Surplus: A Symposium on Wealth, Waste and Excess
All civilizations have been built on surplus – an economic, political or cultural capital over and above a minimum which a given society requires to survive. But how is such surplus defined and measured? How is it produced and distributed? What indeed is the relationship between wealth and waste, excess and poverty, scarcity and conflict?
In times of austerity it is especially important to think about surplus.
All civilizations have been built on surplus – an economic, political or cultural capital over and above a minimum which a given society requires to survive. But how is such surplus defined and measured? How is it produced and distributed? What indeed is the relationship between wealth and waste, excess and poverty, scarcity and conflict?
These and other related questions were addressed at three interconnected roundtables dealing with scarcity, conflict, demography, precarity, rubbish, democracy and protest. The format enabled genuinely cross-disciplinary conversations on some of the most pressing social phenomena of our day, ranging from mass unemployment (or ‘redundancy’) to the ‘irrational exuberance’ of financial markets; from ‘imperial overstretch’ of American foreign policy to the ‘social explosion’ among marginalised urban populations across the world.
Panelists included: Eric Swyngedouw, James Meadway, Simon Choat, John Scanlan, Alberto Toscano, Lisa McKenzie, Danny Dorling, Anders Dahlbeck, Joel McKim, Anna Stavrianakis, Sue Branford, Emma M Jones and Esther Leslie.
You can listen to podcasts of these discussions here.