New Capitalism[s]& Violence

Contemporary scholarship increasingly speaks of capitalism(s) rather than a singular capitalism. Platform economies, gig work, extractive markets, aestheticized consumer cultures, and criminalized market formations coexist and overlap, generating distinct configurations of power, precarity, and harm.

This seminar brings together scholars working with different conceptualizations of capitalism alongside participants engaged with questions of violence and harm beyond academia, to examine how contemporary market logics produce mutations of violence – economic, symbolic, cultural, and criminal. Rather than treating violence as a stable or singular phenomenon, the seminar explores how harm and crime are shaped, normalized, and redistributed across consumer societies structured by market relations.

This is a seminar open to everyone.

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Organisers

Sofia Ulver, Associate Professor in Consumer and Marketing Studies, Lund University School of Economics and Management (LUSEM)

Erik Hannerz, Associate Professor in Cultural Criminology, Department of Sociology, Lund University

David Sausdal, Associate Professor in Cultural Criminology, Department of Sociology, Lund University

Programme

(Speaker presentations linked below)

09.00 (sharp) – 09.15 Welcome (Sofia Ulver, Erik Hannerz and David Sausdal)

09.15 – 12.30 Speakers on capitalism(s)

Keynote Speakers:

Financilized Capitalism
Professor Ester Barinaga, Lund University School of Economics and Management (LUSEM)

Affective Capitalism
Professor Joel Hietanen, University of Helsinki, Finland

Abandonement Capitalism
Professor James Fitchett, University of Leicester in the UK

Beyond Capitalocentrism: Reading for difference in criminal economies
Associate Professor Christina Jerne, Aarhus University

Moderator: Sofia Ulver

12.30 – 13.30 (sharp) Lunch

13.30 (sharp) – 13.40 Welcome back (Sofia Ulver and Mia-Marie Hammarlin)

13.40 – 15:30: Flash talks and Panel, deeper into how capitalism(s) connect to specific violence.

Flash talks and Panel Debate:

Gig Economy and Gangsters
Associate Professor David Sausdal, Cultural Criminology, Lund University, Cultural Crimininology, Faculty of Social Sciences

Racial Capitalism
Associate Professor Peter Svensson
Marketing Studies, Lund University School of Economics and Management (LUSEM)

Algorithmic Capitalism and the Far-Right
PhD, Researcher Pasko Kisić-Merino, Researcher at PLEDGE Horizon Project, Department of Political Science at Lund University

Beyond Capitaliocentrism
Associate Professor Christina Jerne, Aarhus University

Financialized Capitalism
Professor Ester Barinaga, Lund University School of Economics and Management (LUSEM)

Moderator: Mia-Marie Hammarlin

Additional participants, including representatives from outside academia, will be confirmed.

Moderator: Associate Professor, Mia-Marie Hammarlin, Department of Communication, Lund University

Speaker presentations

Professor Ester Barinaga

Finanzialized Capitalism
Ester Barinaga is Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at Lund University School of Economics and Management. Her research interrogates the violence embedded in contemporary capitalism, not just as a system of economic exchange, but as a regime that enforces exclusion, extraction, and erasure. Her work exposes how dominant forms of capitalism, particularly in their financialized and neoliberal iterations, perpetuate structural violence: territorial stigmatization, economic dispossession, and the colonization of collective imagination. Through her scholarship, Barinaga goes beyond critiquing these dynamics, to also look at the methods and practices social and grassroots entrepreneurs use to advance social change. In this doing, she focuses on how such initiatives actively seek to reclaim and remake capitalism from the ground up, centering marginalized communities as architects of alternative economic futures.

Her presentation will focus on how financialised capitalism’s money creation process – rooted in bank-issued debt and interest – is not just an economic mechanism, but a form of structural violence. By unpacking the accounting alchemy that allows private banks to conjure money out of loans, she will reveal how this system entrenches inequality, fuels cyclical crises, and forces perpetual growth, all while extracting value from the many to benefit the few. Drawing on her work with grassroots monetary innovations and community currencies, she will contrast this extractive logic with emergent, commons-based alternatives that reclaim money as a tool for collective agency and sustainability. The presentation ultimately asks: Can we dismantle the violence of debt-driven capitalism – and what would it take to remake money for a just future?

Professor James Fitchett

Adandonement Capitalism
James Fitchett is Professor of Marketing and Consumption, and Deputy Head of the School of Business and the University of Leicester in the UK, and an Associate Editor for Marketing Theory. His research sits at the intersection of critical theory, cultural theory, and political economy, with a particular focus on diagnosing contemporary forms of market, marketing, and consumer culture erasure. His work interrogates how capitalism produces subjectivity, desire, and harm through symbolic power and symbolic violence.
 
