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Keynote Speaker: Associate Professor Liv Yarrow, Brooklyn College, CUNY

"Though money is often characterised as an impersonal medium of exchange, it remains intricately connected to cultural value systems, social relationships, and political regimes. These characteristics are linked to the role of currency as a medium of commensuration designed to render equivalent and transitive once incomparable objects, ideas, signs, and meanings. In this way money goes ‘between’ cultures, and as a medium at the point of contact, money can often become ideologically charged. The eurozone, the rise of alternative currencies like Bitcoin, and the symbolic transformation of currencies during events like the Occupy movement ("We need a Revolution"), indicate that the social, ideological, and political aspects of money remain key modern concerns. This interdisciplinary conference aims to explore the differing ways money has connected, subverted, and entangled different cultures throughout history."