Economic Representations:
Both Academic and Everyday

April 2-3, 2004
UCR Humanities Room 1500

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Why is there such a proliferation of economic discourses in literary theory, cultural studies, anthropology, and other areas outside the official discipline of economics? How is the economy represented in different ways by economists and noneconomists? How can these various perspectives be combined both to improve our understanding of disciplinarity and to produce more effective answers to the ethical, philosophical, and policy questions posed by contemporary economic developments in the United States and around the world?
 

These are the questions that will form the basis for a workshop/conference of 30 or so individuals to be convened in April 2004 at the University of California, Riverside. We will organize the meeting in conjunction with a group of 10 scholars from various disciplines who first met in a team residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study and Conference Center in March 2002. The Riverside conference will expand the scope of the Bellagio team, by including 10 UC-based scholars and 10 individuals from outside the academy. This expanded group will, in turn, work with us to formulate the call for papers and devise the list of invited speakers for a large international conference, tentatively scheduled for Fall 2005, at the University of Notre Dame.

The Conference Itself

The discussion in Riverside will build on and extend the papers on "What Is At Stake?" in economic representations that emerged from the Bellagio team residency, which are available on the internet (http://www.nd.edu/~econrep/essays.html) and currently being discussed (for later revision) by the Bellagio team members. We will ask the participants of the Riverside conference to respond to these essays in preparing their own contributions and to send their position papers to the other conference participants at least one month prior to the beginning of the conference. The conference itself will be organized on the basis of formal sessions (during which the position papers will be presented and discussed) and structured workshops (in which the participants will be invited to discuss particular concepts—such as the global economy, living wages, and so on—that are treated in different ways across the disciplines and outside the academy). We will also have 2 keynote addresses, on the first and second nights of the 2-day conference.

The later international conference will be held over four days in the Fall of 2005 and will consist of four plenary sessions, a series of concurrent paper sessions and workshops, an art exhibit, live theater and music performances, a film festival, and much more. In contrast to the usual practice at other interdisciplinary conferences, the events will be organized so that scholars from diverse disciplines and individuals from outside the academy are represented on each topic. The participants in the Riverside conference will be asked to form the conference organizing committee and, later, edit a series of specific, thematic volumes and multimedia presentations based on a selection of the papers from the larger conference.