Contributors

Hannah Appel is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. As an economic anthropologist, she is interested in the daily life of capitalism, the private sector in Africa, and the re-emergent dialogue between economics and anthropology. Her research and teaching interests are guided by the economic imagination. Her current book project, Futures: Oil and the Licit Life of Capitalism in Equatorial Guinea, explores the U.S. based oil and gas industry’s efforts to disentangle the production of profit from the frictions of space. She is also developing a second ethnographic project, Pan-African Capital: Finance, Banking, and Economic Self-Fashioning, to continue her inquiry into the licit life of capitalism in Africa’s private sector, and the displacement of how and from where we think about global capitalism. Pan-African Capital is a multi-sited project based on ethnographic work with transnational, African-owned banks and financial institutions on the continent. Finally, she works extensively with ongoing Occupy Wall Street projects, including Strike Debt and the Debt Collective. These projects work to reimagine finance, capitalism, and economic possibilities for our time, and they demand that the tools of critical theory and the anthropology of finance be tested and sharpened in dynamic public praxis.

Lily Chumley is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her work in linguistic and semiotic anthropology focuses on formations of media and material culture, political and commodity aesthetics in China and Taiwan. She is the author of Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Post-Socialist China (Princeton University Press, 2016) and is currently developing a new research project, Gaming the World System: Currency Play at the Bank of China,” which looks at Chinese women’s small-scale currency speculation as a private geopolitics mediated by state-run financial news. She is also an organizer of the OIKOS working group at the Institute for Public Knowledge.

Tao Leigh Goffe is Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. A cultural critic and interdisciplinary scholar, she specializes in the narratives that emerge from histories of imperialism, migration, and globalization. Her interdisciplinary research examines the unfolding relationship between technology, the senses, memory, sexuality, and nature. She teaches these themes in relation to African, Asian, and Caribbean diasporas using DJ’ing as an embodied praxis remixing the senses. She received a PhD in American Studies from Yale University and has held academic positions at New York University, Princeton University, and Hunter College, CUNY. Twitter: @taoleighgoffe

Gökçe Günel is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. Her new book, Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019) focuses on the construction of renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures in the United Arab Emirates, more specifically concentrating on the Masdar City project.

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media, and Social Justice at Lakehead University in Northwest Ontario and Director of the ReImaginging Value Action Lab (RIVAL). He writes articles for both academic and general audiences and is the author of the books Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity, and the Commons (2014), The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (with Alex Khasnabish, 2014), and Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2014). His most recent book, Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization, was published by Pluto in 2018.

Soo-Young Kim is a Lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program, where she teaches about education, equity, and evidence. In her research as an anthropologist she examines the relationship of the economy and the future. Her current book project is an ethnography of how the economy and the future are thought about, acted upon, and experienced in contemporary Greece, where she has conducted fieldwork since 2010. Her newest projects focus on economic statistics and on higher education. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia in 2017, M.A. in Anthropology from the New School in 2009, and B.A. in Classics from Harvard in 2006.

Fabio Mattioli is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne. His research and teaching focuses on the connection between economy and politics, and expecially on the political implications of international finance in peripheral and postsocialist contexts, where he has examined its authoritarian dimensions. More recently, he has been researching the transformations of work regimes caused by the unequal proliferation of financial debt in the construction and fashion industries. Macedonia is his main country of specialization, but he is broadly interested in Southern and Eastern Europe (especially Italy) and Australia (especially Melbourne).

Sarah Muir is co-director of the Unpayable Debt working group and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research is situated at the intersection of linguistic, political-economic, and historical anthropology and grounded in ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Argentina. Thematically, her work examines the practical logics of economic investment, ethical evaluation, and political critique, with a particular focus on financial crisis and social class. Her work has appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, and ANUAC (Journal of the Italian Society of Cultural Anthropology). Her first book, Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

Frances Negrón-Muntaner is co-director of the Unpayable Debt working group. She is a filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar, and professor at Columbia University, where she is the founding director of the Media and Idea Lab and founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive at Columbia’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Among her books and publications are: Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (CHOICE Award, 2004), The Latino Media Gap (2014), and Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism in Native Nations and Latinx America (2017). Her most recent films and art works include Small City, Big Change (2013), Life Outside (2016), and the award-winning Valor y Cambio, an art, digital storytelling and community currency project in Puerto Rico and New York (valorymcambio.org). For her work, Negrón-Muntaner has received several fellowships, including the Ford, Truman, Scripps Howard, Rockefeller, Pew, and Chang-Chavkin. She has been similarly recognized with various awards, including the United Nations’ Rapid Response Media Mechanism designation as a global expert in the areas of mass media and Latin/o American studies (2008); the Lenfest Award, one of Columbia University’s most prestigious recognitions for excellence in teaching and scholarship (2012), an inaugural OZY Educator Award (2017), the Latin American Studies Association’s Frank Bonilla Public Intellectual Award (2019), and the Premio Borimix from the Society for Educational Arts in New York (2019).

