Our world is composed of obligations woven from the key threads of modern power: forms of knowledge, ethical claims, and legal and economic regimes. It is between these three co-constitutive forces that value – particularly economic value – is produced, maintained, or, at times, destroyed. The concept of unpayable debts helps us to account for the way colonial, racial, and capitalist power are entangled in the history of the world we share.

In this panel, the speakers will think through the contemporary borders and enclosures that debt creates. Drawing on tactics of evasion, speculation, and risk in order to reject the limitations of economic optimisation, participants will navigate how the refusal of long-accepted regimes might reclaim and reconfigure value through new technologies, collective economic processes, and paradigms.

With support by the Embassy of Canada to Germany.