HUMA & IMTFI Book Launch (4/19) Disrupting Africa: Technology, Law, and Development

Join us! This Monday (4/19) 9amPT/12pmET/6pmSAST
HUMA-IMTFI book talk of the forthcoming Disrupting Africa: Technology, Law, and Development by Funmi Arewa, published with Cambridge University Press

Disrupting Africa: Technology, Law, and Development

"Elites, Ornamentation, and Future Visions" with Olufunmilayo B. Arewa 

Monday 19 April 9amPT/12pmET/6pmSAST

Register: https://uct-za.zoom.us/j/97775121915

Introductory Remarks

Divine Fuh, HUMA Director

Panelists

Olufunmilayo B. Arewa, Temple University Beasley School of Law

Bill Maurer, UC Irvine, IMTFI Director

Rogers Orock, University of Witwatersrand

About the book

In the digital era, many African countries sit at the crossroads of a potential future that will be shaped by digital-era technologies with existing laws and institutions constructed under conditions of colonial and post-colonial authoritarian rule. In Disrupting Africa, Olufunmilayo B. Arewa examines this intersection and shows how it encompasses existing and new zones of contestation based on ethnicity, religion, region, age, and other sources of division. Arewa highlights specific collisions between the old and the new, including in the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria, which involved young people engaging with varied digital era technologies who provoked a violent response from rulers threatened by the prospect of political change. Using materials from extensive archival research, Arewa demonstrates how lawmaking and legal processes during and after colonialism continue to frame contexts in which digital technologies are created, implemented, regulated, and used in Africa today.

About the author

Olufunmilayo (“Funmi”) Arewa is the Shusterman Professor of Business and Transactional Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law. She received an M.A. and Ph.D. (Anthropology) from the University of California, Berkeley, an A.M. (Applied Economics) from the University of Michigan, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and an A.B. from Harvard College. Her research focuses on technology, music, film, business, and Africana studies. 

For enquiries and optional readings contact: huma@uct.ac.za or imtfi@uci.edu.

Duo Book Review in American Ethnologist: PAID and Money at the Margins and 4/18 Livestream Book Launch at Ohio University!

by Daivi Rodima-Taylor, Boston University

Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff. Bill Maurer and Lana Swartz, eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. 320 pp. Hardcover $27.95/£22.00. Paperback $17.95/£13.99.

Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Financial Inclusion, and Design. Bill Maurer, Smoki Musaraj, and Ivan Small, eds. New York: Berghahn, 2018. 334 pp. Hardcover $140.00 | £100.00. Paperback $29.50/£21.00.

Paid and Money at the Margins are seminal books—the first organized efforts toward an ethnographically informed study of payment systems. Recent rapid advances in financial technology have diversified payment infrastructures with important implications for how money is valued and transformed or even replaced as a medium of exchange. Emerging payment structures also shape who has access to such forms of exchange across and within national borders, and so we can think of them in terms of inclusion, exclusion, and power. Disruptive digital innovations potentially enable vast unbanked populations to gain access to global financial systems, but the consequences of such inclusion are as yet unclear.

Meanwhile, new sharing economy platforms empower alternative spaces for value creation. Who profits and who loses in such emerging exchange networks are still open questions. These two edited collections explore these issues by focusing on everyday practices, socialities, and materialities around money movement pathways. A sequential examination of the volumes would enable the reader to gain familiarity with historical and comparative perspectives on payment systems and technologies and allow for an informed application of that knowledge to the topics of inclusion and technology design in the financial systems of the Global South.

Read and download the full review on AnthroSource: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/amet.12740

Link to Introduction: Money and Finance at the Margins, which outlines the contributions of the book to the anthropology of money and finance as well as to studies of development and financial inclusion.

In celebration of the affordable paperback publication--Berghahn is offering a 25% discount on the through it's website, code: MAU485. Valid through May 31st:
http://berghahnbooks.com/title/MaurerMoney

***

Join us for a Livestream Book Launch this Thursday! 

Money at the Margins, April 18  

The Center for Law, Justice & Culture presents book launch panel for Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Financial Inclusion, and Design on Thursday, April 18, from 5 to 6:30p.m. in Bentley Hall 124.

The panelists will discuss changes in the socio-cultural meanings of money in various sites across the Global South, and the impact of new forms of money and financial services—such as mobile money and digital government grants—on development and financial inclusion. The book, published by Berghahn Books, is part of The Human Economy series.

The panel features two of the co-editors, Dr. Smoki Musaraj, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and CLJC Faculty Affiliate at Ohio University; and Dr. Ivan Small, Assistant Professor at Central Connecticut State University. Dr. Bill Maurer, Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology; Law; and Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California at Irvine, will join the conversation via Skype.

Money at the Margins considers the impact of new monetary technologies, including mobile money, e-commerce, cash cards, retail credit cards, and more. As these technologies have become increasingly available, the Global South has cautiously embraced these mediums as a potential solution to the issue of financial inclusion. How, if at all, do new forms of dematerialized money impact people’s everyday financial lives? In what way do technologies interact with financial repertoires and other socio-cultural institutions? How do these technologies of financial inclusion shape the global politics and geographies of difference and inequality?

Read full details of the event here: https://www.ohio-forum.com/2019/04/book-launch-money-at-the-margins-april-18/

Watch live or later on A&S TV: https://livestream.com/ohiocas/events/8636574