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This paper looks at cognition from the perspective of Yaśovijaya-sūri’s Jaina-tarka-bhāṣā. Considering the nature of sensory cognition (mati-jñāna), represented by the four stages (sensation, speculation, perceptual judgement, retention) and of verbal cognition (śruta-jñāna), it reflects on the form and rendering of the word as a raw, physical sound or the meaningful particle of language linked to an infinite number of other such particles, deeply rooted in reliance on linguistic convention. The author considers here what properties such cognition recognises and relates to them especially in light of the theory of viewpoints, providing a contribution to reflections on its meaning. The other questions posed in the article are: which prerequisites are met by people between whom this kind of communication takes place and what role do the scriptures play? Yaśovijaya-sūri’s thought is set in the broader context (Siddhasena Divākara, Jinabhadra Gaṇi, Vādideva-sūri, Dharmabhūṣana, Vinayavijaya Gaṇi), with emphasis of his sources of inspiration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use a sample of Chinese firms to examine the impact of local gambling preference on corporate financialization. Our findings suggest that when a firm is located in a region with stronger gambling preference, it commits more corporate financialization. Specifically, strong opportunism and high risk-taking ability are the main mechanisms. In addition, we provide evidence based on gambling psychology that 'house money effect' and 'break-even effect' strengthen the positive relationship between gambling preference and entity corporate financialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the turn of the millennium, the practice of sport has changed significantly as more and more people leave club sports in favor of self-organized sports. A common feature of this change is the need of other spatial conditions than traditional sport facilities. Simultaneously, self-organized sports have largely been overlooked within policy and programs seeking to improve today's sport facilities. The aim of this narrative review is therefore to provide a comprehensive understanding of self-organized sports and their social-spatial needs. From the databases SCOPUS, SportDiscus and ProQuest Social Sciences 66 articles are linked together for reinterpretation and development of three theoretical discussions that are accompanied by Deleuze's philosophy of immanence: The flatness, motion, and the responsivity of self-organized sports. Taking these theoretical aspects into account, it is concluded that self-organized sports need not fully defined places open for unpredictable encounters and that enable speculations of what can be created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on fieldwork in Facebook support groups, in this article I explore how people, now patients, learnt to live with Barrett’s esophagus, a risk state or “precancer” for a type of esophageal cancer. This diagnosis brought the possibility of both facing and averting cancerous futures into the present. Far from passive recipients, members worked to foreground speculations of “wanted futures” in which prompt surveillance successfully prevented cancer deaths, transforming cancer risk into an opportunity for hope. Speculation here was an ambivalent and active process, involving not only the “observation of potentiality,” but the opening up and foreclosing of both desirable and undesirable potentialities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of birth trauma places a psychophysical knot at the center of the constitution of the psyche tied to maternal space. What does it mean that the maternal is seen as a site of trauma and regressive desire? How do women experience being this place? While Freud's neglect of the importance of the mother and hyper-emphasis on the father has been visited and re-visited, from the angle of birth trauma, an idea he fought against fearsomely, we begin to witness something important concerning his efforts to move away from this battleground. Not to erase the mother, but to leave something Real there intact. Revisiting three wild speculations on the psychoanalytic meaning of birth, I ask about this maternal knot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We trace the rumour that two undeveloped regions were to be administratively merged into Beijing, which is the capital of China. Applying a difference-in-difference approach, we find that housing listing prices in the two undeveloped regions declined by 25.1% after local governments clarified the rumour. Our results are robust after considering possible confounders such as contemporary housing market policies, business cycles and migrations. The price reduction caused by the rumour collapse averages to 347–396 thousand yuan, a comparable number to the value of 'Hukou' in Beijing. Finally, we show that herding and speculation accelerate the price bust after the rumour collapses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an "inter(con)textual reading" (Maraj), this essay explores the resonances and generative incongruences between two prominent metaphors that reflect the thought/feeling/praxis of two of the modern era's most significant revolutions – "the common wind" from the Haitian revolution and the "wind from below" from the Zapatista revolution. My goal is to think within/across/beyond these revolutions via the methods, epistemologies, and imaginaries that flow within these shared metaphors – in the common wind from below – and speculate on how the seeds and meanings carried therein might take root and grow into something beyond what the disciplines and world currently offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an abiding scepticism in normative theory that individual responsibility for global injustice lies outside commonsense moral thought because it is not grounded in an intuitive conception of human agency. Despite the grim realities of injustice in an interconnected world, this scepticism holds that human beings cannot properly internalise a nonrestrictive view of responsibility because it cuts against their experience of agency in the world. Against this view, this article argues that individual responsibility for the realisation of global justice is supported by a pervasive, and socio-politically influenced, feature of the phenomenology of agency: moral imagination. Moral imagination connects actions which are within the domain of an ordinary life to larger projects of social and political change. Since there is no compelling reason for the scope of those projects to be restricted, there is an accessible understanding and experience of the phenomenology of agency which grounds individual global responsibility in the real world. I call this a dynamic phenomenology of agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zombie startups – which neither grow nor die, but persistently breakeven and inexplicably refuse to fold – are a staple presence in startup sectors globally. While dominant business discourses dismiss them as aberrantly misguided ventures, I draw on anthropological understandings of the labour of time to show how zombies are integral to the startup sector’s temporal logics. Startup sectors run on the interplay between what scholars have termed ‘the time of investment’ and ‘the time of speculation.’ Following a startup in Singapore through five years of unprofitable operation, my ethnography shows how zombies are produced by and, in turn, contribute to maintaining these temporalities. By connecting the value that successful startups create to the unpaid labour that un-succeeding startups do to maintain the sector’s timescape, the article demonstrates how anthropology’s attentiveness to time can surface new forms of relationality that are emerging with this globally expanding form of entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes how urban development and property management strategies shape and accelerate new-build speculation (i.e., speculation mechanisms attached to the development of newly built real estate projects) in Phnom Penh (the capital of Cambodia), a city experiencing a growing financialization of its real estate markets. By discussing dominant conceptions of property speculation within critical research in geography and urban studies, the article shows that speculation has primarily been seen as a fictitious and unproductive form of capital accumulation rather than as an effective mechanism of urban production. Analyzing the development of mixed-use, large-scale, and condominium projects, the article argues that not only does property speculation participate in shaping real estate development but also that the production and management of real estate projects "engineer" property speculation and the spatialization logics of real estate financialization. Four main mechanisms of new-build speculation are identified: the design of speculative urbanity, the refining of the liquidity of real estate assets, the spatialization of speculation, and the production of territorial investment platforms. Ultimately, the article discusses how the intensification of the construction of large-scale, mixed-use, and condominium projects in Global South cities is supporting a speculative turn of urban development in so-called frontier markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIn Europe, increased precarity characterises the lives of many people, making crisis-talk especially appealing as a framing mechanism to naturalise anti-migration policies within the EU. In 2020–2021, the EU and the Spanish government proclaimed a migration crisis and immobilised in dehumanising conditions a few thousand African migrants who had just arrived in the Canary Islands. This action was facilitated by narratives of migrant invasion and the view of Europe as a space of formality. This article asks what kinds of speculation the proclamation of a migration crises creates and who is doing the speculating. We stress that the term ‘speculation’ is based strongly on temporalities involving the creation of value by future predictions in uncertain circumstances. Using the Canary Islands as an example, we use this future-oriented understanding of speculation to emphasise that different actors, and not only financial ones, also imagine and act on the future as a sort of infraspeculation. While not losing sight of how the latter differs from financial speculation, it is important to highlight the diverse forms of agency in relation to migration within a quite complex changing policy and ­crisis-management environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the social generation and experience of potentiality in the context of radical uncertainty. After a booming decade, the oil bust in mid-2014 wrought havoc on Angola's economy. Immigrant traders and entrepreneurs from West Africa responded to the crisis by assessing their possible livelihoods in and away from Angola. They further couched their search for economic potential in a discourse on Angola's own potential for recovery. By (de)potentializing economies and livelihoods, traders entrenched potentiality, rather than actuality, as a pervasive aspect of their sociality and their ethical orientations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I take an ecopoetic standpoint by attending to those practices that distinguish between dirt and backdirt on field sites. Fabricating this distinction features ongoing and intermittent speculation of dirt/backdirt on a continuum of archaeological value. Rather than positioning this distinction as external to the field site, it is rather a matter of being exposed to the site and exposing it in one and the same movement. A necessary quality of staying with the indeterminacy of this ecopoetic dimension of decision-making includes an embodied wit in contrast to a brainy rationality. Excavating with embodied wit implicates the relational interplay between exposing the landscape through excavating it and yielding to the excavation in the process. The field site is then made knowable by how the touching power of both excavators and field site threads the archaeologically imagined and material worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides insight into one of the most prevalent forms of the second economy in the Estonian SSR – small-scale speculation and black market profiteering – through the results of narrative research conducted among a small group of speculators who were involved in the smuggling of Western goods behind the Iron Curtain between the mid-1970s and late-1980s. The empirical material comprises five in-depth interviews that focus on various illegal and semi-illegal practices and strategies employed to establish and sustain the flow of contraband consumer items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the concept of ‘regimes of dispossession’ to explore how processes of land dispossession are evolving in Cambodia. Focusing on Preah