Anitra Nelson is Associate Professor at RMIT University in the Centre for Urban Research. Her numerous publications include the book based on her doctoral thesis Marx’s Concept of Money: The God of Commodities (London: Routledge 1999) and co-editing a non-market socialist collection with Frans Timmerman, Life After Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies (London/New York: Pluto Press, 2011). You can find out more about her and her work at her site — https://anitranelson.info/ — and more written material at ResearchGate (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anitra_Nelson).

Gustav Peebles is Associate Professor of Global Studies at the New School for Social Research. Among his research interests are exchange theory; monetary history, theory, and policy; ethnography of the state and the emergent state; history, theory and practice of socialism; black markets and debt. He is the author of The Euro and Its Rivals: Currency and the Construction of a Transnational City (2011).

Michael Ralph is Associate Professor 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. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as well as Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Studies and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. He has served on the editorial boards of Social Text, Souls, Disability Studies Quarterly, Sport in Society, and Cultural Anthropology. At present, he is Editor-in-Chief of Transforming Anthropology, the flagship journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists. He built the multimedia archive, Treasury of Weary Souls, the world’s most comprehensive ledger of insured slaves and is currently writing, producing, and directing an animated musical, Fishing, which explores the ingenuity of people who are incarcerated.

Maria Alejandra Rodriguez Ortiz is a junior at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, majoring in Human Rights. She grew up in Puerto Rico and is a Bard High School Early College Cleveland alumna. While earning an early college education in liberal arts in Ohio, she became strongly interested in studying history, philosophy, law, psychology, film, economics, religion, and human rights. In her senior thesis project, she will explore how personal data can be used to manipulate general and presidential elections in the United States and around the world. She has also volunteered with the grassroots organization Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson, in New York, and she’s interested in advocacy on climate change, academic freedom, global immigration, human rights advocacy, and mental health.  

Jerome Roos is an LSE Fellow in International Political Economy at the Department of International Development of the London School of Economics. His research focuses on the political economy and historical sociology of global capitalism, its crises and its contestation. He holds a dual degree in International Political Economy from Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence. Prior to returning to LSE in January 2018, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology of the University fo Cambridge (2016-2018). His first book, Why Not Default? The Political Economy of Sovereign Debt (Princeton University Press, 2019), charts the long-term historical development of sovereign debt, cross-border lending, and international crisis management. In addition to preparations for a second book project on the making and remkaing of the international economic order, Jerome is currently working on a number of journal articles on the international organization of sovereign debt, the structural power of finance, the historical evolution and distributional consequences of international crisis management, and the early stirrings of what appears to be a new emerging-market debt crisis. Beside this academic work, he regularly contributes to various international media, including Al Jazeera English and BBC World.

Carl Wennerlind is Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University. He specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, with a focus on intellectual history and political economy. He is particularly interested in the historical development of money and credit, as well as attempts to theorize these phenomena. He is the author of Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720 (Harvard University Press, 2011) and A Philosopher’s Economist: Hume and the Rise of Capitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2020). He is currently at work on two books—one on the history of scarcity (tentatively titled Scarcity: Humanity, Nature, and the World of Goods) and one on the formation of a seventeenth-century Swedish discourse on improvement (tentatively titled Atlantis Restored: The Improvement of Nature and Nation in Early Modern Sweden). His research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships including from the NEH, American Philosophical Society, ACLS, Insitute for New Economic Thinking, Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Jason Thomas Wozniak is a Lecturer in the Humanities Department at San José State University. He founded and co-directs the Latin American Philosophy of Education Society (LAPES). He is the author of several articles on education debt, and is currently completing the book manuscript, The Mis-Education of the Indebted Student. He is a co-investigator with Samir Haddad and Ariana González Stokas on an Andrew W. Mellon Critical Theory in the Global South sub-grant: Inventing School/Hacer Escuela. He is also a collaborative researcher for The Debt Collective and serves on the steering committee for the California College for All ballot campaign.