My project examined cultural and intellectual responses in France to the 2008 global financial crisis. This encompassed conceptualizations of the crisis by French philosophers and economists, (re-)conceptualizations of ideas surrounding the world of work following the crash, and the ways in which French cinema and media have represented and responded to the crash. I divided my research into three overall objectives, which were to research and provide critical accounts of:
1. Recent texts by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler on the future of work in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis;
2. The work of French economists responding to the crisis, especially Frédéric Lordon and the play he wrote about the crisis;
3. How the world of work and the financial crisis have been represented, discussed and responded to in French fiction, art and documentary films since 2008.
The host institution for the project was the Research Institute on Cinema and the Audio-visual (Institut de recherche sur le cinéma et l’audiovisuel, IRCAV), a research laboratory at the university Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, where cutting-edge academic work on film and media takes place.
My project was conceived in a context in which Europe has witnessed economic crises, financialization, growing inequality and debt, yet also responses to these phenomena in, for example, social movements advocating debt relief and calls for a citizens’ basic income. At the same time, since the 1970s, many traditional forms of work have become increasingly redundant due to technological advances, globalization, and other historical factors. France has been at the forefront of movements trying to respond to these phenomena. The project is important as it addresses the urgent question of how we are to understand one of the fundamental historical events of our time – the 2008 financial crisis – and its significance for the future of France and Europe. The widespread sense that the underlying problems of the economy have not been remedied ten years on from the crisis means that my work could hardly be timelier. The relative obscurity of the financial mechanisms involved means this is an area that tends to remain hidden from public view, and it is an innovation of my project to focus on how these issues have been rendered visible in images.
