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headshot of Jakob Feinig

Jakob Feinig

Assistant Professor

CCPA Human Development
DC 411

Background

I am a sociologist who interrogates the historically changing politics of money creation in British colonial America and the United States. In a series of articles and a book (Moral Economies of Money, Stanford University Press), I show how that for centuries, large groups understood money creation as a political practice and attempted to redesign the institutions that create money. I also discuss how and why public monetary controversies receded and re-emerged periodically, and show how debate or silence about money creation shaped possibilities for collective life. This historical and theoretical project is grounded in a commitment to democratizing socio-economic life today.

I teach a range of undergraduate and graduate courses on money and debt, human rights, social justice and migration. While factual information is important, I understand teaching above all as a process of familiarizing students with concepts and ways of thinking that may be new to them. I want learners to make their initial commitments more explicit and reconsider everyday lives in their institutional context through various theoretical lenses. I want them to be able to make informed choices about sociological frameworks, adopt or reject these lenses, and use them to analyze situations outside of the classroom.

Education

  • PhD, Binghamton University
  • MA, University of Vienna, Austria
  • DEUG, Marc Bloch University, France

Awards

  • Dissertation Year Fellowship, Binghamton University, 2014
  • Social Science Research Council-DPDF Fellowship, 2008
  • Graduate Scholars' Award, Binghamton University, 2006
  • Fulbright Fellowship, 2006

More Info

Recent Publications

  • Feinig, Jakob. (forthcoming 2022). Moral Economies of Money: Politics and the Monetary Constitution of Society. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.
  • Feinig, Jakob. (forthcoming 2022). "Money, Water, and the Job Guarantee." In Care, Climate and Debt: Transdisciplinary Problems and Possibilities ed. B. Wilson. London: Palgrave.
  • Valayden, Diren, and Jakob Feinig. 2022 (forthcoming). "Humanization as Money: Modern Monetary Theory and the Critique of Race." Humanity 13 (2).
  • Feinig, Jakob. 2022. Feinig, Jakob. 2022."Fünf Thesen zu einer moralischen Ökonomie des Geldes." makronom. [in German]
  • Feinig, Jakob, and Diren Valayden. 2021. "The Pedagogy of the Job Guarantee." Radical Teacher 119 (Spring).
  • Feinig, Jakob. 2020. "Toward a Moral Economy of Money? Money as a Creature of Democracy." Journal of Cultural Economy 13 (5):531-47.
  • Feinig, Jakob. 2020. "Notes on Monetary Institutions in State and Class Formation Processes." Journal of Historical Sociology 33 (4):601-13.
  • Feinig, Jakob. 2018. "Beyond Double Movement and Re-regulation: Polanyi, the Organized Denial of Money Politics, and the Promise of Democratization." Sociological Theory 36 (1):67–87.
  • Feinig, Jakob. 2017. "The Moral Economy of Money between the Gold Standard and the New Deal." Journal of Historical Sociology 20 (2):315–41.