Speakers
- Michael Ralph
- New York University, Associate Professor
Michael Ralph teaches in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the School of Medicine at New York University. His research integrates political science, economics, history, and medical anthropology through an explicit focus on debt, slavery, insurance, forensics, and incarceration. His 2015 University of Chicago Press book, Forensics of Capital, explores how Senegalese people determine who owes what to whom, in daily interactions and in geopolitics. In showing how discourses on debt are used to assess social standing, he traces how Senegal became a leader of political and economic reform in Africa. I treat forensics as a theory of capital as well as a theory of sovereignty that explains how people adjust social standing based on whether they receive payment for outstanding goods and services, as well as for crimes and offenses. The main argument of Forensics of Capital is that the social profile of an individual or country is a credit profile as well as a forensic profile. He is currently at work on two books that center on slavery, insurance, and incarceration.