About This Course

This course aims to contextualize and situate economic practices across time and space, paying careful attention to the embeddedness of such practices within larger systems of meaning and power. It is motivated by and organized around the question of reconfiguration – of ways of seeing and being, of conceptions of rights and mutual obligation, and of how we decide what kinds of life and action are socially valuable. Such reconfigurations are fundamental to transitions to industrial capitalism and the birth of ‘the market’ as the dominant organizing principle in the lives of people across the world.