R Aitken
Biographic Data
| ID | 18753 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Aitken |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Aitken |
| SIGNATURE | AITKEN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Alberta |
| ORCID | 0009-0005-6057-238X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 163 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1928 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Climate futures in the time of the unbroken asset
The crisis that now grips the ‘living earth’ establishes an intersection of climate and finance which entails questions of time: what does temporality mean in the context of both climate emergency and the processes of financialisation? In this paper, I intervene in these debates by reflecting on the reconstruction of time as a concrete legal object in the space of international investor-state arbitration. Over the past decade, international arbit…
Extractive separations: A Polanyian note on the international investment treaty regime
This paper examines the relationship between extractive industries and the In-ternational Investment Treaty Regime. This regime, I argue, works to separate extrac-tive investments from the social conditions that make those investments and extractions possible. Examining 3 recent cases— Bear Creek, Von Pezold and Rockhopper, I argue that international investment arbitration invokes novel and deeper separations . More-over, the kinds of separations…
Depletion work: Climate Change and the Mediation of Stranded Assets
The relationship between economy and society increasingly takes financialized form. In this article, I examine two mediations of climate change which attempt to re/settle this financialized relationship: (a) stranded assets, a representation of value lost as the long-term lives of assets are interrupted; and (b) internal proxy pricing for carbon, a mechanism which allows firms to integrate a price for carbon into investment decision-making. I arg…
Numberless Little Risks”: ‘Tropical Exposure’ in Globalizing Actuarial Discourse, 1852–1947
I argue that life insurance and imperial meaning making are deeply implicated in each other. As life insurance expanded internationally in the nineteenth century, and as insurers became advocates of White settlement, they grappled with what actuarial science meant in the context of their orientalist conceptions of colonial populations. In particular, actuaries were concerned with tropical markets and the racialized/exceptionalized differences the…
Mediating and mapping climate risk: Micro-insurance and earth observation
This article examines the increasing use of earth observation (EO) data and digital platforms in micro-insurance schemes designed to address climate risks in the Global South. It argues that EO and digital technologies are not simply neutral tools for managing risk, but are actively shaping how climate risk is understood and governed. Focusing on index-based insurance products, the article explores how EO data is used to construct standardized in…
The Afterlives of Global Capital
Decay and decomposition have long been important to the histories of capitalist development but what are the particular forms that characterize the relationship between “waste” and value in post-2008 financialization? I argue that financialization is characterized by the organized conversion of distress into forms of financial value. To make this argument I lay particular emphasis on the rehabilitation of “toxic” assets through the practices of a…
“Hemisphere Training”: Exporting the Psychological Self at the Inter-American Popular Information Program
This article examines the Inter-American Popular Information Program (IIP), a midcentury attempt to apply a set of psychological techniques in mass communication practices oriented to poor and “illiterate” populations in Central and South America. I argue that this program offers an instructive contrast to conventional accounts of social reconstruction and of the history of the “social” as an analytical category. These conventional accounts often…
‘All data is credit data’: Constituting the unbanked
Global financial and data capitalism has constituted new forms of knowledge, novel inscriptions which make that knowledge tangible and new ways of visualizing sources of value and profit. This paper examines a cluster of new practices designed to make visible – and extract value from – those without formal credit scores in contemporary financial markets. Many ‘financial inclusion’ projects now attempt to score the ‘credit invisible’ by drawing on…
Experience, Emotion, and Eudaimonia: A Consideration of Tourist Experiences and Well-being
Experiential marketing and the quest to create memorable and extraordinary customer experiences have become central to tourism. However, implementing the concept of experiential marketing has been problematic due to a lack of knowledge regarding what makes experiences memorable, as well as inattention to the subjective and personal nature of experiences. This study explores the nature of individual experiences, particularly with regard to persona…
Everyday Debt Relationalities: Situating peer-to-peer lending and the rolling jubilee
