LSE event

Courtesy of Peter at ANTHEM:

Workshop announcement:
“NO-THING PERSONAL? Drawing the frontier between persons and things in accounting, law and marketing

Time: Thursday 2nd February 2012, 14h-18h

Place: London School of Economics and Political Science, Graham Wallas Room (5th floor of the Old Building — behind the Senior Common Room)

Presentation:
After a few decades of increased interest in non-human things, it
seems like a good idea for the social sciences to now look again, with their renewed intellectual gaze, at the traditional objects of
anthropology that are human beings. What has the detour via things
helped us discover about men and women, about individual subjects,
about persons? More specifically, the question may be to understand in what ways humans are affected, and possibly redefined, by the non-
humans they cohabit with. This workshop proposes to explore this
question by confronting the point of view of three social scientists,
from three distinct disciplines: Franck Cochoy (University of
Toulouse, Sociology), Alain Pottage (LSE, Law) and Peter Miller (LSE,
Accounting). Each of them has already, in his personal works, explored the frontier between persons and things (Pottage), subjects and instruments (Miller), or dispositifs and dispositions (Cochoy). All three have, moreover, focused acutely on the sphere of economic
transactions, where persons aspirations intermingle constantly with
accounting, legal and marketing devices. Their dialogue — or
experimental trialogue, rather! — should help us see more clearly how
unexpectedly personal things can sometimes get.

Schedule:
14h00-15h00: Franck Cochoy — “Animating markets”
15h00-15h15: intermission
15h15-16h15: Alain Pottage — “Taking law literally”
16h15-16h30: intermission
16h30-17h30: Peter Miller — “Democratising failure”
17h30-18h00: wrap-up Q&A

For further information on the workshop, please contact Martin
Giraudeau, at m.l.giraudeau@lse.ac.uk.