Sihanouk province, which has received an influx of capital from China, we show empirically how non-productive and speculative land uses are thriving, resulting in frenzied and chaotic patterns of land grabbing. Our findings suggest a new phase in the recursive relationship between land control and the Cambodian state. Land previously occupied and farmed by rural villages is now being re-classified and re-packaged for private and non-productive purposes like real estate, tourism, and industrial investment that remain largely speculative, as international capital meets predatory state logics. We thus draw attention to how regimes of dispossession operate at a range of scales to shape how land is valued and grabbed, inviting comparative analysis between countries, particularly in the context of high levels of Chinese investment in the global south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the price and risk dynamics of Bitcoin. Applying SVAR to study Bitcoin, gold and U.S. dollar in one system, we find that neither the gold nor U.S. dollar can explain Bitcoin pricing dynamics in the short-run. We further apply the DCC-MGARCH model to study the risk correlations. The results show that there exists volatility spillover effect and dynamic correlation between three markets, which is magnified with the advent of COVID-19. We can thus draw a conclusion that the boom of Bitcoin is just a hype and speculative bubble. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article suggests that humanity may be approaching a critical juncture, since a confluence of macro-historical changes might—individually or collectively—fundamentally transform the field of human rights, and usher in a second human rights era. In particular, it suggests that the confluence of tectonic geopolitical changes, system-wide shifts in climate and energy, and fundamentally new developments in science and technology might lead to a rupture of the same scale as the cluster of events that heralded the onset of the current rights regime. This argument builds on a number of literatures, especially those focused on norms cycles, rights generations, and what is being called the "ontological turn." Yet the implications extend beyond these conversations in terms of both conceptual scale (the emphasis here is on critical junctures between eras, rather than cycles or generations within eras) as well as temporal scale (the emphasis is on the medium-to-long-range future, rather than the near future). An effort to ground this speculation takes the form of testable hypotheses and practical recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Dry Matters" describes a dual interest. The phrase reminds designers that drylands are active contributors to our collective futures and advocates for an expanded material palette to design resilient arid landscapes. It is also the conceptual framework of a graduate design studio that I teach at the University of California, Berkeley which is predicated on the assumption that aridity is an intrinsically valuable ecological condition. In this essay, I recount how dryland policies, attitudes, and perceptions manifest materially through design and planning. Grounding this research, I show how engaging the history of place can be a pedagogical framework for students to design speculative dryland futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article surveys the media arts practice-based research involved in the South Side Speculations (SSS) project. SSS was an intergenerational collaboration among Chicago-based high school students, arts and humanities scholars, and practicing artists and storytellers facilitated by the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois Chicago that sought to reimagine the pasts and futures of local neighbourhoods in Chicago's South Side with the aim of rethinking political systems for social justice. In particular, SSS participants interrogated the interplay between forms of racialised structural violence and emergent surveillance technologies. The youth-led projects resulted in three major contributions to the field of speculative design. First, futures can only be imagined by also reimagining the past and the historical narratives that make any kind of future possible. Second, futures must engage hyperlocal contexts to consider concretely how speculative design objects will exist in specific material realities. Third, young people can use speculative design to interrogate the role of institutions in their communities and increase the agency they have in their futures. Ultimately, this article argues that speculation can enable forms of community-building through media arts practice in ways that draw from and contribute to broader collective social justice organising and activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nineteenth-century French economist Jules Regnault has been reassessed as a pioneer of financial economics by Jovanovic and others. Although not as elaborate as Regnault's model for the random nature of stock prices, there was a Japanese philosopher in the same century whose ideas resembled Fama's hypothesis that all available information is reflected in market prices. His name was YAMAGATA Bantō. This paper clarifies his contribution to the early concept of the Efficient Market Hypothesis by analysing his discussion on information presented in his 1806 Great Knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sharp increases in systemically important crude oil prices have been a major cause of the recent surge in the inflation rate in the U.S. This paper investigates the extent to which the increase in oil prices can be attributed to excessive speculation in the oil futures market. Our analysis suggests that excessive speculation in the crude oil market has been responsible for 24%–48% of the increase in the WTI crude oil price during October 2020–June 2022. These estimates translate into an oil price increase of around $18-$36 per barrel and an increase in the U.S. PCE inflation rate by circa 0.75–1.5% points during the same period. We complement the analysis with an empirical investigation of the crude oil market, which shows that (speculative) long noncommercial open-interest positions in oil futures have increased considerably relative to short noncommercial positions. We further find that higher futures prices for crude oil "Granger-cause" oil spot prices, the futures prices of corn and soybeans and the fertilizer price. These econometric results show that oil speculators have