In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, there have been important experiments in alternatives to mainstream financial practices. This paper situates two of these experiments – peer-to-peer (p2p) lending and the Rolling Jubilee – alongside each other. Both these experiments, I argue, attempt a kind of repositioning of ‘finance’ and the ‘everyday’ in ways that resist the transformation of debt into abstract or instrumentalized sources of f…
Performing the limits of finance
Recent financial turmoil has put emphasis once again on the very meaning and reach of ‘finance’. In doing so, recent financial crises have also provoked questions about the very ‘ends’ of finance: Where are the borders of finance? Given the expansive reach of financial innovation over the past two decades, are there any serious limits to the kinds of practices that can be converted into financial objects? Does the culture of finance (expansive an…
A 'World Without End: Post-War Reconstruction and Everyday Internationalism in Documentary Film
Although the Documentary Film movement has been the object of an immense amount of scholarly attention, much of it has framed early documentary film in relation to projects of national projection or national cultural development. This article builds on recent calls to move beyond this preoccupation with 'national cinema' by stressing the international basis of early documentary film, especially in the inter-war and early post-war period. The auth…
The Financialization of Micro-Credit
The financial crisis which crested in 2008/2009 sparked much debate regarding the future of global financial governance. Echoing the ways in which that crisis entailed a particular intrusion of 'high finance' into everyday lives, the main contention of this article is that critical analyses of finance would benefit from training attention onto the intersections between global finance and the level of the everyday and the mundane. To explore this …
Postwar World Order, Displaced Persons, and Biopolitical Management
In building on the scholarship that recognizes the complexity of world order, we emphasize that emerging notions of world order were connected to postwar planning efforts that involved liberal conceptions of reconstruction and the management of vulnerable populations, such as displaced persons. We argue that one way in which world order was constituted was through a biopolitical orientation, one that takes ‘life’ and ‘population’ as key objects o…
Financializing security
The logics of ‘finance’ and ‘security’ have been enmeshed within each other in complicated ways since at least the start of the 20th century. As fields deeply alive to the possibilities and dangers associated with risk and uncertainty, finance and security occupy overlapping but uneven fields of operation. This article examines one particular financial mechanism – political prediction markets – in order to trace out the tensions and intersections…
Provincialising embedded liberalism: Film, orientalism and the reconstruction of world order
This article explores conceptions of post-war world order promoted in appeals to ‘filmic internationalism’ – an Anglo-American movement of filmmakers, artists, and cultural bureaucrats who became committed to social-realist documentary films throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Examining this movement, I argue, allows us to reflect on the cultural consititution of embedded liberalsim, a vision of post-war order pursued not only in political-economic b…
Ambiguous incorporations: Microfinance and Global Governmentality
In the spring of 2007 an event dramatically reshaped conversations relating to microfinance. This event was the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Mexico's largest microfinance organization, Compartamos. The IPO, as this article suggests, is indicative or a broader trend through which microfinance is increasingly becoming financialized, increasingly becoming governable as a financial object. This is important at one level because it crystallizes so…
Corporate social responsibility in the European Union: A new trade barrier
This paper contributes to the discussion about Corporate social responsibility (CSR), competitiveness and trade policies, and how trade barriers emerge between countries already committed to CSR and those for whom CSR is still gaining ground. The authors describe the development of CSR within Europe and explain its role in shaping trade relationships. Gaining access to the European market, and obtaining the ‘licence to operate’ in light of streng…
Embedded Liberalism in Counterpoint: Reading Woody Guthrie's Reciprocal Economy
`Culture' and cultural analysis have recently become important to our understanding of world politics and international studies. Cultural analysis has been less central, however, to work in International Political Economy (IPE). This article is an experiment in thinking through the possibilities of one cultural methodology — contrapuntal analysis — and the potential it might have in opening up discussions of cultural analysis in IPE. To explore t…
Notes on the Canadian exception: Security Certificates in Critical Context
This paper attempts to place the Canadian security certificate program in critical context. The program is a mechanism of arbitrary detention targeted to non-citizens the state has certified as ‘threats’ to national security. As a mechanism of arbitrary detention the program fully locates Canadian policies inside of, and not in some manner external to, the worst abuses and ‘exceptional practices’ associated with the ‘global war on terror’. To pla…
