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  ANNELISE RILES

Law/Anthropology

Curriculum Vitae

  RESEARCH PROJECT

How can we explain the capacity of technical details of risk-management techniques to slip under the radar screen of critical thought? Is theory and critique adequate to the task of appreciating the efficacy of the technical? What other responses beyond critical debunking and historical/sociological contextualizing might be possible to the technical knowledge practices that characterize risk-management expertise?  Is it possible that these technical devices defeat our critical capacities by their very capacity to render themselves uninteresting, by the way they trick us into passing them over on our way to seemingly more important political and theoretical subjects? Might we learn something about risk on the terrain of theory from an ethnographic engagement with those inside the iron cage of risk-management instruments? 

Over the past ten years, I have been engaged in a longitudinal ethnographic study of risk-management practices among lawyers in government and private practice engaged in the regulation of the global financial markets.  In March of this year, I published a first and rather policy-oriented monograph based on this project, Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets (University of Chicago Press 2011).  I am now working on a prequel to this text focusing on the epistemological and ethical challenges of risk-management tools (in their material/documentary, policy, and legal theoretical forms) and their theoretical implications for anthropology and for critical theory more broadly.  The book aims to take advantage of the current controversies surrounding the agency of risk-management persons and techniques, to exploit the contradictions risk-management seems to generate in commitments and theoretical positions on all sides, as a way into the contemporary political and epistemological condition.  The premise of the book is that there is purchase for critical theory in the knowledge-practices of risk-management techniques. Themes that serve as the focus of individual chapters include: legal amateurism, legal pragmatism, and legal fictions and the fictionality of legal technique.
  BIO

Annelise Riles is the Jack G. Clarke Professor of Law in Far East Legal Studies and Professor of Anthropology at Cornell, and she serves as Director of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture. Her work focuses on the transnational dimensions of laws, markets and culture. Her most recent book, Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets (Chicago Press 2011), is based on ten years of fieldwork among regulators and lawyers in the global derivatives markets. She recently co-edited a special issue of the journal, Law and Contemporary Problems, Transdisciplinary Conflict of Laws, which rethinks the field of Conflict of Laws from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her first book, The Network Inside Out, won the American Society of International Law’s Certificate of Merit for 2000-2002. Her second book, Rethinking the Masters of Comparative Law, is a cultural history of Comparative Law presented through its canonical figures. Her third book, Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge, brings together lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists and historians of science. Professor Riles has conducted legal and anthropological research in China, Japan and the Pacific and speaks Chinese, Japanese, French, and Fijian. She was recently featured in the Cornell Chronicle. She also writes about financial markets regulation on her blog, collateralknowledge.com.

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