to be held accountable for not just raising oil prices, but also driving up food commodity prices. We finally discuss measures to clamp down on excessive speculation in oil in order to eliminate its systemically adverse consequences for the U.S. economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In China, re'nao or 'hot noise' is the experience of being immersed within an active crowd. Traditionally it is associated with festivals, markets, and temples. The participatory and embodied nature of re'nao puts it at odds with the gaze of the alienated, individual spectator, and indeed re'nao has been described by scholars in terms that directly oppose it to the structure of modern spectatorship. How can the medium of film be used to represent or evoke re'nao? Might re' nao--related works offer a ground for a critical or historical response to the advent of modern spectatorship? This paper examines the interplay between re'nao and spectatorship as it is dramatized by the mainland Chinese film, Shanghai Fever (股疯, 1994). The film documents the widespread speculation mania that followed the economic reforms and reinstitution of stock trading during the early 1990s, a pivotal moment in the development of postsocialism in China as state and society embraced the unfettered pursuit of private wealth. Serving as a key work of the economic imagination of its day, Shanghai Fever also represents a transformation in the regime of visuality thanks in part to its remediation of a new mass medium: the market 'itself,' as manifested in the system of stock price display screens ubiquitously installed across Shanghai and accompanied by the emergence of the new figure of the speculator-spectator. The co-arrival of finance capitalism along with an intensified form of spectatorship in everyday urban life is complicated by the de-stabilizing potential of re'nao, as the immersive social experience of heat and noise expose the irrationalities of the market and its alienating affects. I situate Shanghai Fever within a long tradition relating re'nao to the performativity of marketplaces to reveal the film's deep ambivalence towards postsocialism. Moving beyond a thematic reading of re'nao's role in the speculation mania of the early 1990s, I argue that film, by evoking re'nao in order to commodify it as entertainment, subverts the very structure of spectatorship upon which cinema depends. 'Hot noise' ultimately proves to be both a powerful form of cinematic attraction and anti-cinematic in its dispensation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bubbles have become ubiquitous. This ubiquity has stimulated research over the past three decades into bubbles in history. In this article, we provide a systematic overview of research into historical bubbles. Our analysis reveals that there is no coherent approach to the study of bubbles and much of the debate has unhelpfully focussed on the rationality/irrationality dichotomy. We then suggest a new framework for the study of historical bubbles, which helps us understand the causes of bubbles and their economic consequences. We conclude by suggesting ways in which business history can contribute to the study of historical bubbles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anchoring on the core notions spiraled out of a close reading of Hélène Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1975), this article intends to interpret four short stories of Vandana Singh from the anthology The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (2008) by using écriture feminine as a tool of analysis. The selected stories belonging to the genre of speculative fiction respectively oscillate around four women characters and leave us with an emerging pattern of searching for a lost "self." The ingenious story telling with elements of the imaginary addresses subtle yet complicated gender issues. Apropos to this, compartmentalized into three primary sections this work develops an argument toward recognizing an unconventional and original literary tradition in the making that might partially realize the intricate nuances of woman's writing within a South-Asian (Indian) context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use a time-varying vector autoregressive model to investigate the dynamic effect of investor attention on Bitcoin speculation and then examine the association of this effect with five types of events in the Bitcoin market. The results indicate that investor attention has a positive effect on Bitcoin speculation and this effect changes with time and decays as lag phases increase. Policy-related events are the key factors that make this effect time-varying, while safety events have no obvious impact. Besides, our results find the existence of contrarian strategy in the Bitcoin market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present investigation was to determine the prevalence, demographic profile, and correlates of financial speculation in Canada, with a focus on its relationship to gambling. In cooperation with Statistics Canada, a brief assessment of financial speculation was developed and included in the 2018 Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) and administered to 23,952 adults. The past year national prevalence of financial speculation was found to be 3.6%, with the province of Alberta having the only higher inter-provincial rate. Speculators were predominantly male, White, with a modal age of 30–49, and with higher educational attainment and household income. In terms of health indicators, they were more likely to be regular alcohol drinkers and occasional smokers, but to have better self-reported general health, mental health, and life satisfaction. However, the strongest multivariate predictor of speculation was higher frequency of gambling involvement. Speculators had higher levels of participation in all types of gambling (especially skill-based formats) with the exception of instant lotteries. This high level of involvement contributes to somewhat higher rates of problem gambling symptomatology. The present investigation confirms that speculation not only has a strong conceptual relationship to gambling but also a strong empirical relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the connection between inheritance and confidence schemes or other forms of financial speculation (such as gambling) in early modern English drama. Considering plays including Thomas Middleton's Michaelmas Term (1604-6), John Cooke's Greene's Tu Quoque (1611), and Ben