Performing Capital: Toward a Cultural Economy of Popular and Global Finance
This books reviews forms of capital 'popular finance' and argues that it is important, as a site at which capital is visible not as a macro-structural reality but as a category itself, which needs to
Cementing Divisions: An assessment of the impact of international interventions and peace-building policies on ethnic identities and divisions
This article analyses the ethnic implications of peace-building policies and institutional design in recent international interventions. International interventions and peace-building efforts emphasize the importance of reconciliation and representative government. However, based on evidence derived primarily from the interventions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Afghanistan and Iraq, it is argued here that policies pursued by international agencies to ac…
Capital at Its Fringes
The Vital Force: Visuality and the National Economy
Although it has often been conceived as a material or already‐existing kind of category, the “economy”, before it can be governed, must first be “made up” and constituted in particular ways. This paper seeks to contribute to recent genealogies of the “economy” by highlighting the role of one particular “cultural” technology–the techniques of visuality–in the making up of the national economy during the interwar and postwar periods. To develop thi…
A direct personal stake’: Cultural economy, mass investment and the New York stock exchange
Although it is often conceived as a key aspect of neo-liberal globalization, appeals to ‘mass investment’ have actually occupied much longer and more complex historical contexts than are often acknowledged. This paper draws upon archival material of the advertising, educational and ‘cultural’ campaigns developed by the New York Stock Exchange in the immediate postwar period in an attempt to recover one fragment of these earlier lines of force occ…
Feminisms, Islamophobia and Identities
There has been a tendency of late to conflate all Muslims as belonging to a single nation and aspiring to a single political aim. This effect has been achieved by some authors so as to accommodate Islamophobia, but by others to generate a sense of inclusive unity that encloses all Muslims. We contend that in the post 9/11 climate of Islamophobia women wearing the scarf, the mohajabehs, are making a political choice. They are publicly branding the…
The Financialization of Micro-Credit
The financial crisis which crested in 2008/2009 sparked much debate regarding the future of global financial governance. Echoing the ways in which that crisis entailed a particular intrusion of 'high finance' into everyday lives, the main contention of this article is that critical analyses of finance would benefit from training attention onto the intersections between global finance and the level of the everyday and the mundane. To explore this …
A direct personal stake’: Cultural economy, mass investment and the New York stock exchange
Although it is often conceived as a key aspect of neo-liberal globalization, appeals to ‘mass investment’ have actually occupied much longer and more complex historical contexts than are often acknowledged. This paper draws upon archival material of the advertising, educational and ‘cultural’ campaigns developed by the New York Stock Exchange in the immediate postwar period in an attempt to recover one fragment of these earlier lines of force occ…
The democratic method of obtaining capital-culture, governmentality and ethics of mass investment
The past thirty years have witnessed a range of complex changes in global and national political–economic landscapes. One of the most dramatic aspects of these changes is the “globalization” of finance capital. “Finance” is often said to be at the center of a new and globalizing set of financial spaces in which “everyday” actors are increasingly asked to participate. However, these developments are often depicted in the critical literature in epo…
Financializing security
The logics of ‘finance’ and ‘security’ have been enmeshed within each other in complicated ways since at least the start of the 20th century. As fields deeply alive to the possibilities and dangers associated with risk and uncertainty, finance and security occupy overlapping but uneven fields of operation. This article examines one particular financial mechanism – political prediction markets – in order to trace out the tensions and intersections…
Capital at Its Fringes
Mediating and mapping climate risk: Micro-insurance and earth observation
This article examines the increasing use of earth observation (EO) data and digital platforms in micro-insurance schemes designed to address climate risks in the Global South. It argues that EO and digital technologies are not simply neutral tools for managing risk, but are actively shaping how climate risk is understood and governed. Focusing on index-based insurance products, the article explores how EO data is used to construct standardized in…
Corporate social responsibility in the European Union: A new trade barrier
This paper contributes to the discussion about Corporate social responsibility (CSR), competitiveness and trade policies, and how trade barriers emerge between countries already committed to CSR and those for whom CSR is still gaining ground. The authors describe the development of CSR within Europe and explain its role in shaping trade relationships. Gaining access to the European market, and obtaining the ‘licence to operate’ in light of streng…
