CALL FOR PAPERS
Lauren Berlant 3CT Graduate Student Conference
Power and Personality in Contemporary Capitalism
Conference dates: November 7–8, 2025
Deadline for paper proposals: Friday, June 13, 2025
The conversion of the real economy into a maze of financial assets has accentuated the impersonal experience of capitalist domination. Capitalist profits have never before depended so heavily on abstraction of and from productive and reproductive processes. Yet, capitalist power has rarely been so personal: we live in a time of “strongmen” and their acolytes.
Decades of neoliberal governance have subsidized capital gains and gutted economic assistance programs. Today, getting rich requires owning appreciating assets, and the entities responsible for managing those assets wield a stunning amount of power. Value resides in increasingly obscure financial instruments. Simultaneously, private finance is pouring into the care economy, gobbling up basic services and pensions, and staking massive real estate claims. All these necessary things—and the people who provide and rely on them—have been turned into numbers on a spreadsheet. The impersonal has expressed itself all too personally.
The richest Americans use so-called “family offices” to manage their mind-boggling private wealth. Self-dealing and grift have become dominant cultural and economic modes. In the ultra-online “manosphere,” influencers peddle self-improvement slop and misogyny alongside digital assets and get-rich-quick schemes. Meanwhile, President Trump and his lackeys use the office of the executive to grow their personal fortunes and settle personal scores in a move of right-wing state capture hardly specific to the US.
How might we theorize the simultaneous depersonalization and hyper-personalization of capitalist life?
We invite contributions from graduate students from a wide range of disciplines including, but not limited to, history, anthropology, political theory, philosophy, sociology, and economics.
To apply, submit an abstract (max. 300 words) and a CV by Friday, June 13, at 11:59pm CT.
This conference is organized by Kaya Colakoglu, Max Hancock, Alec Israeli, and Olivia Jenkins.
Questions can be sent to ccct@uchicago.edu.