Jonson's Volpone (1605-6), I explore the cultural work done by dramatic narratives in which inheritance becomes a site of risk or speculation. I argue that the inheritance scam in early modern drama fulfills a cultural fantasy that extends well beyond the monetary, at times modeling or testing out new forms of socioeconomic behavior or injecting the possibility of fluidity into otherwise restrictive systems of wealth transfer and social mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads George Eliot's novel Middlemarch (1871–2) in the context of what I argue is a recurring pattern in Victorian fiction: inheritance is recast as a form of "relational speculation" – a practice that imbricates the period's rising logics of credit and contract with older structures of kinship, marriage, and property. Middlemarch draws on this pattern by aligning manipulative testators with expectant heirs, but also complicates it by placing these relational speculations within a longer history of tensions around ownership. Focusing on the recurring image of the "dead hand," I reveal its complex allusion to the term mortmain. Originating in feudal law, mortmain statutes restricted the alienation of land to corporations and later came to limit bequests to charities, and yet mortmain's role was still debated in the nineteenth century. Legal accounts reflect this lingering uncertainty, describing mortmain's effects in terms of both limitless ownership and its curtailment or loss. I contend that Eliot draws on mortmain's shifting history and multivalence, especially its association with restraint, to challenge relational speculation and outline a necessary constraint on speculative subjectivity. The paper concludes by suggesting that mortmain's dynamic of curtailment emerges in the novel's self-reflexive, interventionist narration and poetics of generative constraint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we theoretically discussed the relationship between financial liquidity, speculation and grain price for the first time. Then we employ the structural vector auto-regression model (SVAR) to explore the impulse response of grain price to the structural shock of world grain production, demand, financial liquidity and speculation. Our empirical results show that the effects of financial liquidity and speculation on the grain price are significant. Meanwhile, grain demand changes caused by the global economy have no significant impact on grain price. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between trading activity and returns volatility in white maize futures listed on the South African Futures Exchange (SAFEX) and investigates the impact of speculative activity on volatility. Returns volatility is estimated using a GARCH (1,1) model. Trading activity changes are observed by computing two negatively correlated ratios from daily trading volume and open interest. The dynamic relationship between volatility and trading activity is explored over the period April 2000 to May 2022 using a vector autoregressive framework. The paper examines not only the Granger-causality between speculative and hedging ratios and volatility but also assesses their interactions through variance decomposition and impulse response functions. The first ratio, of volume to open interest, is used to capture speculative market activity; and the second, a ratio of the change in open interest to volume, is used to reflect the activity of hedgers. The results shed light on the effectiveness of targeting speculators for regulation in grain futures markets, while also contributing to the veracity of price limits in effectively moderating volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based in ethnographic fieldwork among high-performance speed skaters, this paper considers some of the structures and experiences of athlete development and training. As a racing sport, fast times in speed skating matter. Yet time is not simply quantified. It is also felt in various ways. There are qualities to time. Time is taken into the body and expended from the body. Inspired by Nancy Munn's contributions to temporalization, I explore time's embodiment, its strategic use, and the moral evaluations of time within speed skating. I further consider how potential underpins various temporal engagements and enactments, including the sequence of athlete development, cycles and rhythms of training and the experience of tapering prior to competition. Both time and potential, I argue, are sensed in the broadest meaning of that term. Lastly, I consider how the timely management of potential demands faith, suggesting that athletes and coaches have much in common with speculators in financial markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During what is described as the world's first international stock market bubble – an economic bubble which burst in 1720 – visual and literary metaphors were an important means to criticise new economic practices and events. In this article I will argue that within this context, magic lanterns and raree shows functioned as key metaphors. Engravings and texts picture the devices as machines of magic and illusion, but also of propaganda and education. As such, a visual or literary reference to a raree show could point to the deceit and illusions of financial speculation ('wind trade'), or to the triumph over these illusions. This diverse use is not only an indication of the fact that the medium was already more flexible than we might expect in this period of time, but it also reflects the status of theatre itself: both the fascination for the theatre and the anti-theatrical sentiments were deeply embedded in western societies of the early modern period. It also shows that metaphors of financial speculation were not only used to make sense of something that could not yet fully be grasped; indeed, they were used strategically and reflect great knowledge about speculative trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detrital zircon U–Pb age patterns in sandstones from the Triassic–Cretaceous Clarence-Moreton Basin, eastern New South Wales and Queensland, unexpectedly reveal sediment sources overwhelmingly dominated (>70%) by Precambrian–Cambrian zircons, with virtually no input, as was anticipated, from the nearby Carboniferous, Permian or Triassic magmatic arcs and contemporary accretionary wedge associated with the New England Orogen. Some rare, youngest zircons (<5%) are mostly contemporaneous with the estimated depositional age. The older, reworked zircon