Mergers & Acquisitions

In the third and final episode of Rethinking Informality, hosts Miria Gambardella and Griet De Lombaerde turn to Latin America and the field of popular economies. They are joined by Cristina Cielo and Alioscia Castronovo, whose work has contributed to critical debates on popular economies, social reproduction, care, self-management, commoning, and popular forms of institutionality. The conversation dives into the limits of ‘informality’ as a category and the popular economy as an alternative to it. It discusses its origins and explores related concepts such as reproduction, value, and the making of economic life, as well as autonomy, commoning, and the ambivalences of popular economies. Finally, it questions what we gain or lose when we abandon the category of ‘informality’. The conversation concludes with some reflections from the guests on how to move forward in the field of economic anthropology.

Guests

Cristina Cielo is a research professor in the Department of Sociology and Gender Studies at FLACSO Ecuador. She explores the subjective and political dimensions of inequalities, with a particular interest in ecologies and economies of the global south. Her research topics include violence and care in extractive logics, transformations in the production of knowledge, and urban-popular politics and economics. Her recent work brings feminist perspectives of expanded reproduction to the study of popular practices that must increasingly negotiate with illicit and militarized organizations and structures, exploring creative responses that reshape possibilities in contexts of dispossession and conflict.

Alioscia Castronovo is an anthropologist and postdoctoral fellow (2024-2026) at Padua University, Italy, PI of the STARS Starting Grants Project “Popular economies in Latin America: urban territories and self organization in Colombia”. He gained a Phd in Urban Studies at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, and Social Anthropology at IDAES UNSAM, Argentina. Co-coordinator of the GT CLACSO “Popular Economies: mapping theory and practices” , member of GSEID UNAL and the Urban Popular Economy Collective, he published in Revista Íconos, ACME, Scienze del Territorio, South Atlantic Quarterly, Public Culture, Tracce Urbane and his first book “Territories of the Common”, for Lettera22 Edizioni, Italy.

Miria Gambardella is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Researcher at the Centro per la Cooperazione Internazionale (CCI) and a PhD candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research explores informal and autonomous economic practices through long-term ethnographic fieldwork with European social movements and Zapatista communities in Chiapas, focusing on the ethics and politics of coffee circulation. She is part of PRESILIENT, a Horizon Europe MSCA Doctoral Network (Grant Agreement ID 101073394) investigating informality through collaborative research globally.

Griet De Lombaerde is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD fellow at the University of Split and part of the Horizon Europe MSCA Doctoral Network PRESILIENT (Grant Agreement ID 101073394) investigating informality through collaborative research globally. Her research focuses on the nexus between environmental migration and the urban informal economy in Bolivia, with special attention for the social and economic implications of migration, displacement, and informality in the cities of La Paz and El Alto.

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 Alba’s intellectual trajectory into informality, from her fieldwork encounters to her positioning within the broader literature on African economies. The episode interrogates the classic tripartite framing of informality – as passive adaptation, resistance, or prefiguration – and asks how this framing shapes, and sometimes distorts, our understanding of women’s agency in informal trade. It also pushes further, moving beyond the formal/informal binary to think in terms of gradients of informality, and how these materialize concretely in Alba’s own fieldwork among second-hand clothing traders in Equatorial Guinea. The conversation closes by turning to how informality is imagined and instrumentalized also outside academia – from the ILO to everyday public discourse – and what that tells us about where the concept stands today.

Alba Valenciano-Mañé is a social anthropologist and historian, currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her work explores the political economy of everyday life in Central Africa, with a long-term focus on Equatorial Guinea. Her research on female second-hand clothing traders and moral economies of redistribution sits alongside broader interests in popular economies, recycling and waste, coloniality, and the political economy of museums. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Barcelona (2017), with a thesis on clothing, circulation, and power in Equatorial Guinea, and was previously a visiting fellow at Hofstra University, the University of Liverpool, and the University of Manchester.

Hosts

Marta Massera is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow completing a doctorate in socio-economics at Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines within the European project PRESILIENT. Her research integrates ethnographic and quantitative methods to bridge everyday practices and broader structural dynamics. Her work examines self-employment in informal economies, gendered labor relations, and food provisioning practices in the Dakar region, Senegal.

Daniela D’Urso is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research assistant at the University of Latvia and PhD student at Ku Leuven. She is part of PRESILIENT, a large network committed to exploring informality in 15 different countries. Her work focuses on urban informality in Morocco, examining how different urban spaces regulate, enable, and shape informal practices.

