For a number of years, Verena Halsmayer has been studying mathematical models as the central means in the fabrication and circulation of economic knowledge. In particular, she is interested in the relationships between modeling and narrating, between making ‘the economic’ visible and manageable, and between models’ active potential and the kinds of questions they exclude. How these relations turn out depends on the concrete situations in which models—supposedly very efficient tools for both depicting economic phenomena and providing knowledge for intervention—are built, used, extended, reduced, and dismissed. Currently, Verena is working on a book manuscript under contract with Cambridge University Press and based on her dissertation (Modeling, Measuring, and Designing Economic Growth: The Neoclassical Growth Model as a Historical Artifact). Focusing on the period between the 1930s and the 1970s, several episodes from the life of the so-called “Solow model” investigate the interplay between model form, reasoning about growth and development, measurement techniques, and practices of intervention in specific circumstances. The study raises the question: To what extent might granting economic models a history and attending to their temporality open new ground for understanding the various kinds of politics they support?

More recently, Verena started research on the history of political planning and its temporalities. She is interested in the everyday workings and failures of the instruments and techniques that were intended to establish “rational,” “appropriate”—and at the same time “decentralized” and “transparent” decision-making procedures—for democratic control. While technologies in support of decision-making largely presented clear-cut programs for action, the practice of planning was shaped by diverging behavior, heterogenous temporalities, unexpected opposition, administrative routines, and simple disregard. The project follows the tools of planning to various sites apart from federal offices and analyzes the various ways of dealing with them. How are different practices of planning linked to each other? What are the temporal effects of decision-making technologies—regardless of whether they were deemed successful or whether things went differently than planned?

Wider research and teaching interests:

• history of economic knowledge
• models and modeling in the social sciences
• historical and political epistemologies
• theories and practices of planning in the 20th century
• tools and procedures of administering, managing, and organizing