As a researcher, I think a lot about …

  • Money and technology

  • Financial well-being and financial justice

  • Material cultures of trust and accountability

  • Marketplace infrastructures

  • Disintermediation ideologies

  • Organizational design and institution-building

  • Work and exhaustion

  • What makes for a good job

  • Remote work, communication and culture

  • Histories of political economy

  • Colonial and postcolonial histories of law,
    sovereignty, and value

  • Statistical and non-statistical evaluation in
    baseball scouting cultures

  • Speculative and science fiction

  • Street dogs

  • Bureaucracy as a kind of care

I’m especially interested in how people make and maintain alternative economies, from the US credit union movement to Latin American cooperativism.

I'm currently writing a book about solidarity and economy, drawing on fieldwork with urban market vendors, family and neighborhood savings groups, development experts, and government officials in and around Quito, Ecuador. It examines efforts to reimagine "the social" as an alternative to neoliberalism from policy to practice at the height of Latin American left-populist state transformation.

As a public scholar located institutionally somewhere around the edges of the academy, I am keen to pursue experiments in knowledge production, dissemination, and organization—like this webinar series.

I have consulted, contracted, and otherwise collaborated on projects with dozens of credit unions and other financial services providers like Visa, as well as organizations like Samsung, Intel, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the US Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California, and visiting delegations of international legal, finance, and security professionals, including the Chief Justice of Malaysia. 

books

Back to the ‘30s? Repeated Crises of Capitalism, Democracy, and Liberalism. Edited with S. Falls, J. Rayner, and G. Souvlis. London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

A Cultural History of Money in the Modern Age. Edited with D. Pedersen. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.

journal articles & book chapters

“Introduction: Money, Culture, History, and Modernity.” With D. Pedersen. A Cultural History of Money in the Modern Age. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.

“Money and the Everyday: Instability and Inventiveness in the Modern Era.” With J.I. Guyer. A Cultural History of Money in the Modern Age. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.

Social Payments: Innovation, Trust, Bitcoin, and the Sharing Economy. With B. Maurer, L. Swartz, & S. Mainwaring. Theory, Culture & Society, 2017. [prepublication pdf]

Accounts. Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff, 2017. [prepublication pdf]

Riding the Rails of Mobile Payments: Financial Inclusion, Mobile Phones, and Infrastructure. With S.C. Rea, U. Dalinghaus, & B. Maurer. The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography, 2016. [OA version]

"The Problem of Delimitation": Parataxis, Bureaucracy, and Ecuador's Popular and Solidarity Economy. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2015. [prepublication pdf] — awarded the Dolores Cacuango Prize for Best Essay in Ecuadorian Studies

Pliegues de la Economía Popular y Solidaria. El Laberinto de la Moneda y las Finanzas: La Vida Social de la Economía, 2015. [prepublication pdf]

Materiality, Symbol and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money. With B. Maurer. The Psychological Science of Money, 2014. [OA version]

“When Perhaps the Real Problem is Money Itself!": The Practical Materiality of Bitcoin. With B. Maurer & L. Swartz. Social Semiotics, 2013. [OA version]

“Bridges to Cash": Channelling Agency in Mobile Money. With B. Maurer & S.C. Rea. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2013. [OA version] — reprinted in Linguistic and Material Intimacies of Cell Phones, 2018.

The Zombie Bank and the Magic of Finance, or: How to Write a History of Crisis. Journal of Cultural Economy, 2012. [prepublication pdf]

Harvesting Failure from the Field: An Ethnographic Apprenticeship in Coping with the Unexpected. With M. Amrith, J. Johnson, D. Martin, & M. Murawski. Cambridge Anthropology, 2008/2009. [pdf]

working papers

Mobile Money: The First Decade. With S.C. Rea. Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, 2017.

Dollarization, Denomination, and Difference: Rounding Up in Quito, Ecuador. 2017.

essays & reviews

“Trust: A Pragmatics of Social Life?” Allegra, 2022.

“Apocalypse When? Andean World-Turnings in an Era of Neoliberalism, and After.” With R. Colloredo-Mansfeld. The Immanent Frame, 2021.