Episode 1

Miria Gambardella is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Researcher at the Centro per la Cooperazione Internazionale (CCI) and a PhD candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research explores informal and autonomous economic practices through long-term ethnographic fieldwork with European social movements and Zapatista communities in Chiapas, focusing on the ethics and politics of coffee circulation. She is part of PRESILIENT, a Horizon Europe MSCA Doctoral Network (Grant Agreement ID 101073394) investigating informality through collaborative research globally.

Series Summary

Episode 2

Guests:

Hosts:

Dr. Daniel Murphy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Cincinnati.

Dr. Ariell Ahearn is a Departmental Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Oxford.

Series Summary

Episode 3

Guest

Host

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 policies involved obscures the connections to everyday practices of extraction and resistance. This series reinfuses the economics of climate change with people’s histories and agencies. Therefore, anthropologists and adjacent field scholars have a particularly apt skill set for grounding the climate finance discussion in place-based, community-informed explorations across the globe.

In the second episode of the series, Denise Fernandes recounts the global process that solidified a top-down and market-driven approach to climate change action. In her analysis of the Rewa Solar Park in India, Denise weaves together the long history of colonialism, the flow of capital, and science and technologies that produce the “free, clean, and green energy.” As a result of these processes, certain spaces, like the Gurh tehsil, become banjaar zameen (barren lands) amenable to megaprojects backed by green loans from the World Bank, in what Denise describes as American energy imperialism. She also brings art into the energy discussion! From Odetta’s interpretation of Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty,” to her photographic narrative of invisibilized fracking in Colorado Denise shows her interdisciplinary approach. She also discusses her teaching and public press articles, like the ones in The Wire, Article 14, and New Lines Magazine.

Guest

Denise Fernandes is an Assistant Professor of Global Environmental Politics at Whitman College, Washington, USA. She earned her Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her teaching and scholarship focus on renewable energy and fossil fuel landscapes, climate justice, and the reproduction of injustices and inequalities in historically marginalized communities in the Global South. For her Ph.D., she studied the financialization of World Bank-financed solar parks in India. In this work, she investigated the historic narratives and rhetoric that shaped solar decision-making processes during the energy transition in the Global South. She regularly collaborates with artists and journalists to visually portray energy landscapes and the climate crisis, and to enhance the importance of public scholarship within academia.

Host

Jéssica Malinalli Coyotecatl-Contreras is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She holds a PhD in Anthropology (UCSB, 2025) and a Master’s in Social Anthropology (El Colegio de Michoacán, 2013). Her work builds on the knowledge of women and Indigenous communities, at the intersection of the (built) environment, feminist political ecology, and anti-coloniality in the Americas. Her work has been featured in peer-reviewed articles and online pieces for broader audiences. She is currently working on her first manuscript “Volcanic Sustainability: Progressive Fossil Capitalism, Violent Energy Transition, and Indigenous Futurities in Mexico.”

Series Summary

Fernando Leiva is a Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Califprnia, Santa Cruz. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (1998). He is the author of Latin American Neostructuralism: The Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and The Left Hand of Capital: Neoliberalism and the Left in Chile (SUNY Press, 2021). For the last decade, his research deploys a Critical Cultural Political Economy Perspective that examines how semiotic and material practices co-constitute reality. He uses this approach to examine newly emerging strategies with which transnational capital aims to expand the frontiers of extractivism and craft the foundations for a new capitalist hegemonic project anchored on “eco-extractivism.”

Jéssica Malinalli Coyotecatl-Contreras is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She holds a PhD in Anthropology (UCSB, 2025) and a Master’s in Social Anthropology (El Colegio de Michoacán, 2013). Her work builds on the knowledge of women and Indigenous communities, at the intersection of the (built) environment, feminist political ecology, and anti-coloniality in the Americas. Her work has been featured in peer-reviewed articles and online pieces for broader audiences. She is currently working on her first manuscript “Volcanic Sustainability: Progressive Fossil Capitalism, Violent Energy Transition, and Indigenous Futurities in Mexico.” 

Series Summary

Final Episode

Wei Shi Khai is Co-founder and General Partner of LongHash Ventures, with aggregate assets under management of approximately US$100 million since 2021. Shi Khai also co-founded and launched LongHashX, Asia’s first globally focused blockchain accelerator backed by a Singapore sovereign wealth fund. Through LongHashX, he has overseen the acceleration of more than 70 early-stage companies and supported them in raising over US$250 million to date. Prior to LongHash Ventures, he was a consultant at McKinsey & Company in Malaysia, advising C-suite clients across the banking, telecommunications, and energy sectors on strategy, organisational design, and digital transformation. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Imperial College London.

