Wall Street and the Public Culture of Fi

Wall Street has been imagined as a site of democracy, capitalism, and the pursuit of the American Dream; it has also been imagined as a place of immorality, filled with greedy global elite male financiers taking advantage of the “99 percent”. This seminar will consider how capital, gender, race, culture, and power shape understandings of Wall Street in the popular imagination, and how people’s everyday practices reshape that understanding. Drawing on a variety of texts –anthropological, sociological, political-economic, historical, literary, and cinematic – we will examine the ways new forms of capital produce financial subjects, class difference, and crisis, within the global economy. We will also explore the ways Occupy Wall Street, Me Too, Black Lives Matter and other social movements are recapturing the radical imagination and the possibilities of new forms of resistance to capitalism that often intersect with sexism, racism, and other systems of power. Using interdisciplinary methodologies such as fieldwork, archival research, and literary analysis students will produce short papers and one research paper that allows them to take advantage of conducting research in New York City.