Caitlin Zaloom
Biographic Data
| ID | 118079 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Caitlin Zaloom |
| GIVEN NAMES | Caitlin |
| FAMILY NAME | Zaloom |
| SIGNATURE | ZALOOM C |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6285-7171 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 406 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The Human Geography of Care
The exponential increase in life expectancy in the twentieth century, coupled with a significant drop in fertility in the twenty-first century, demands rethinking family-based care for older people who require assistance with activities of daily living. We argue that age diversity in the population and a trend toward urbanization represent two emerging resources on which new care models can be built. By distributing care among age-diverse groups …
Legacies, logics, labors of love
We write to note the passing of world-renowned Africanist and economic anthropologist Jane Isabel Guyer, who died in Davis, California, on January 17, 2024, from complications from dementia. Born in Dunoon, Scotland, on New Year's Eve in 1943, she had just turned 80. Jane earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of Rochester in 1972 and went on to teach at Boston University, Harvard, Northwestern, and, finally, Johns Hopkins, from which s…
Financialization and the Household
Finance and the household are a pair that has not received sufficient attention. As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders' social creativity fuels borrowing, making them the target of banks and other lender…
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966)
Mary Douglas's masterpiece Purity and Danger holds a troubled place in the social sciences and humanities. Both classic and cast out, the book's analysis cannot be ignored. In fact, Douglas's thesis, "Dirt is matter out of place," can help explain the fate of the very book that made it famous. Purity and Danger presents a probing cultural analysis. Douglas argued that social systems should be understood by what they expel but also that the true p…
The future is family
Future visions energize growing enterprises, states, and families to act. Together, these entwined processes and their conflicts open unpredictable avenues for both profit-making and social transformation. This was a key insight of Aihwa Ong's classic ethnography Spirits of resistance, which was published more than thirty years ago. In Spirits, Ong developed a feminist approach to political economy that begins with this dynamic. Today, anthropolo…
Antidemocracy in America
Antidemocracy in America is a collective effort to understand the fragility of American democracy and how to protect it from the buried contradictions that Trump’s victory brought into view. It offers essays from leading scholars on topics including race, religion, gender, civil liberties, protest, inequality, immigration, and the media.
Think in Public
Think in Public presents a selection of inspiring essays that exemplify the distinctive approach of the online magazine Public Books to public scholarship. Today’s leading thinkers offer a guide to the most exciting contemporary ideas about literature, politics, economics, history, race, capitalism, gender, technology, and climate change.
Think in Public
Antidemocracy in America
Antidemocracy in America
On Election Day in 2016, it seemed unthinkable to many Americans that Donald Trump could become president of the United States. But the victories of the Obama administration hid from view fundamental problems deeply rooted in American social institutions and history. The election's consequences drastically changed how Americans experience their country, especially for those threatened by the public outburst of bigotry and repression. Amid the del…
A Right to the Future
In September of 2008, when the banking giant Lehman Brothers collapsed, lending came to a halt.Borrowers across the globe were left holding outsized debts and declining credit scores.Consumers in the United States soon showed that they wanted out of the credit trap.From 2008 to 2012, U.S. households reduced their financial liabilities by $1.3 trillion (Federal Reserve Bank of New York 2013).They "deleveraged" in all areas but one: student debt.By…
How will we pay? Projective fictions and regimes of foresight in US college finance
For most American households today, a college education requires financial planning. Planning can seem like a reckoning with "real" economic constraints of household budgetary truths; however, financial planning begins with imaginative acts. To plan, families must craft "projective fictions," forecasts of trends in the broader economy and family life with which they can guide parenting actions in the present. Drawing on inspiration from ethnograp…
The evangelical financial ethic
In evangelical churches across the United States, volunteers assist other church members in transforming household budgets into lenses that reveal God's kingdom on earth, reframing the force and volatility of markets as divine mystery. The strategies of financial ministry are distinctive, yet they engage a more general conundrum that pits economic success against conflicting ethical projects; they illuminate the process of ethical management in t…
