Megan Moore awarded IDF at MCPS

Megan Moore is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota
photo of Megan Moore

Megan Moore has been awarded an Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowship (IDF) with the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science for the 2020-2021 academic year.

Megan is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation research uses the story of a dying shopping mall in the suburban American Southeast to explore the fragmenting nature of real estate finance and its relationship to contemporary capitalist market technologies. Philosophically, her work turns to debates around the question of technical individuation which de-prioritize the role of individual human knowledge within machinic systems of capitalist reproduction. Drawing on both indigenous and continental scholars critiquing Cartesian understandings of capitalism, she approaches the role of property in settler colonial democracies through an ontological framework. It is within this framework that she explores real estate derivatives markets as a divinatory medium whose aim is to create the conditions of absolute contingency. While at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, Megan will spend her IDF year studying the role of randomness in physics as it relates to how Brownian Motion is used in financial derivatives. This work will build on a larger critique of settler colonial governance as reliant upon the Federal Reserve as the sovereign who ensures that the future is divined to secure the market’s continuation at all costs, with special attention to how this has led to conditions similar to state capitalism during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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