiating projects on development theory and the informal economy. His long term project is to deploy the tools of classical political economy to understand the construction and breakdown of both contemporary and historical financial formations. This is conceived as a step to understanding how manifold social formations are expressed and contested through the conception, design, and construction of social institutions more generally.Before joining City University, Dr Kapadia was a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University, and previously a Postdoctoral Research Scholar with the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University in New York.