Cementing Divisions: An assessment of the impact of international interventions and peace-building policies on ethnic identities and divisions
This article analyses the ethnic implications of peace-building policies and institutional design in recent international interventions. International interventions and peace-building efforts emphasize the importance of reconciliation and representative government. However, based on evidence derived primarily from the interventions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Afghanistan and Iraq, it is argued here that policies pursued by international agencies to ac…
Ambiguous incorporations: Microfinance and Global Governmentality
In the spring of 2007 an event dramatically reshaped conversations relating to microfinance. This event was the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Mexico's largest microfinance organization, Compartamos. The IPO, as this article suggests, is indicative or a broader trend through which microfinance is increasingly becoming financialized, increasingly becoming governable as a financial object. This is important at one level because it crystallizes so…
Notes on the Canadian exception: Security Certificates in Critical Context
This paper attempts to place the Canadian security certificate program in critical context. The program is a mechanism of arbitrary detention targeted to non-citizens the state has certified as ‘threats’ to national security. As a mechanism of arbitrary detention the program fully locates Canadian policies inside of, and not in some manner external to, the worst abuses and ‘exceptional practices’ associated with the ‘global war on terror’. To pla…
Depletion work: Climate Change and the Mediation of Stranded Assets
The relationship between economy and society increasingly takes financialized form. In this article, I examine two mediations of climate change which attempt to re/settle this financialized relationship: (a) stranded assets, a representation of value lost as the long-term lives of assets are interrupted; and (b) internal proxy pricing for carbon, a mechanism which allows firms to integrate a price for carbon into investment decision-making. I arg…
The Afterlives of Global Capital
Decay and decomposition have long been important to the histories of capitalist development but what are the particular forms that characterize the relationship between “waste” and value in post-2008 financialization? I argue that financialization is characterized by the organized conversion of distress into forms of financial value. To make this argument I lay particular emphasis on the rehabilitation of “toxic” assets through the practices of a…
A 'World Without End: Post-War Reconstruction and Everyday Internationalism in Documentary Film
Although the Documentary Film movement has been the object of an immense amount of scholarly attention, much of it has framed early documentary film in relation to projects of national projection or national cultural development. This article builds on recent calls to move beyond this preoccupation with 'national cinema' by stressing the international basis of early documentary film, especially in the inter-war and early post-war period. The auth…
Provincialising embedded liberalism: Film, orientalism and the reconstruction of world order
This article explores conceptions of post-war world order promoted in appeals to ‘filmic internationalism’ – an Anglo-American movement of filmmakers, artists, and cultural bureaucrats who became committed to social-realist documentary films throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Examining this movement, I argue, allows us to reflect on the cultural consititution of embedded liberalsim, a vision of post-war order pursued not only in political-economic b…
The Vital Force: Visuality and the National Economy
Although it has often been conceived as a material or already‐existing kind of category, the “economy”, before it can be governed, must first be “made up” and constituted in particular ways. This paper seeks to contribute to recent genealogies of the “economy” by highlighting the role of one particular “cultural” technology–the techniques of visuality–in the making up of the national economy during the interwar and postwar periods. To develop thi…
Gifts to the Dead and the Living: Forms of Exchange in San Miguel Tzinacapan, Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico
Climate futures in the time of the unbroken asset
The crisis that now grips the ‘living earth’ establishes an intersection of climate and finance which entails questions of time: what does temporality mean in the context of both climate emergency and the processes of financialisation? In this paper, I intervene in these debates by reflecting on the reconstruction of time as a concrete legal object in the space of international investor-state arbitration. Over the past decade, international arbit…
DIE STRASSE VON Gibraltar. Von Dr Otto Jessen mit einem Beitrag von Dr A. Schulten, mit 23 textbildern, 16 tafeln und 2 karten. Berlin: Deitrich Reimer. 1927. pp. 294. 18 marks
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
