ABSTRACT
Drawing on the history of heterodox social scientific collaboration, from the early 2000s, economic geographers have contributed to the development of an interdisciplinary body of work commonly termed a ‘cultural economy approach’ to money and finance. This chapter explores how the potential of such approaches could be maximized by responding to two critiques. The first critique focuses on the extent to which the focus on micro scale processes and practices allows cultural economy to reflect critically on the wider politics and power relations at work in global finance. Second, the cultural economy literature has its own geographically specific genealogy. The chapter explains the parameters of approaches to money and finance before, exploring some of cultural economy’s silences and blind spots. Within the broad post-structuralist approach, several key areas of focus within such approaches to finance can be identified. A key concept that has been widely used, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly, within the economy approach is that of performativity.
