Comments: Luciane Lucas dos Santos (CES)


Overview

Interest in deconstructing ‘money’ as an instrument of social fascination is back on the agenda of economic sociology and practice. Nation states and communities both seek more sustainable designs of new monies – but is the pathway for equitable exploration clear? COVID-19 has profoundly demonstrated the essential quality of non-remunerated work. This has led to a rare collective call by citizen groups, NGOs and social business networks for a more ‘feminist’ economy – one oriented around caring institutions (Women’s Budget Group 2021), with strengthened social infrastructures, and with more responsiveness to collective over individual values (Hawaiʻi State Commission on the Status of Women 2020). The challenge for monetary re-imagining, however, is that whilst unpaid labor is at forefront of political consciousness, coordinated state responses to COVID-19 still included mass monetary stimuli that, paradoxically, underlined societies’ continued reliance on conventional money.

New conceptual touchpoints are required to explore equitable re-imaginings of money. Despite the increasing presence of post-colonial and feminist economics scholarship, money as a socio-technical instrument is still very rarely re-imagined in these literatures. Whilst the influence of post-colonialism and the ‘epistemologies of the south’ is increasing in social innovation and social economy literatures – with the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos and others – bringing these insights to bear on questions of monetary design pushes against both Marxist and Liberal inclinations within the disciplines. By re-articulating the debate around monetary innovation at the level of epistemology, however, we can frame money as an instrument of translation, whose future designs, values and enactments require the insights of translation studies, semiotics and post-colonial readings of translation. Many advocates of a more ‘people-centred’ transition in economic relations struggle to see an ethical space for money – however it is re-designed – as anything other than a reductive, fetishistic and objectifying social technology. Having deconstructed many of these concepts since the ‘Wages for Housework’ movement of the 1970s, however, feminist theory and economics is beginning to offer productive strategies for re-designing money, root-and-branch (Adkins, 2018; Allon, 2018; Green, 2021; Mellor, 2018).

In this seminar, I propose to initiate a dialogue around the relationship between ‘money’ and ‘translation’ in the context of social innovation studies, drawing on post-colonial theory and feminist economics. Deriving from my PhD thesis on monetary innovation in feminist political economy, I hope for this seminar to allow dialogue for colleagues across these disciplines, exploring not only ‘translation’ as a discourse for redesigning money, but as a broader ‘metaphor for our times’ (Ribeiro, 2004)


Bio note

Kai Roland Green is a PhD candidate at Roskilde University, Denmark in the programme for Learning, Working Life and Social Innovation. His doctoral thesis concerns feminist approaches to monetary innovation, and he has published papers in the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, Social Innovation Journal, and the Springer book series on Ethical Approaches to Economy (2022). He holds a BA in Theatre and Philosophy from Royal Holloway, University of London (UK) and an MSc. In Social Entrepreneurship and Management from Roskilde University (DK). During his stay at CES, Kai is under the supervision of Luciane Lucas dos Santos, where they have been developing their shared interests in alternative currencies, feminist economics and aesthetics. He is a representative on the research council for the European Reform University Alliance and has a particular interest in social entrepreneurship education. 

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