Professor Kathleen Weston

Why do people so often use bodies and corporeal analogies to think through the implications of financial developments? This project trains an ethnographic gaze on 17th-century scientific debates about blood circulation, spontaneous generation and gestation, to investigate how early modern scientific inquiries into the way bodies work remain deeply embedded in contemporary understandings of prosperity, market operations, economic crisis and new financial products.  In times of crisis, why should a medicalised vocabulary of stagnation, glut, purging and cardiac arrest frame financial issues, with credit described as lifeblood that needs to circulate to restore ailing economies to health?  These are 17th-century circulation and generativity puzzles with 21st-century policy implications, amenable to socio-cultural critique. Research outputs will include a monograph on Body Finance, workshops and a legacy project, building on earlier collaborations in ‘new kinship studies’ to further the second generation of work in this area.