As a researcher, I think a lot about money and technology, financial well-being and financial justice, organizational design and institution-building, work and exhaustion, material cultures of trust and accountability, marketplace infrastructures, disintermediation ideologies, colonial and postcolonial histories of law, sovereignty, and value, statistical and non-statistical evaluation in baseball scouting cultures, speculative and science fiction, street dogs, and 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 and Co-op Solutions, 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.