2nd FinGeo Summer School
21 – 24 June, 2021
Online
The four-day FinGeo Summer School is intended for early career scholars, e.g. advanced PhD students, Postdocs and early career faculty members. The Summer School is designed to prepare researchers for academic advancement and to build a community of scholars researching the intricate relations between finance and space. The Summer School hosts keynote sessions by pre-eminent scholars, sessions on theory and methodology, career development sessions and feedback on individual research activities. And some mingling.
The organizers are the people that run the Global Network on Financial Geography (fingeo.net), the leading group for scholars with an interest in financial geography, and some friends. Chief Organizer is Janelle Knox-Hayes (MIT, DUSP), co-organizers are David Bassens (Vrije Universiteit Brussels), Theodor Cojoianu (University College Dublin), Michael Grote (Frankfurt School of Finance & Management), Dariusz Wójcik (Oxford University), Siqi Zheng (MIT, CRE), and Matthew Zook (University of Kentucky).
The Summer School is further directed by an advisory board consisting of Manuel Aalbers (KU Leuven), Fabio Contel (University of São Paulo), Michael Ewers (Qatar University), Sabine Dörry (Luxembourg), Zoltan Gál (University of Pécs), Karen Lai (Durham), Stefan Ouma (University Bayreuth), Fenghua Pan (Beijing Normal University), Thomas Sigler (University of Queensland) and Martin Sokol (Trinity College Dublin), Yllka Hysaj (University of Bristol), Fernando Toro (University College London).
We are very grateful for our sponsors, the Regional Studies Association (RSA) and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The RSA contributes the online platform for all activities, marketing, as well as advice and wisdom. DUSP contributes funding and superb research assistants.
Background and ambition: The FinGeo Summer School broadly addresses scholars with an interest in the geography of finance. While finance is in theory fungible, able to flow across geographies with little restriction, in practice it becomes rooted in places. Indeed, cities can be seen as key geographical nodes that shape, and are shaped by, finance. Some emphasis will be put on the linkages between financial geography, urbanism and economic processes in the context of the current global challenges. The summer school will cover, among others, themes of finance and sustainability, equity and inclusion, and financial mechanisms of sustainable real estate.
Special sessions are devoted to the pandemic, which is also an unprecedented event from a financial perspective. Lost incomes through lockdowns and recessions are the largest known in peaceful times. The financial impacts of the pandemic are strikingly uneven within countries and across them. Any recovery nations, regions and cities embark on in 2021 and beyond requires funding. At the same time, public debt reaches historical peaks, raising issues about financial stability. Innovations and changes in domestic and international financial institutions and systems might become necessary.
We will explore (and probably push) the boundaries of the current debates and discuss methods – ranging from scraping of social media data to natural language processing and close dialogue – with leading scholars to tackle these problems.
Target Group and Application Procedure: The target audience consists of Early Career Academics, i.e. advanced Graduate/PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and early career faculty. While the focus of the Summer School is on financial geography, we actively seek to attract participants from cognate fields in anthropology, business, economics, history, political science, sociology, etc.
Participation is by application only. The application form needs to be submitted online by May 15, 2021.
During the selection procedure, the organizers will pay attention to the individual academic qualities and motivation of the applicant. We will also seek to compose a well-balanced and diverse group in terms of gender, geographical background, and disciplinary training. We aim to bring together a workable group of Early Career academics.
In order to foster continued and in-depth discussion in the group the selected candidates need to commit to attend all of the summer school sessions from June 21- June 24th. We acknowledge that this might be difficult for participants from various time zones.
Attendance is free of charge.
Please contact us for any further questions at jankh@mit.edu.
Format: The Summer School will offer a 4-day program, organized across four 1-hour sessions with 1 additional hour of optional social time before and after sessions. The program will be organized through four types of sessions:
1) Keynote Lectures and Reading Seminars
Keynote Lectures will serve as the backbone of the Summer School. The keynote lectures offer different perspectives on financial geography that warrant further reading and debate in a number of background readings which are prepared by the participants based on the literature provided by the organizing committee.
2) Methods Master classes
Methods Master Classes are situated around specific sets of methodologies to “do financial geography”. Potential themes include methodologies to map cross-border capital flows, methodologies for elite research, methodologies to study social movements, methodologies to study financialization processes, etc.
3) Peer review sessions
The Summer School also offers Peer Review Sessions to present and discuss their own research, and we seek to challenge them to make empirical, conceptual, and theoretical linkages to the material offered throughout the program.
4) Career Development
The Summer School offers a platform for Early Careers to engage with senior scholars and seek mentoring as it comes to publication strategies, searching for funding opportunities, establishing research collaborations, working across disciplinary boundaries, etc. Dedicated sessions will be organized to that end.
Confirmed speakers include:
- Lucia Alessi, Senior Economist, Joint Research Centre of the EU Commission
- David Bassens, Assistant Professor of Economic Geography, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
- Theodor Cojoianu, Assistant Professor in Finance, Queens University Belfast
- Michael Grote, Professor of Corporate Finance, Frankfurt School of Finance and Management
- Matthew Kahn, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Business, John Hopkins University
- Ayesha Khanna, CEO and Cofounder of ADDO AI, Singapore
- Janelle Knox-Hayes, Associate Professor of Economic Geography and Planning, MIT
- Raquel Rolnik, Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of São Palo, Brazil
- Dariusz Wójcik, Professor of Economic Geography, University of Oxford
- Siqi Zheng, Samuel Tak Lee Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability, MIT
- Matthew Zook, Professor of Information and Economic Geography, University of Kentucky
The program is currently being finalized and will be posted here in due time.
We are looking forward to welcoming you to the 2nd FinGeo Summer School!
Best,
The organizing team
