Description
Session 3 of REIN Reading Circle.
The premise of any economic model is grounded on the categories that frame its inquiry. This week's readings seek to trouble the ways in which economics as a discipline imagines reality, and the categories it uses to translate lived experience into analyzable data. This set should provoke economics to confront the distance that there might be in the way they conceptualise and taxonomize reality, and the way in which its subjects, that is ordinary people imagine their own world. An entry into the discourses and power structures that have historically informed the way economics approaches its object of inquiry will hopefully be questioned through a close reading of these materials
The readings we will be discussing:
Preface and Ch. 6, Thompson, E. P. (2002). The Making of the English Working Class. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited
Introduction, Mitchell, T. (2002). Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. United States: University of California Press
Preface, Graeber, D. (2018). B******t Jobs: A Theory. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited
(Optional reading): Introduction, Anand, N. (2017). Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. United Kingdom: Duke University Press.