Caroline Humphrey to give a paper

We have recently learned that Caroline Humphrey, one of project’s Team Members (TM),  has agreed to give a paper in connection with our meeting in Sussex, on the 26^th November.  Last summer Caroline conducted fieldwork in Vladivostok focusing on practices and ethos of entrepreneurship in Russian construction business and we will be the first to hear her talk on the topic, preliminary called: ‘Real Estate Speculation: the Clash of Forms at a Global Frontier of Capitalism.’

New Construction

Here is an abstract of the talk:
This paper discusses real estate speculation in housing as it takes place at a frontier of capitalism, the Russian city of Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan.  It is argued that real estate speculation in general involves a set of relations that take a 'form' which is recognisable across time and in different geographical regions.  In Russia, internal contradictions within this form and entanglements with the dominant form of political-business relations have resulted in the emergence of new, network-like social entities consisting of failed speculators.  The paper considers the salience of influential models of the entrepreneur and theories of the new capitalism and concludes that they fail to account for the fate of capitalism in its wilder reaches. Speculators in Russia switch between a number of subjectivities, including a specifically Russian providential fatalism.