populations can only be acquired by postulating either (1) an Australian provenance by long overland sediment pathways from the interior to the west, during one or more transport cycles, perhaps from within the Thomson Orogen, and then bypassing or crossing the New England Orogen without any local contribution from that sector or (2) a North Zealandia provenance with a shorter transport distance from a postulated basement block to the east, within the Northern Lord Howe Rise and Kenn Plateau. This would comprise late Mesoproterozoic (1200–1000 Ma) and late Neoproterozoic–Cambrian (700–500 Ma) igneous and metamorphic complexes, similar to that proposed in South Zealandia. Triassic to Jurassic Clarence-Moreton Basin sedimentary rocks have provenances unlike their hinterland time-correlates in New South Wales and Queensland. The latter better share similarities with those in Murihiku Terrane, North Island, New Zealand. The provenance of Clarence-Moreton sediments is similar to that of time-correlates in New Caledonia, and it is postulated that they share a source region on the northern Lord Howe Rise or Kenn Plateau. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers relations between inheritance, disobedience and speculation in art practice and art education in schools and other sites of teaching and learning. In recent decades educational practices such locations have been subject to doctrinal cultures of audit, standardisation and competences, invoking what Michael Hampe terms the homogenization of the interpretation of experience. In contrast the article advocates the idea of speculative pedagogies that remain open to the unknown potentialities of students' and teachers' learning encounters and invent a future when such a future, demands thought. Speculative practice and the idea of disobedience are elaborated through contemporary art practices, then applied to pedagogical contexts and processes of learning. Focusing upon the relevance of how a learning encounter matters for a student and the obligations required of a teacher, the article then considers an ethics and politics of pedagogical work through the idea of idiotic events and Isabelle Stengers' notion of the cosmopolitical proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a speculative reading of crime reports from the 1960 and '70s, this article grapples with the way in which Ethiopians who refuse to be fixed within gender binaries were introduced to readers as social problems. Considering the violence gender-non-conforming people are subjected to – including by some cisgender members of the queer community itself – I closely study some of these archives to ask what could emerge if we engage them imaginatively. I experiment with the crime reports to see what a speculative reading might afford us in writing a history of the present. I subject the reports to speculation on what might have been instead of being loyal to archives and what they present to us. In an act of defying the authority of the archive, which gives a narrow and skewed account of lived experiences, I introduce a speculative biography of three gender-non-conforming Ethiopians in a fashion that moves away from the crime narrative within which they were limited. In so doing, however, I do not claim to recover their voice, their wishes and desires; I rather read a theory of how their existence was made (im)possible/freedom was practised. Though I heavily draw on the crime reports from Amharic newspapers, I juxtapose these with recently produced documentaries, my own childhood memories, ethnography as well as conversations with members of the queer community at home and in the diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not infrequently, smart home imaginaries and installations are envisaged for nuclear families dwelling in detached houses fitted with the latest Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. In our article, we follow one approach to escape this powerful but inadequate projection that entails inviting people to imagine alternative forms of domestic IoT use. Surveying the setup of these nascent endeavours, in particular attempts that pivot on narrative accounts and forward-oriented fictions on the design of new habitats, we show how these seek to evoke visions of technologically supported cohabitation and everyday life. Due to their inclusive ambitions, such approaches face participatory predicaments that arise from the sought-after spontaneity and creativity within a purposive process. In response, all of them resort to methodological scaffolding that helps their designers to reconcile the tension between the idiosyncrasies embraced by the procedures and the overarching requirements of a particular exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I investigate a decentralized infrastructure meant to assist autonomous vehicles in making decisions. More akin to a call centre than a centralized control room, Nissan's 'Seamless Autonomous Mobility' (SAM) project imagines that remote 'mobility managers' will intervene in the decision-making of autonomous vehicles, with the assistance of live video streams and other sensor data. Different from other kinds of AI microwork in which human workers prepare, imitate, or verify AI, mobility managers are envisioned instead as 'interveners', meant to directly and actively intervene in the movements of 'autonomous' vehicles when unable to negotiate an obstacle. Firstly, through a comparison between SAM and a traffic management system in Los Angeles, I argue that the former 'normalizes' intervention, in which decision-making delays become ordinary, if not altogether desirable. Secondly, through an analysis of a video in which such normalized interventions are imagined, I consider how SAM offers a kind of speculative mundanity in which remote workers, enabled by a technological infrastructure, embody a novel logic that modifies the social settings of driving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People within the cryptocurrency world come together on imageboards and forums to tell stories about the highly volatile and uncertain world they inhabit. Although they engage with a highly technical digital money form, the stories they share online could be more productively analysed as digital folklore. Through ethnography primarily conducted via 4chan and Reddit, I highlight three types of stories, loosely grouped together within the categories of 'despair', 'comedy' and 'courage'. Drawing parallels to folk and fairy tales, I explore