Event:2014/10/14 Max Haiven: Debt and the Cultural Imagination

Max Haiven: Debt and the Cultural Imagination Ballroom 7-9:30

Drawing upon work by both artists and social movements, Max Haiven will examine how debt and today’s debt-driven capitalism shape creativity and inhibit the true potential of creative communities. How has debt-driven capitalism consumed the idea of creativity for its own purposes, spinning dangerous myths of “creative capitalism,” the “creative class,” “creative destruction” and “creative cities”? How can we use the very debt that inhibits us as a new form of solidarity? How are artists and others confronting and reimagining debt? What might life beyond debt look like and feel like? How can we get there from here?

Moderated by artist Cassie Thornton

Max Haiven is a writer, teacher and organizer, and an Assistant Professor in the Division of Art History and Critical Studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He holds a PhD in English and Cultural Studies from McMaster University and an MA in Globalization Studies from the same. He spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Art and Public Policy at New York University. Based now in Halifax, Canada, Haiven has been involved in student, peace, trade union, anti-racist and Indigenous solidarity struggles. Primarily, Haiven’s scholarly research has focused on the financialization of society and culture over the past forty years. He has published in journals including Social Text, Cultural Studies, Cultural Politics, Mediations, The Radical History Review and Cultural Logic. His first scholarly monograph Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in August of 2014. He is currently is co-director (along with Alex Khasnabish) of the Radical Imagination Project a ethnographic solidarity research initiative dedicated to understanding and enlivening radicalism and activism in Halifax. Their writing about the project has appeared in journals including Affinities, Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, and Interface and their book The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity was published by Zed Books in July of 2014. Haiven’s sole-authored academic work on the radical imagination has appeared in journals including Cultural Critique and The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies. He also frequently writes for non-academic venues, including Truth-Out, Dissident Voice, Art Threat, ROAR Magazine, Canadian Dimension and Znet. His book Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons was published by Zed Books in March 2014.