The Warwick Workshop on the Subprime Crisis 

On September 18^th/19^th 2008 the Department of Political Science and International Studies hosted a two-day Workshop on the economics, politics and ethics of response to the subprime crisis.  The event was scheduled for a week in which the credit crunch which followed the initial outbreak of the subprime crisis came back to disrupt world markets with renewed vigour.  It was therefore extremely timely from a political perspective, and the proceedings reflect the sense of imminent breakdown which at that time dominated both market sentiment and media reporting of that sentiment.  The individual papers were presented in front of an audience which was never less than sixty for any of the sessions and was sometimes closer to the hundred mark.  Participants from nearly thirty different academic institutions were present at some stage of the event and contributed fully as the discussion built up sequentially from one session to the next. 

All of the academic papers presented at the Workshop were recorded as podcasts and are available to download for free.  Simply click on this link to go to the relevant page, where you will find a series of inspiring intellectual contributions.  Taken together, they revealed many mechanisms through which the credit crunch has become a social phenomenon.  The socialisation of bank losses through capitalising extravagant bailout packages using public money is one obvious example.  But so too is the development of new political forms of agent subjectivity as the credit crunch has become increasingly entrenched in the popular psyche.  People are very definitely feeling the pinch in ways which subsequently rebound politically.  This has been reflected in new concerns being voiced through the political system and the enactment of numerous new political alignments of self and other that this has entailed.  The proceedings of the workshop will be kept together and eventually published as a special issue of New Political Economy and a special section of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations.  In the meantime, the podcasts give an important flavour of the written work which will follow.

Below you will find a number of pictures which were taken at the Workshop of one or other of the presenters in full flow.  Clicking on the thumbnail pictures enlarges them.  The paper presenters, in the order in which they appeared at the event, were: Will Hutton, Nicolas Véron, Timothy Sinclair, Paul Langley, Grahame Thompson, Andrew Leyshon, Johnna Montgomerie, Matthew Watson, Colin Crouch, Alan Finlayson, Colin Hay, Julie Froud and Ewald Engelen, Leonard Seabrooke, Anastasia Nesvetailova, Andrew Gamble, Brigitte Young and Robert Wade.  A full timetable of the event, including all paper abstracts, remains available on the Workshop blog.

The Workshop benefited from the support of a number of sponsors in addition to the Department.  Financial and/or personal assistance was provided by the Economic and Social Research Council, Research Councils UK, the Political Economy Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association and, from the University of Warwick, the GARNET Network of Excellence and the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation.

Ben Rosamond, Will Hutton and Nicolas Veron at the opening roundtable.

Paul Langley, Grahame Thompson and Timothy Sinclair in Session 1; Johnna Montgomerie, Andrew Leyshon and Matthew Watson in Session 2; Alan Finlayson and Colin Hay in Session 3 (Colin Crouch unfortunately not shown).

Ewald Engelen, Julie Froud, Anastasia Nesvetailova and Leonard Seabrooke in Session 4; Robert Wade, Brigitte Young and Andrew Gamble at the closing roundtable.