Mary Poovey
Oration| January 01 2012 Mary Poovey Caitlin Zaloom Caitlin Zaloom Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2012) 24 (1 (66)): 85–103. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-1443565 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Caitlin Zaloom; Mary Poovey. Pub…
The shortsighted brain
The young field of neuroeconomics converges around behavioral deviations from the model of the human being as Homo economicus, a rational actor who calculates his choices to maximize his individual satisfaction. In a historical moment characterized by economic, health, and environmental crises, policymakers have become increasingly concerned about a particular deviation for which neuroeconomics offers a biological explanation: Why do humans value…
The Spectacle of Wealth and its Costs
How to Read the Future
Financial prediction provokes intense affect. For bond traders, hedge fund managers, and economic planners, both statistical reasoning and affective discomfort surround professional judgments about the future. This article argues that contemporary financial knowledge is organized around the interplay of reason and affect. The history and contemporary use of the U.S. Treasury yield curve-a key economic indicator-point to this intractable problem o…
Authors of the Storm
The Discipline of Speculators
This chapter contains section titled: Scalpers Market Space Losses The Danger of Narratives Wishing, Hoping, and Praying Entering the Zone Conclusion: The Ethical Practice of Discipline Notes
Future knowledge
Markets and Machines
Markets and Machines:Work in the Technological Sensoryscapes of Finance Caitlin Zaloom (bio) In the hit 1983 film Trading Places, the august banking brothers Randolph and Mortimer Duke bet one dollar on the answer to the question of what matters more, environment or genetics, nature or nurture. The pair wager on the fortunes of Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Akroyd), a pedigreed white commodities trader from whom they strip job, family, and reputation,…
The Productive Life of Risk
Contemporary social theorists usually conceive of risk negatively. Focusing on disasters and hazards, they see risk as an object of calculation and avoidance. But we gain a deeper understanding of risk in modern life if we observe it in another setting. Futures markets are exemplary sites of aggressive risk taking. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork on trading floors, this article shows how a high modern institution creates populations of risk-taki…
Ambiguous numbers
Financial markets and information technologies are key issues for contemporary social theory and the anthropology of globalization. Drawing on fieldwork in Chicago and London, I examine the interplay between processes of technological rationalization and the situated actions of traders in two financial futures markets-one that operates on open-outcry pit technology and the other process online. Both technologies represent the market in numbers. T…
Ambiguous numbers
Financial markets and information technologies are key issues for contemporary social theory and the anthropology of globalization. Drawing on fieldwork in Chicago and London, I examine the interplay between processes of technological rationalization and the situated actions of traders in two financial futures markets-one that operates on open-outcry pit technology and the other process online. Both technologies represent the market in numbers. T…
The Productive Life of Risk
Contemporary social theorists usually conceive of risk negatively. Focusing on disasters and hazards, they see risk as an object of calculation and avoidance. But we gain a deeper understanding of risk in modern life if we observe it in another setting. Futures markets are exemplary sites of aggressive risk taking. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork on trading floors, this article shows how a high modern institution creates populations of risk-taki…
How to Read the Future
Financial prediction provokes intense affect. For bond traders, hedge fund managers, and economic planners, both statistical reasoning and affective discomfort surround professional judgments about the future. This article argues that contemporary financial knowledge is organized around the interplay of reason and affect. The history and contemporary use of the U.S. Treasury yield curve-a key economic indicator-point to this intractable problem o…
The evangelical financial ethic
In evangelical churches across the United States, volunteers assist other church members in transforming household budgets into lenses that reveal God's kingdom on earth, reframing the force and volatility of markets as divine mystery. The strategies of financial ministry are distinctive, yet they engage a more general conundrum that pits economic success against conflicting ethical projects; they illuminate the process of ethical management in t…
The shortsighted brain
The young field of neuroeconomics converges around behavioral deviations from the model of the human being as Homo economicus, a rational actor who calculates his choices to maximize his individual satisfaction. In a historical moment characterized by economic, health, and environmental crises, policymakers have become increasingly concerned about a particular deviation for which neuroeconomics offers a biological explanation: Why do humans value…
