What Is OIKOS?

 

OIKOS is an interdisciplinary working group for the study of kinship and economy. The group organizes reading groups, research workshops, and public talks.

OIKOS reading groups invite scholars and students to discuss classic texts on family and economy (from Aristotle and Xenophon to Confucius and Mencius); social and political theories of domestic and economic spheres; and historical, ethnographic, and sociological case studies of how gender and kinship structure circulations of value.

OIKOS workshop participants present new research on gender, kinship, sexuality, and money. Topics include financial products as tools of mediation between households and financial industries; network marketing as corporate forms built through religious affiliations; second-world women as managers of household wealth and investors in financial services; debt and accumulation as legal forms built around joint persons, from couples to families to corporations.

Our lecture series brings scholars and cultural analysts to NYU to discuss the history and future of kinship economics. Relevant topics include structuring forms of connection and separation between family and firm, home and market, as well as social practices, technologies, media genres, corporate forms, legal procedures, and financial instruments.

 

Organizers

 

Kelli Moore

Angela Wu

Lily Chumley

Erica Robles Anderson