Qing Ze (QZ) is a community builder and investor in the Ethereum ecosystem. Over the past several years, he has been deeply embedded in the space — organizing ETHSingapore, one of Southeast Asia’s flagship Ethereum events, and contributing to ecosystem development at Gitcoin. Building on this foundation, QZ co-founded the Ethereum Ecosystem Fund, a $30M seed-stage venture fund backed by Ethereum pioneers. This fund invests in early-stage projects that advance decentralized infrastructure and programmable financial systems.

Al Lim is an incoming Presidential Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Singapore Management University and a PhD candidate at Yale University, where his doctoral research examines the social ecology of crypto in Thailand. He has published in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Urban Geography, and The Journal of the Siam Society, and holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA (summa cum laude) from Yale-NUS College. He also brings several years of professional experience in the crypto and AI sectors, including venture capital and ecosystem development.

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, speculate, preserve savings, or move money outside traditional financial systems. States also experiment with crypto in their own ways, including using it in transactions involving commodities, such as Venezuelan oil, or in projects like El Salvador’s Bitcoin Beach. From geopolitical dynamics in the wake of Nicolás Maduro’s extraction to questions of religious permissibility amid everyday practices of luck, this episode explores the diverse ways and contradictions through which states and people engage crypto.

Antulio Rosales is a political economy scholar and Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. His research centers around the political economy of development, natural resource extraction, and democracy in Latin America, with special interest in the expansion of cryptocurrencies and their impact on energy infrastructures, the environment and development. Antulio’s current project is concerned with the political and social conditions that lead to expansions and restrictions of cryptocurrency markets in both the Global North and the Global South. His research has appeared in the Review of International Political Economy, Current History, Development and Change, New Political Economy, Energy Research and Social Science, Political Geography, among other journals.

Wesam Hassan is an anthropologist and trained medical doctor whose research lies at the intersection of medical and economic anthropology. Currently, she is a Fellow in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a postdoctoral affiliate at the University of Oxford. She researches uncertainty, temporality, speculation, and risk in contexts of economic and health crises and technological affordances. Wesam completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford, with long-term ethnographic work on gambling, cryptocurrency trading, and moral economies in Turkey’s urban centers amid economic collapse. Her earlier research at the American University in Cairo examined biomedical uncertainty and the governance of HIV-positive subjectivities in Egypt. Her scholarship, published in peer-reviewed journals, investigates how speculative infrastructures mediate survival strategies in precarious futures shaped by ecological, political, and economic crises. Her work has critically examined the moral and material economies of gambling, cryptocurrency and gambling, digital speculation, and healthcare infrastructures, tracing how risk, uncertainty, and future imaginaries are negotiated in contexts of socio-economic crisis. Before returning to academia, she worked for over a decade in public health and humanitarian aid with UN agencies and the third sector.

Series Host:

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 reworked across communities, geographies, and cycles.

Episode 1

Guests:

Koray Çalışkan is an economic sociologist and organizational designer, currently working as a tenured professor at Parsons School of Design, The New School. His work examines how markets, platforms, and economies are made, governed, and redesigned, with a particular focus on digital advertising and AI. He is the author of Market Threads: How Farmers and Traders Create a Global Commodity (Princeton UP) and Data Money: Inside Cryptocurrencies and Their Markets, Communities and Blockchains (Columbia UP), and co-author of Inside Digital Advertising: Platforms, Power, and Material Politics (Polity, with Donald MacKenzie) and Economization: Markets, Platforms, and Ecologies (Columbia UP, forthcoming with Michel Callon and Donald MacKenzie). In 2021, he received the Scientific Breakthrough of the Year Award from the Falling Walls Foundation for his contributions to social science research on cryptocurrencies, blockchains and their communities. His current research focuses on AI integration in digital economies, examining how agentic systems, platform infrastructures, and strategic design are reshaping value creation, production, and exchange across contemporary economies.

Annaliese Merfield is an anthropologist and Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute’s Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. Her research concerns two of the largest cryptocurrency communities—Bitcoin and Ethereum—and the blockchain technologies they have developed.

Series Host:

Al Lim is a PhD candidate in Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Yale University, where his research examines the social ecology of crypto in Thailand. He has published in Environment and Planning E, Urban Geography, and The Journal of the Siam Society, and holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA (summa cum laude) from Yale-NUS College. He also brings several years of professional experience in the crypto and AI sectors, including venture capital and ecosystem development.