Financialization and the Household
Finance and the household are a pair that has not received sufficient attention. As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders' social creativity fuels borrowing, making them the target of banks and other lender…
How will we pay? Projective fictions and regimes of foresight in US college finance
For most American households today, a college education requires financial planning. Planning can seem like a reckoning with "real" economic constraints of household budgetary truths; however, financial planning begins with imaginative acts. To plan, families must craft "projective fictions," forecasts of trends in the broader economy and family life with which they can guide parenting actions in the present. Drawing on inspiration from ethnograp…
Markets and Machines
Markets and Machines:Work in the Technological Sensoryscapes of Finance Caitlin Zaloom (bio) In the hit 1983 film Trading Places, the august banking brothers Randolph and Mortimer Duke bet one dollar on the answer to the question of what matters more, environment or genetics, nature or nurture. The pair wager on the fortunes of Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Akroyd), a pedigreed white commodities trader from whom they strip job, family, and reputation,…
A Right to the Future
In September of 2008, when the banking giant Lehman Brothers collapsed, lending came to a halt.Borrowers across the globe were left holding outsized debts and declining credit scores.Consumers in the United States soon showed that they wanted out of the credit trap.From 2008 to 2012, U.S. households reduced their financial liabilities by $1.3 trillion (Federal Reserve Bank of New York 2013).They "deleveraged" in all areas but one: student debt.By…
Future knowledge
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966)
Mary Douglas's masterpiece Purity and Danger holds a troubled place in the social sciences and humanities. Both classic and cast out, the book's analysis cannot be ignored. In fact, Douglas's thesis, "Dirt is matter out of place," can help explain the fate of the very book that made it famous. Purity and Danger presents a probing cultural analysis. Douglas argued that social systems should be understood by what they expel but also that the true p…
The Spectacle of Wealth and its Costs
Ambiguous numbers
Financial markets and information technologies are key issues for contemporary social theory and the anthropology of globalization. Drawing on fieldwork in Chicago and London, I examine the interplay between processes of technological rationalization and the situated actions of traders in two financial futures markets-one that operates on open-outcry pit technology and the other process online. Both technologies represent the market in numbers. T…
The Productive Life of Risk
Contemporary social theorists usually conceive of risk negatively. Focusing on disasters and hazards, they see risk as an object of calculation and avoidance. But we gain a deeper understanding of risk in modern life if we observe it in another setting. Futures markets are exemplary sites of aggressive risk taking. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork on trading floors, this article shows how a high modern institution creates populations of risk-taki…
Markets and Machines
Markets and Machines:Work in the Technological Sensoryscapes of Finance Caitlin Zaloom (bio) In the hit 1983 film Trading Places, the august banking brothers Randolph and Mortimer Duke bet one dollar on the answer to the question of what matters more, environment or genetics, nature or nurture. The pair wager on the fortunes of Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Akroyd), a pedigreed white commodities trader from whom they strip job, family, and reputation,…
The Discipline of Speculators
This chapter contains section titled: Scalpers Market Space Losses The Danger of Narratives Wishing, Hoping, and Praying Entering the Zone Conclusion: The Ethical Practice of Discipline Notes
Future knowledge
The Spectacle of Wealth and its Costs
How to Read the Future
Financial prediction provokes intense affect. For bond traders, hedge fund managers, and economic planners, both statistical reasoning and affective discomfort surround professional judgments about the future. This article argues that contemporary financial knowledge is organized around the interplay of reason and affect. The history and contemporary use of the U.S. Treasury yield curve-a key economic indicator-point to this intractable problem o…
Authors of the Storm
The shortsighted brain
The young field of neuroeconomics converges around behavioral deviations from the model of the human being as Homo economicus, a rational actor who calculates his choices to maximize his individual satisfaction. In a historical moment characterized by economic, health, and environmental crises, policymakers have become increasingly concerned about a particular deviation for which neuroeconomics offers a biological explanation: Why do humans value…
Mary Poovey