“Introduction: Speculative Anthropologies.” With R. Anderson, E.L. Backe, E. Reddy, and J. Trombley. Theorizing the Contemporary. Cultural Anthropology website, 2018.

“Invisible City: A Speculative Guide.” Theorizing the Contemporary. Cultural Anthropology website, 2018.

"Give and Take, Part One: Demonetization’s Pragmatics and Politics" and "Give and Take, Part Two: Demonetization and the Pedigrees of Money." With B. Maurer. Hot Spots. Cultural Anthropology website, 2017.

"On Brutal Culture." With D. Umney, D. O'Brien, F. Muniesa, L. Moor, L. McFall, M. Cooper, & P. Campbell. Journal of Cultural Economy, 2017. [pdf]

alt.economy: Strategies, Tensions, Challenges. Journal of Cultural Economy, 2016.

Neoliberalism’s Strange Bedfellows and the Limits of Distribution. Review of Give a Man a Fish, by James Ferguson. Current Anthropology, 2016. [prepublication pdf]

"Ecuador Bans Bitcoin!" A Monetary Mix-Up. King’s Review, October 2015.

Material Histories of Debt and Payment: Assembling the Transactions Archive. With R.J. Kett. Anthropology News, September/October 2013. [pdf]

odds & ends

Outside/Alongside the Academy: A Conversation with Dr. Taylor Nelms. Interview on the podcast Mergers & Acquisitions for the Society for Economic Anthropology, March 2023.

Teaching Cultural Anthropology (Episode 7): Economics and Subsistence. Interview on the podcast Teaching Anthropology for 21st Century Learners on WGMU Radio, February 2022.

Criticism Inside, Alternatives Alongside: Organizing Otherwise to Intervene in Anthropology's Future. An 11-part webinar conversation series, 2021.

A Conversation about Mobile Money and Financial Technologies, with Taylor Nelms and Stephen Rea. Interview on The Human Show, May 2018.

Toying with Our Teleologies: Reflections on What SF Can Do for Anthropology. The Geek Anthropologist, April 2018.

Mobile Money: The First Decade. Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion blog, November 2017.

Olivier Godechot: A Classic Work, in Translation. Journal of Cultural Economy, July 2016. [OA version]

Is It Art? Is It a Hoax? Hedging Precarity and Protecting the Commonfare: An Interview with Akseli Virtanen. Journal of Cultural Economy website, February 2016.

AAA 2015 Preview: Undisciplining Law and Economy. Association for Political and Legal Anthropology website, November 2015.

Bitcoins, Blockchains, and Bolstering e-Payments. Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion blog, April 2015.

Reseña y Discusión de Las Sospechas del Dinero de Ariel Wilkis. Estudios de la Economía, December 2014.

Estudios de la Economía: An Interview with José Ossandón (pdf). Accounts: ASA Economic Sociology Newsletter, Fall 2014.

Immersion: Four Beginnings for an Anthropology of Big Data. Medium, June 2014.

Share Economies on the Rise. Interview on KCUR Kansas City Public Media, May 2014.

Digital Payment Client Uptake Warning Signs and Ways Forward. With B. Maurer, J. Fan, S. Musaraj, I. Small, E. Reddy, & N. Dobson. Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, 2013. [pdf]

An Interview with Michel Anteby (pdf). Accounts: ASA Economic Sociology Newsletter, Fall 2013.

25.000:1. Estudios de la Economía, August 2013.

Economía Popular y Solidaria. Interview with Natalia Aruguete for Página 12, March 2013.

Marketing Finance in the Aftermath of Crisis. Charisma Network, September 2012.

Las Imágenes de la Solidaridad y lo Popular: El Proyecto de Imaginar una Economía Popular y Solidaria en el Ecuador. Estudios de la Economía, August 2012. Reposted on Portal de Economía Solidaria.

Las Formas de la Deuda y la Confianza en un Mercado de Quito, Ecuador. Estudios de la Economía, April 2012.

Conference Encounters: Challenging Boundaries and Rethinking Ethics at the 2008 AAA Annual Meeting. With C. Fouratt & J. Li. Anthropology Today, 2009.