Market Futures—Future Markets
Joint conference of the Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop (IMSW) and the Journal of Cultural Economy
Welcome! It was our great pleasure to host the 7th Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop (#IMSW2023). In 2023, IMSW came to the University of Edinburgh and was hosted for the first time in collaboration with the Journal of Cultural Economy.
IMSW was founded in 2010 and is now the primary gathering place for academics interested in the social studies of markets from fields as diverse as science and technology studies, sociology, organisation studies, marketing, information systems, political science, history, anthropology, and geography. Previous events have been hosted in Sweden, Dublin, Ireland, France, Scotland, and Denmark.
The Journal of Cultural Economy (JCE) was established in 2008 as an outlet for research exploring the role material cultural practices play in organising economies, markets, and societies, and is now an essential platform for inter, cross, and transdisciplinary studies of all things economic. The constituencies of IMSW and the JCE have always naturally overlapped, and we are delighted to join forces in Edinburgh in 2023.
Our theme in 2023 was Future Markets—Market Futures. The concept of 'futures' is often mobilised in response to the twenty-first century's urgent, stubborn, or 'wicked' problems: global public health, climate emergency, geopolitical instability, rising wealth inequalities, technopopulism among many. In the academy 'futures' indexes a range of critical, empirical, methodological, and institutional responses to these problems. We drew on this architecture of futures thinking to reflect on the role the future plays in planning. projecting, modelling, imagining, designing, making, maintaining, promising, casting, and forecasting markets.