Mergers & Acquisitions

Rethinking Informality, Episode 2

In the second episode of Rethinking Informality, hosts Marta Massera and Daniela D’Urso are joined by Alba Valenciano-Mañé, social anthropologist and historian at Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, whose long-term ethnographic research with women traders in Equatorial Guinea has shaped a distinctive approach to the study of informal economies and practices. The conversation traces Al...

Series: Rethinking Informality

Episode 1
In the first episode of “Rethinking Informality”, hosts Miria Gambardella and Daniela D’Urso (MSCA PRESILIENT) are joined by Alena Ledeneva, political sociologist at UCL and founder of the Global Informality Project, whose work has fundamentally reshaped the comparative study of informal practices. The conversation retraces Ledeneva’s intellectual journey...

Series Summary
Pastoralists face the dual challenge of a rapidly changing climate and the transformative potential of global capitalism. In this series, we check in with interdisciplinary scholars who are working with pastoralists from around the world in diverse political, economic, and cultural settings to assess current challenges and the future viability of these complex livelihoods.

Episode 2
In this episode, our co-ho...

Series Summary
This series brings together scholars researching the relationship between green finance, and the everyday experiences of violence and solidarity across the world. Green finance, the various models of loans and investments that ostensibly support mitigation and adaptation to climate change, is promoted by international bodies such as the United Nations and the World Bank. However, the abstraction of this language ...

Series Summary

This series brings together scholars researching the relationship between green finance, and the everyday experiences of violence and solidarity across the world. Green finance, the various models of loans and investments that ostensibly support mitigation and adaptation to climate change, is promoted by international bodies such as the United Nations and the World Bank. However, the abstraction of this language and ...

New Series: Grounding the Green Financing

Series Summary
This series brings together scholars researching the relationship between green finance, and the everyday experiences of violence and solidarity across the world. Green finance, understood as various models of loans and investments that ostensibly support mitigation and adaptation to climate change, is promoted by international bodies such as the United Nations a...

Series Summary
The series brings together anthropologists, researchers, and practitioners to examine crypto as it unfolds across time and place. We follow crypto through its successive cycles, from early experimentation and speculative booms to moments of crash. These episodes highlight the value of an ethnographic lens to research the volatile landscape of crypto, showing how ideas of value, risk and trust are continuously rew...

Why do everyday people buy or trade crypto? And how do states regulate or even use it themselves? Host Al Lim speaks with Wesam Hassan and Antulio Rosales about the practices and politics of crypto in Turkey and Latin America. In places facing acute and overlapping crises, such as Argentina and Turkey, high inflation and currency instability have driven widespread crypto adoption as people seek ways to hedge against inflation, spec...

Series Summary

The series brings together anthropologists, researchers, and practitioners to examine crypto as it unfolds across time and place. We follow crypto through its successive cycles, from early experimentation and speculative booms to moments of crash. These episodes highlight the value of an ethnographic lens to research the volatile landscape of crypto, showing how ideas of value, risk and trust are continuously reworke...