Event Date: January 22, 2016 - 12:00
Location: Social Sciences Building, 120 University Pvt., room 4006
JULIET JOHNSON, McGill University.
Presented by the CIPS and the International Political Economy Network.
Free. In English. Registration is not required. Seating is limited and available on a first come, first served basis.
This talk discusses how central banks build public confidence in money through strategically employing a stability narrative. This narrative asserts that central banks: 1) can maintain the value of money; 2) can maintain the security of money; 3) represent the nation; and 4) have grown better at their jobs over time. I explore the stability narrative by studying its expression in central bank museums. Museums tell stories; they distill, teach, and privilege the beliefs of their creators. As such, museums represent an ideal vehicle for understanding the ways in which central banks describe and promote their ability to govern money in the national interest. This task has become more difficult and more important since the global financial crisis, as central bankers increasingly rely upon communicative strategies in order to defend national and international monetary stability.
Juliet Johnson is Professor of Political Science at McGill University. Her research focuses primarily on money and banking in the post-communist world, as well as on post-communist memory politics. She has been an Advisory Council member for the Kennan Institute, a Research Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, and a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. At McGill she has served on the Board of Governors and as Associate Dean (Research and Graduate Studies) for the Faculty of Arts, and won the Faculty’s Fieldhouse award for Distinguished Teaching. She received her PhD and MA in Politics from Princeton University and her AB in International Relations from Stanford University. She is the author of many books, including Priests of Prosperity: Transnational Central Bankers and Post-Communist Transformation (Cornell 2016) and A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System (Cornell 2000).
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