LES IBÉRO-MastiÈNES EN Gaule ET Tartessos EN Aquitaine. Par L. Guignard (Gaulois). Autun: Guignard-Nourry. 1926. pp. 171, with 3 maps
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Gifts to the Dead and the Living: Forms of Exchange in San Miguel Tzinacapan, Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico
Jumping Borders with Pleasure: Chicano Cultural Resistance to Neo-liberalism
It has become a truism that we live in an age of global capitalism where international capital flows and the mass media and the movement of people have blurred national borders and challenged established notions of national, group and individual identity. As the forces of the market lure people, money and products across sovereign boundaries, the immutable forces of globalization meld us all into one, creating a borderless world
Mexico in Perspective
The democratic method of obtaining capital-culture, governmentality and ethics of mass investment
The past thirty years have witnessed a range of complex changes in global and national political–economic landscapes. One of the most dramatic aspects of these changes is the “globalization” of finance capital. “Finance” is often said to be at the center of a new and globalizing set of financial spaces in which “everyday” actors are increasingly asked to participate. However, these developments are often depicted in the critical literature in epo…
A direct personal stake’: Cultural economy, mass investment and the New York stock exchange
Although it is often conceived as a key aspect of neo-liberal globalization, appeals to ‘mass investment’ have actually occupied much longer and more complex historical contexts than are often acknowledged. This paper draws upon archival material of the advertising, educational and ‘cultural’ campaigns developed by the New York Stock Exchange in the immediate postwar period in an attempt to recover one fragment of these earlier lines of force occ…
Revue des revues
Distribution lectronique Cairn.info pour Presses de Sciences Po. Distribution lectronique Cairn.info pour Presses de Sciences Po. La reproduction ou reprsentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorise que dans les limites des conditions gnrales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas chant, des conditions gnrales de la licence souscrite par votre tablissement. Toute autre reproduction ou reprsentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque …
Feminisms, Islamophobia and Identities
There has been a tendency of late to conflate all Muslims as belonging to a single nation and aspiring to a single political aim. This effect has been achieved by some authors so as to accommodate Islamophobia, but by others to generate a sense of inclusive unity that encloses all Muslims. We contend that in the post 9/11 climate of Islamophobia women wearing the scarf, the mohajabehs, are making a political choice. They are publicly branding the…
Capital at Its Fringes
The Vital Force: Visuality and the National Economy
Although it has often been conceived as a material or already‐existing kind of category, the “economy”, before it can be governed, must first be “made up” and constituted in particular ways. This paper seeks to contribute to recent genealogies of the “economy” by highlighting the role of one particular “cultural” technology–the techniques of visuality–in the making up of the national economy during the interwar and postwar periods. To develop thi…
Performing Capital: Toward a Cultural Economy of Popular and Global Finance
This books reviews forms of capital 'popular finance' and argues that it is important, as a site at which capital is visible not as a macro-structural reality but as a category itself, which needs to
Cementing Divisions: An assessment of the impact of international interventions and peace-building policies on ethnic identities and divisions
This article analyses the ethnic implications of peace-building policies and institutional design in recent international interventions. International interventions and peace-building efforts emphasize the importance of reconciliation and representative government. However, based on evidence derived primarily from the interventions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Afghanistan and Iraq, it is argued here that policies pursued by international agencies to ac…
Embedded Liberalism in Counterpoint: Reading Woody Guthrie's Reciprocal Economy
`Culture' and cultural analysis have recently become important to our understanding of world politics and international studies. Cultural analysis has been less central, however, to work in International Political Economy (IPE). This article is an experiment in thinking through the possibilities of one cultural methodology — contrapuntal analysis — and the potential it might have in opening up discussions of cultural analysis in IPE. To explore t…
Notes on the Canadian exception: Security Certificates in Critical Context
This paper attempts to place the Canadian security certificate program in critical context. The program is a mechanism of arbitrary detention targeted to non-citizens the state has certified as ‘threats’ to national security. As a mechanism of arbitrary detention the program fully locates Canadian policies inside of, and not in some manner external to, the worst abuses and ‘exceptional practices’ associated with the ‘global war on terror’. To pla…
