Lecture by VWAP consultant Philip Grant

In conjunction with Goldin+Senneby’s exhibition VWAP, one of the consultants on the project, Philip Grant, talks about why anthropologists and sociologists, and not bankers and economists, should be who we go to when we want to understand finance. He focuses on the complex question of value and how the concept links together practices as diverse as stock market investing and performance art.

Grant is Research Fellow in the Social Studies of Finance at the University of Edinburgh, where he works on the European Research Council funded project ‘Evaluation Practices in Financial Markets’, based in the Department of Sociology. He is an anthropologist who trained at the University of California, Irvine, where he wrote his PhD thesis on performativity, gender, transnationalism, translation, and ethnographic collaboration with Iranian women’s rights activists. He was previously an equity fund manager at Cazenove Fund Management in London, and combines this experience with his anthropological training in order to carry out his present project. He also has an M.Res. in Political Sociology from Sciences Po, Paris, and is a freelance translator from Persian to English, both prose and poetry.