James' presentation "Abandonment Capitalism: Living Currency and the Limits of Critique – De Sade, Nietzsche, and Innovations of Violence" develops a conceptual intervention into consumer and marketing theory through a close engagement with Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency. While critical consumer research has been shaped by Marxist political economy and Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis, his presentation argues that these frameworks increasingly struggle to account for contemporary forms of capitalist violence that operate through affect, excess, and the commodification of subjectivity itself. 

Professor Joel Hietanen

Affective Capitalism
Joel Hietanen is Professor at Centre for Consumer Research, University of Helsinki.
His interests include affectivity in technocapitalism and the dark side of desire in consumption from psychoanalutical and French poststructuralist perspectives. His recent work has focused on the notion of the perverted consumer, the dividual, and automated subjectivity. Methodologically he has a continued interest in videography and netnography.
 
His talk will be on how consumer culture inherently needs perverted consumer subjectivities to function. While critical frameworks have began to question the coherence and agency of the consumer, the perverted impulse in consumption has been largely overlooked. In contrast to typical interpretations of consumption's neurotic or psychotic tendencies, It is the largely hidden logic of a perverted impulse that guarantees consumer culture its extreme libidinal allure and longevity, even as its inherently empty and alienating qualities are increasingly recognised.

Associate Professor Christina Jerne

Beyond Capitalocentrism
Christina Jerne is a scholar, translator and experiential curator. Her most recent book is Opposition by Imitation: The Economics of Italian Anti-Mafia Activism, published by University of Minnesota Press in 2025. Her studies of mafias in Italy and gangs in Denmark, show how forms of social violence frequently mimic and intensify existing social norms – whether expressed in capitalist, patronal, welfare-based, diasporic, or feudal economies – by opposing them, subjugating them, or fully aligning with them. By examining the different logics of harm embedded in these economies, she identifies potential sites for collective action.

Her speak will be about: What if we treated capitalism like any other form of economic logic; as one of many, rather than “the One”? Drawing on ethnographic research on mafia economies in Italy and gang economies in Denmark, this talk explores the diversity of economic logics that these forms of collective violence build on in a historical perspective. The method of “reading for economic difference” ultimately allows for the tracing of agency as well as dominance.   

Opposition by Imitation: The Economics of Italian Anti-Mafia Activism – upress.umn.edu

About the flash speakers and panel members

Associate Professor David Sausdal

Gig Economy and Gangsters
David Sausdal, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Lund University. As a criminological ethnographer David's research interests revolve around contemporary issues of crime and control. He is currently PI on two research projects focusing respectively on private investigators and gang criminality in the Nordic countries.

“I don’t really care about gangs” is something David might be tempted to say, even though he is leading the largest research project ever conducted on gangs in the Nordics. What he means by this is, of course, not that gangs do not interest him at all. Rather, it is meant to point to how gangs primarily interest him as a societal mirror – as a way of understanding how the so-called criminal “underworld” reflects wider trends in society, including shared cultural, technological, and economic configurations. David would like to talk about “gigs, games, and gangsters”; that is, how present-day gang life and violence can be understood, in cultural criminological terms, as reflections of a broader gig-based and gamified economy.

Associate Professor Peter Svensson

Racial Capitalism
Peter Svensson, Associate Professor, Department of Business School, LUSEM, reads, writes and teaches at the intersection of organization studies. organizational communication and marketing. His research is mostly informed by different versions of discourse analysis and critical theory. At the moment he (together with Johan Jönsson) is doing research on the ideology of excellence and the culture of good-enoughness in contemporary work life. He is also doing research on the power of formalization and documentation of organizational life.

Drawing mainly upon Pushkala Prasad’s forthcoming book Capitalism’s Dark Complexion: Race, Markets and the Politics of Value (Bristol University press, 2026), Peter will try to connect the discussion of capitalism and violence to the historical role of management, oppression and exploitation of race. In relation to this debate, he will also make a preliminary remark on the incapacity of capita-isms to contribute to the emancipation from oppression and structural imprisonment.

Researcher Pasko Kisić-Merino

Algorithmic capitalism
Pasko Kisić-Merino is a Researcher for the PLEDGE Horizon Project (Politics of Grievance and Democratic Governance) at the Department of Political Science at Lund University, Sweden. As part of his research, he aims to understand how the far-right and neoliberal capitalism operate in a libidinal continuum both reproducing a spectacle of politics and foreclosing possibilities for substantial social transformation and emancipation through violent discourses and technologies.He will discuss how the normalisation of the far-right - seen through empirical illustrations in hybrid media in Sweden and the US - reveals the structure of capital’s libidinal economy of power. Explored in the “Helg Seger!” incident during the Swedish national elections in 2022 and in the US Capitol Hill storming in 2021, this libidinal economy of power is co-constituted by the perverse intertwining of i) fantasies of belonging, (in)security, and dystopia; ii) the material conditions of algorithmic media technologies; and iii) our unconscious commitments to perpetrate “necessary”, redemptive violence against threatening, essentialised others.

This is a joint event with the Faculty of Social Sciences at Lund University.