Corporate social responsibility in the European Union: A new trade barrier
This paper contributes to the discussion about Corporate social responsibility (CSR), competitiveness and trade policies, and how trade barriers emerge between countries already committed to CSR and those for whom CSR is still gaining ground. The authors describe the development of CSR within Europe and explain its role in shaping trade relationships. Gaining access to the European market, and obtaining the ‘licence to operate’ in light of streng…
Ambiguous incorporations: Microfinance and Global Governmentality
In the spring of 2007 an event dramatically reshaped conversations relating to microfinance. This event was the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Mexico's largest microfinance organization, Compartamos. The IPO, as this article suggests, is indicative or a broader trend through which microfinance is increasingly becoming financialized, increasingly becoming governable as a financial object. This is important at one level because it crystallizes so…
Financializing security
The logics of ‘finance’ and ‘security’ have been enmeshed within each other in complicated ways since at least the start of the 20th century. As fields deeply alive to the possibilities and dangers associated with risk and uncertainty, finance and security occupy overlapping but uneven fields of operation. This article examines one particular financial mechanism – political prediction markets – in order to trace out the tensions and intersections…
Provincialising embedded liberalism: Film, orientalism and the reconstruction of world order
This article explores conceptions of post-war world order promoted in appeals to ‘filmic internationalism’ – an Anglo-American movement of filmmakers, artists, and cultural bureaucrats who became committed to social-realist documentary films throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Examining this movement, I argue, allows us to reflect on the cultural consititution of embedded liberalsim, a vision of post-war order pursued not only in political-economic b…
Postwar World Order, Displaced Persons, and Biopolitical Management
In building on the scholarship that recognizes the complexity of world order, we emphasize that emerging notions of world order were connected to postwar planning efforts that involved liberal conceptions of reconstruction and the management of vulnerable populations, such as displaced persons. We argue that one way in which world order was constituted was through a biopolitical orientation, one that takes ‘life’ and ‘population’ as key objects o…
A 'World Without End: Post-War Reconstruction and Everyday Internationalism in Documentary Film
Although the Documentary Film movement has been the object of an immense amount of scholarly attention, much of it has framed early documentary film in relation to projects of national projection or national cultural development. This article builds on recent calls to move beyond this preoccupation with 'national cinema' by stressing the international basis of early documentary film, especially in the inter-war and early post-war period. The auth…
The Financialization of Micro-Credit
The financial crisis which crested in 2008/2009 sparked much debate regarding the future of global financial governance. Echoing the ways in which that crisis entailed a particular intrusion of 'high finance' into everyday lives, the main contention of this article is that critical analyses of finance would benefit from training attention onto the intersections between global finance and the level of the everyday and the mundane. To explore this …
Performing the limits of finance
Recent financial turmoil has put emphasis once again on the very meaning and reach of ‘finance’. In doing so, recent financial crises have also provoked questions about the very ‘ends’ of finance: Where are the borders of finance? Given the expansive reach of financial innovation over the past two decades, are there any serious limits to the kinds of practices that can be converted into financial objects? Does the culture of finance (expansive an…
Everyday Debt Relationalities: Situating peer-to-peer lending and the rolling jubilee
In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, there have been important experiments in alternatives to mainstream financial practices. This paper situates two of these experiments – peer-to-peer (p2p) lending and the Rolling Jubilee – alongside each other. Both these experiments, I argue, attempt a kind of repositioning of ‘finance’ and the ‘everyday’ in ways that resist the transformation of debt into abstract or instrumentalized sources of f…
‘All data is credit data’: Constituting the unbanked
Global financial and data capitalism has constituted new forms of knowledge, novel inscriptions which make that knowledge tangible and new ways of visualizing sources of value and profit. This paper examines a cluster of new practices designed to make visible – and extract value from – those without formal credit scores in contemporary financial markets. Many ‘financial inclusion’ projects now attempt to score the ‘credit invisible’ by drawing on…
Political science (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Economics (18 works) · Politics (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (12 works) · Political economy (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Business (9 works)