how 'netizens' use these stories to engage with the uncertainty that characterizes cryptocurrencies. Consequently, I highlight how stories come to make the online cryptocurrency world more inhabitable, as well as allowing people to subvert and resist 'economic reason'. By foregrounding storytelling, I highlight the fluid, intersubjective and collective actions that help to sustain a volatile and uncertain market that is favourable for those who take to online message boards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century in Israel – and with growing intensity since the outbreak of the 2011 social protests – a new neoliberal economical subject has appeared in Hebrew literature. In this new subjectivity, self-identity is formed and understood by its relations to work. In this article I will follow the new working subject as it is revealed in Nano Shabtai's novel Book of Men and present an interpretive paradigm, grounded in the critique of neoliberalism. While much of the critique of Book of Men revolves around gender identity and power relations, I will offer a new interpretation. Shabtai's protagonist reveals the mechanism underlying a subjectivity immersed in work and economics. As I will demonstrate, this mechanism negates the conventional dichotomy between exploiter and exploited – indeed, between the concept of coerciveness and choice – offering a reading that accounts for the slippage between these categories within the text. Under such a reading, complex networks of power dynamics weave Shabtai's novel, and are deciphered by employing different languages of meaning. In addition, I will show that Shabtai's literary form is influenced by the neoliberal nature of work and can be read as a stock portfolio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic research carried out in Maputo, Mozambique, in this article I explore the significance of housing in an urban context infused by spectacular speculation. As I will argue, in order for different everyday rationalities to become commensurable through speculative investments, they may have to manifest and activate unique and even opposing horizons of value and economic orientations. By thus considering housing beyond conventional dichotomies – Global South vs. Global North, informality vs. formality, global vs. local – we may acquire a more nuanced understanding of those manifold forms of urban engagements that make housing a way of establishing a sense of order and belonging by activating often contradictory moral orientations and hierarchies of value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an analytical reflection on how urban futures have been imagined throughout history and into the present. Considering this question at a global scale, it examines the place of urbanization within the development of the modern/colonial order, accounting for the imagined futures that have supported this world-historical process. Three thematic sections—idealization, capitalization, and securitization—frame the discussion. Capturing desires for societal betterment alongside attempts to extract economic value and imperatives to govern anticipated threats, these heuristics provide insight into forms of urban future-making and future-thinking that continue to reverberate across contemporary projects, debates, and struggles. This lays the groundwork for the critical analysis of urban futures that identifies what is at stake in imagining the future of cities in one way rather than another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding and anticipating market movements plays a critical role in current capitalist activity. Through the assessment of the present and the engagement in the unknowable future, financial-market participants create financial opportunities. At the heart of this process is the work of experts who claim to provide 'thorough analyses' of economic trends and market movements. In this article, I illustrate how analysts – a powerful guild of economic experts – capitalise on 'feeling', individualised strategies and storytelling to come up with explanatory narratives about possible future market scenarios. In doing so, I build upon the notion of speculation as a practice that is grounded in imagination and show that narrativization of such futured-oriented images is a vital – yet often neglected – process: it allows to treat the unknowable as if it was anticipatable, uncertainty as if it was calculable risk, and thus speculation as if it was 'investment'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the interruption of Amaravati, a project for a new state capital in southern India. I argue that the terms and conditions of Amaravati's financing had specific spatial consequences at multiple scales. The discussion traces the deterritorialization of an agrarian landscape into speculative real estate through so-called "land pooling." It considers the new technologies and modes of governance that facilitated this speculation and catalyzed an "all-over, all-at-once" infrastructural strategy that organized construction work synchronously on scattered sites spread across 217 square kilometers of land. The expedited construction of government housing blocks—using monolithic in situ casting techniques—further supported the financialized terms of development, emphasizing the imminence and inevitability of the future capital as a means of securing private investment from around the world. As Amaravati's ultimate demise suggests, the abstractions of contemporary global finance can be grasped through a close reading of their architectural manifestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of youth is central to efforts to understanding continuity and change and the reproduction of inequality. There are longstanding debates about how to account for class in shaping young people's lives in the context of social change, including recent calls for a greater focus on political economy in the sociological study of youth. This article considers these debates in the context of the rise of the asset economy, developing a generational framework for conceptualizing young adulthood and shifting intergenerational relations in the context of the growing importance of assets to economic stratification. I propose that the shifting interaction of income, assets and family transfers reshapes young lives but not in a way that creates youth as a precarious class position. Instead, access to family assets in young adulthood is of increasing importance for navigating contemporary insecurities