Oration| January 01 2012 Mary Poovey Caitlin Zaloom Caitlin Zaloom Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2012) 24 (1 (66)): 85–103. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-1443565 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Caitlin Zaloom; Mary Poovey. Pub…
The evangelical financial ethic
In evangelical churches across the United States, volunteers assist other church members in transforming household budgets into lenses that reveal God's kingdom on earth, reframing the force and volatility of markets as divine mystery. The strategies of financial ministry are distinctive, yet they engage a more general conundrum that pits economic success against conflicting ethical projects; they illuminate the process of ethical management in t…
A Right to the Future
In September of 2008, when the banking giant Lehman Brothers collapsed, lending came to a halt.Borrowers across the globe were left holding outsized debts and declining credit scores.Consumers in the United States soon showed that they wanted out of the credit trap.From 2008 to 2012, U.S. households reduced their financial liabilities by $1.3 trillion (Federal Reserve Bank of New York 2013).They "deleveraged" in all areas but one: student debt.By…
How will we pay? Projective fictions and regimes of foresight in US college finance
For most American households today, a college education requires financial planning. Planning can seem like a reckoning with "real" economic constraints of household budgetary truths; however, financial planning begins with imaginative acts. To plan, families must craft "projective fictions," forecasts of trends in the broader economy and family life with which they can guide parenting actions in the present. Drawing on inspiration from ethnograp…
Antidemocracy in America
Antidemocracy in America is a collective effort to understand the fragility of American democracy and how to protect it from the buried contradictions that Trump’s victory brought into view. It offers essays from leading scholars on topics including race, religion, gender, civil liberties, protest, inequality, immigration, and the media.
Think in Public
Think in Public presents a selection of inspiring essays that exemplify the distinctive approach of the online magazine Public Books to public scholarship. Today’s leading thinkers offer a guide to the most exciting contemporary ideas about literature, politics, economics, history, race, capitalism, gender, technology, and climate change.
Think in Public
Antidemocracy in America
Antidemocracy in America
On Election Day in 2016, it seemed unthinkable to many Americans that Donald Trump could become president of the United States. But the victories of the Obama administration hid from view fundamental problems deeply rooted in American social institutions and history. The election's consequences drastically changed how Americans experience their country, especially for those threatened by the public outburst of bigotry and repression. Amid the del…
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966)
Mary Douglas's masterpiece Purity and Danger holds a troubled place in the social sciences and humanities. Both classic and cast out, the book's analysis cannot be ignored. In fact, Douglas's thesis, "Dirt is matter out of place," can help explain the fate of the very book that made it famous. Purity and Danger presents a probing cultural analysis. Douglas argued that social systems should be understood by what they expel but also that the true p…
The future is family
Future visions energize growing enterprises, states, and families to act. Together, these entwined processes and their conflicts open unpredictable avenues for both profit-making and social transformation. This was a key insight of Aihwa Ong's classic ethnography Spirits of resistance, which was published more than thirty years ago. In Spirits, Ong developed a feminist approach to political economy that begins with this dynamic. Today, anthropolo…
Financialization and the Household
Finance and the household are a pair that has not received sufficient attention. As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders' social creativity fuels borrowing, making them the target of banks and other lender…
The Human Geography of Care
The exponential increase in life expectancy in the twentieth century, coupled with a significant drop in fertility in the twenty-first century, demands rethinking family-based care for older people who require assistance with activities of daily living. We argue that age diversity in the population and a trend toward urbanization represent two emerging resources on which new care models can be built. By distributing care among age-diverse groups …
Legacies, logics, labors of love
We write to note the passing of world-renowned Africanist and economic anthropologist Jane Isabel Guyer, who died in Davis, California, on January 17, 2024, from complications from dementia. Born in Dunoon, Scotland, on New Year's Eve in 1943, she had just turned 80. Jane earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of Rochester in 1972 and went on to teach at Boston University, Harvard, Northwestern, and, finally, Johns Hopkins, from which s…
Sociology (12 works) · Economics (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Finance (7 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Finance (5 works) · Business (4 works)