Re-imagining the crises of global capital

Samman, Amin Thomas (2013). Re-imagining the crises of global capital. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the imaginary dimensions of economic crisis through a study of the interface between practices of historical representation and processes of social construction. Its core argument is that a sense of history cannot be disentangled from the phenomena that it strives to apprehend. As a result, there can be no fixed and objective relation between the evolution of global capitalism and its long history of crises. Instead, the very intelligibility of both ‘crisis’ and ‘history’ is produced through an iterated telescoping of time, whereby more or less distant events and episodes are grasped together in ways that lend meaning to those of the present. This argument is taken forward via an in-depth and quasi-historical analysis of the 2008 crisis. Focusing on how past crises figure within the pronouncements of international policymaking organisations and the commentary of the global financial press between 2007 and 2009, it develops a typology of different practices of historical representation and the various interpretive functions they are capable of performing. In so doing, it makes a theoretical contribution to the constructivist and cultural political economy literatures on the discursive negotiation of crisis.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):