and accessing opportunities. The conditions faced by many young people are conditions in which the relative rewards for types of speculation on the future are heightened for some young people. The rise of the asset economy is central to the changing life chances between generations at a societal level (and potentially encourages generational conflict at this level) but simultaneously enhances the importance of intergenerational solidarities and transfers within the family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines longstanding, widely circulated arguments regarding blocked futurity in relation to emerging forms of temporal experience associated with financialization. From ambivalent conservative accounts of the 'end of history' to the grim repetition diagnosed on the Left as 'capitalist realism', divergent accounts of post-1960s culture have focused on what I call 'static time', or an experience of time in which human agency is no longer operative because meaningful change cannot be created. Although versions of static time continue to proliferate in academic discourse, liquidity and financialization produce forms of individual temporality that operate very differently. When we make the conceptual parameters of static time explicit, I suggest, it becomes more possible to read for the forms of temporalized human action that these parameters may prevent us from noticing. These forms include what I call suffering agency, or the experience of individually chosen, consequential human action as horrific and unwelcome, and life-interest, or the production of individual binary decisions made in relation to survival. Rather than being inaccessible or unshaped by human efficacy, the future here bears down in the form of negative results directly caused and deliberately chosen by the individual in question. In this form of 'punitive futurity', individuals experience temporalized forms of distress keyed to the willed unfolding of their own choices over time. By reading punitive futurity in relation to what Lisa Adkins calls 'speculation as a rationality', I argue that this temporal form serves as an increasingly crucial means by which individuals experience their subjection within contemporary capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the complicated role that works of art play in colonial remembrance, and the ways in which they sustain stereotypes, biases and power relations over the passage of time. It takes as its case study Thomas Rowlandson's hand-coloured etching, Rachel Pringle of Barbadoes (1796), which has been used as visual evidence for the fragmented biography of an Afro-Caribbean entrepreneur, mythologised as a brothel-keeper servicing the British navy, against the backdrop of slavery. Since the story of Rachael Pringle Polgreen (c.1753–1791) is well-known, I focus on an analysis of the artwork and its unusual composition, speculating reasons for its appearance in London's print culture. Tracing the spectral afterlives of this print, I also argue that the image functions as a colonial keepsake, treasured as evidence of intimate connection between metropole and (post) colony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on research among blockchain communities in the Netherlands and online terrains. Through an empirical example, it explores tales produced by projects based on the blockchain protocol and on the premise that cryptocurrencies are money and that money has generative potential for social and economic change. By unpacking the pragmatics of a particular project – Bitnation and Pangea – I argue that despite tales of decentralisation through the moneyness of cryptocurrencies, and the distributed and automated character of the blockchain protocol, these currencies, and projects, are deeply entangled with fiat and mainstream economies and markets. This is visible by looking at the ups and downs of cryptocurrency pricing and on the effects this volatility has on (certain) projects. The lack of a sustainable community of trust in cryptocurrencies as money – particularly visible in initiatives following more libertarian and utopian tales, detached from everyday life realities – and the way these retain attention mainly due to speculation, have very real effects for blockchain based projects. No matter how radical their tales for decentralisation and socioeconomic revolution are, utterances for these tales to become real have to be there, and seem absent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that China's P2P lending is influenced by the behavioural factors of P2P platforms. This is because severe information asymmetry results in high uncertainty surrounding China's P2P lending industry. Specifically, we examine three behavioural aspects of P2P lending: lending sentiments, herding, and speculation. Using a sample of 918 P2P platforms from October 2015-September 2019, we document that positive P2P news release in the media (sentiments) encourages P2P lending; P2P platforms herd on their peers in making lending decisions; and P2P lending contains speculative elements and is driven by real estate bubbles. Moreover, we find that these behavioural effects are less profound if P2P platforms adopt a fund custody mechanism in which commercial banks provide custodian services for investor funds used for P2P lending. This result suggests that behavioural factors are more important in explaining P2P lending when information asymmetry is more severe. We obtain these results by controlling for other usual factors that can explain P2P lending, including characteristics of P2P platforms, macroeconomic variables, and other variables reflecting features of P2P operating environment. Our results suggest that regulators should monitor risk management of P2P platforms and reduce asymmetric information faced by participants in China's P2P lending market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to identify traces of language contact between speakers of Australian languages and speakers of Austronesian languages other than Macassans. I put forward evidence for lexical borrowing into northern Australian languages from Austronesian languages in South and East Sulawesi, Maluku and Timor-Rote, as well as from Austronesian languages of the Sama-Bajau and Oceanic subgroups. Although the evidence is fragmentary, the presence of these borrowings could be taken to indicate a more varied history of contact with Australia than the Macassan-dominated linguistic data suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]