Call For Papers: Twelfth Cadbury Conference (Deadline 1 March 2015)

By Africa in Words on 29 January , 2015 • ( 0 )

Twelfth Cadbury Conference: Money Judgments

21-22 May 2015

University of Birmingham, UK

The Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham invites paper proposals for the 2015 Cadbury Conference, which will focus on research on money. The keynote address will be given by our Leverhulme Visiting Professor, Jane Guyer, whose seminal research on money and value in Africa is the inspiration for our theme.

How do people in Africa conceptualise, appraise, and assess money and monetary transactions? This interdisciplinary conference explores how people accumulate and think about wealth; describe and measure exchange; attribute moral value to these in different settings and institutions; and how such categorization shapes decisions and behaviour. We will investigate the whole spectrum of ways in which people make judgments in the course of their economic engagements, in contexts ranging from formal legal institutions to intimate domestic, neighbourhood, and community relationships.

Among the questions we speak to explore are:

How do people save money (if they do), and in what form? How do they respond to the requests of others for help, or, alternatively, protect their wealth?
How are monetary transactions defined and depicted in specific cultures, settings or situations? By means of what concepts and metaphors? For example, in what idioms do people distiguish between possessions that can be sold, and those that cannot?
How are the meanings of money and monetary transactions controlled, monitored, imposed or challenged – in formal institutional economic discourses, or in other registers such as journalism, fiction, musical lyrics, proverbs, and slogans? How, for example, do ordinary people, the press, and rumours comment about wealth and express their judgments of it – how wealthy people do or do not deserve their possessions?
What kinds of arguments go on about resources and exchange? How are such arguments framed? In what arenas or social settings? Under what circumstances, for example, is access to basic necessities framed as a matter of economic fact, and when is it understood as a matter of politics?
How do people navigate ambiguities and inconsistencies in definitions of value, and judge between different frameworks? How, for example, is the priority of paying the bank on time judged in relation to the demands of family in urgent medical situations?
Which people manage more than one currency – for example their own national currency and the international currencies? And how do they do it?

If you wish to present a paper, please send an abstract of up to 250 words to Elisa Tuijnder (elisa.tuijnder@gmail.com) by the 1st of March 2015. Participants will normally be expected to seek means from their own institutions to attend.