Talk

MØN€Y

Laleh Khalili, Ryan Davey, and Julio César Linares

Date and Time:: Thu 29 Oct, 6–8pm
Location:: Majlis

Money is one of the most powerful technologies shaping modern life. From wage labour and banking to the digitalisation of finance, cryptocurrencies, and fantasies of cashless futures, money has transformed social relations and shaped our aspirations and ideas of value. Yet stories of its advent often reduce money to a natural or inevitable aspect of human societies. Has money ever been a mere tool, and is it really impossible to imagine life without it?

Featuring Laleh Khalili, Ryan Davey, and Julio César Linares, and hosted by Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa and Lilly Markaki, this panel conversation asks how money has shaped the ways we live and imagine the world – and what the systems of power surrounding it reveal about it.

The evening will also include listening elements, exploring the ways music has long narrated experiences of aspiration, survival, debt, wealth and inequality, from gangsta rap in the United States and French rap conscient to folk music from across the world.

MØN€Y is the launch event and inaugural episode (to be recorded live) of After the Lecture, a new long-form radio programme bringing ideas, culture and critical thought beyond the university. Hosted by Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa and Lilly Markaki, the programme airs bimonthly on Voices Radio.

Doors open at 5.30pm; event starts at 6pm and ends at 8pm.

Image credit: Cildo Meireles, Zero Dollar, 1978–84.

This event is supported by Aston University and Ibraaz and presented as part of the Aston University Festival of Social Science 2026, a free annual programme of public events supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Laleh Khalili is Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter and the author or editor of seven books, including Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso, 2020) and Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Shape the Global Economy (Profile Books, 2025).

Ryan Davey is a lecturer in social sciences at Cardiff University, working across anthropology and sociology with a primary focus on debt. His first book is The Personal Life of Debt: Coercion, Subjectivity and Inequality in Britain (Bristol University Press, 2025), based on eighteen months’ fieldwork on a housing estate in southern England. He is currently developing research into the relationship between debt, sexuality and intimate life, drawing on queer and Marxist perspectives.

Julio César Linares is a community organiser and economic anthropologist born in the territories known today as Guatemala. He holds an MSc from the London School of Economics, where he studied and worked on projects with the late David Graeber. Julio is the author of Decolonizing Money: The Promise of Abolishing the US Dollar (Pluto Press, 2026) and serves as Public Outreach for the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). He lives in Berlin, Germany.

Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Aston University, community organiser and writer based in London. With over a decade of involvement in migrant justice movements in so-called Canada and the UK, their work explores migrant life under contemporary border regimes and the expansion of the carceral state. They are completing their first manuscript, On Ghostly Lives, and serve as Managing Editor of The Philosopher and co-convenor of the BSA Race and Ethnicity Study Group.

Lilly Markaki is Lecturer in Race and Culture in Film and Media at Royal Holloway, University of London. Their research investigates the political life of aesthetic forms and broader questions of race and the coloniality of being, time, and the intersections of desire, technology and contemporary capitalism.