Mergers & Acquisitions
May 17, 2022
Reimaging Money in Kenya: A Conversation with Sibel Kusimba
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In this podcast Jenny speaks with Sibel Kusimba about her book Reimagining Money: Kenya in the Digital Finance Revolution. Sibel explains how digital finance draws upon longstanding practices of reciprocity and exchange in Kenyan society, but she also discusses some of the ways digital money is reconfiguring social lives and relations. Their conversation highlights how anthropological perspectives can enhance understandings of the way money takes on multiple meanings in social life.
More episodes from Mergers & Acquisitions
3 days ago
Feminist Economic Anthropology meets the Multiverse: A conversation with Dr. Caroline Schuster
In this episode, Tanya Matthan speaks with Dr. Caroline Schuster about her research on themes of finance, gender, and development in Paraguay. Dr. Schuster elaborates on the surprising intersections between speculative fiction, feminist anthropology, and graphic novels. In particular, we discuss the inspiration for her forthcoming collaborative graphic ethnography on weather insurance and the challenges and possibilities of building a more accessible and engaged economic anthropology through the medium of comics.
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Dr. Caroline Schuster is Associate Professor at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology; as well as Co-Director of the Australian National Centre for Latin American Studies at the Australian National University. Dr. Schuster’s research interests include value, credit and debt, development policy and NGOs, finance and climate change, gender and kinship with a regional focus on Latin America. Her first book, Social Collateral: women and microfinance in Paraguay’s smuggling economy (University of California Press, 2015) is an ethnographic account of microcredit and collective indebtedness in Paraguay’s triple-frontier with Argentina and Brazil. Her forthcoming book is a graphic novel titled Forecasts: A story of weather and finance at the edge of disaster, along with the illustrators Enrique Bernardou and David Bueno. Her work has been published in a number of journals, including Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Development and Change, to name a few.
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Mar 5, 2023
Outside/Alongside the Academy: A conversation with Dr. Taylor Nelms
In this podcast, Tanya Matthan speaks with Dr. Taylor Nelms about his research within and outside the academy. In particular, we discuss his ongoing research on and with credit unions, and its relationship to his disciplinary training as an economic anthropologist. Dr. Nelms shares his insights on mentorship, graduate school curricula, and the futility of insider/outsider distinctions vis-a-vis the contemporary academy.
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Dr. Taylor C. Nelms is an anthropologist and ethnographer with fifteen years of experience studying money, technology, and banking in the United States, Latin America, and around the world. He is currently the Senior Director of Research at the Filene Research Institute, an independent, non-profit think tank focused on consumer and cooperative finance, especially credit unions. At Filene, Taylor manages a team of researchers and a portfolio of partnerships with leading scholars to pursue research that explores people’s changing economic lives and the business of financial services. Before joining Filene, Taylor worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Irvine, where he received his PhD in Anthropology. He also holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and Ohio State University.
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Jan 31, 2023
Anthropologist “at Home”: A Conversation with Dr. Tami Navarro
In this podcast, Tanya Matthan speaks with Tami Navarro about her research on financialization, development, and racial capitalism in the US Virgin Islands. Dr. Navarro discusses her positionality as an ‘insider’ shapes her work on the economic and social life in the Caribbean which ranges from more traditional academic publishing to co-hosting a podcast on community, storytelling, and diasporic Black feminism. Their conversation addresses the challenges of writing home, working in the neoliberal academy and engaging diverse audiences as well as the value of anthropological lens in these turbulent times.
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A cultural anthropologist, Dr. Tami Navarro is Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies at Drew University. She is a founding member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO) and a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Dr. Navarro is co-host of the podcast, “Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean” and the Co-director of the Transnational Black Feminisms working group at Columbia University. She is the author of Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands (SUNY Press 2021) which has been recognized by the Association for Feminist Anthropology and the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.
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