Mergers & Acquisitions

Hosted by Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA)

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About the show

SEA’s podcast, Mergers and Acquisitions demonstrates how anthropological and other perspectives can enhance and complicate understandings of economic life and contemporary events. Mergers and Acquisitions hosts interviews with leading economic anthropologists, provides reflection pieces on economic transformations and problems, and serves as a vehicle for new and established scholars to connect with each other. Recognizing that the best ideas and insights are rarely generated alone, Mergers and Acquisitions offers a collective mind-hive for furthering the study of economic life.

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10 recent

September 14, 202630 min

Informality, Gender Roles, and The Trap of Fixed Categories: a conversation with Alba Valenciano-Mañé

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 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. Guest 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.

August 21, 202646 min

Rethinking Informality: a conversation with Alena Ledeneva

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 into informality, exploring how the concept evolved from the study of everyday practices in the Soviet and post-Soviet context into a broader analytical lens for understanding governance, trust, power, and economic life across societies. The episode examines the ambivalences of informality, its porous boundaries with formality, and its capacity to illuminate how people reproduce and transform existing social and political orders. It also reflects how informality could evolve as an analytical category, asking whether it still retains its critical purchase in a rapidly changing world and what new directions may shape the field in the years to come. Guest Alena Ledeneva is a Professor of Politics and Sociology at University College London and founder of the Global Informality Project. She authored a trilogy: Russia’s Economy of Favours (1998), How Russia Really Works (2006), and Can Russia Modernize? (2013) and edited three volumes of The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality (2018; 2024). Alongside her academic work, she is a conceptual, mixed-media artist working on informal power and social complexity. In 2019, she participated in the Palace of Ritual, parallel program of the 58th Venice Biennale, at Palazzo Donà Brusa, San Polo. Her first solo exhibition The System Made Me Do It took place at the Galerie de Buci in Paris (2024). Her performances are available at www.alenaledeneva.com. Hosts 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. 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 (EC/MSCA-DN Grant Agreement ID 101073394), 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.

August 18, 20261 hr 15 min

Pastoral Change in a Globalizing World: a conversation with Dawn Chatty and Peter Little

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-hosts engage prominent senior anthropologists and globally recognized experts in pastoralism, Drs. Dawn Chatty and Peter Little, in a long range discussion of how pastoralists have both impacted and been impacted by globalizing processes. In this panel, the hosts and our guests discuss global commodity markets, conservation, state-making, and an array of other pressures and forces impacting the livelihoods of pastoralists around the world. They also consider the future of pastoralism and the relevance of pastoral research for economic anthropology. Guests: Dr. Dawn Chatty, Fellow of the British Academy, Professor of Anthropology and Forced Migration, University of Oxford Dr. Peter Little, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Program in Development Studies, Emory University 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.

July 21, 20261 hr 4 min

Financialization of energy vulnerability in Palestine: a conversation with Tareq Radi

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. Episode 3 In the third and final episode of this miniseries, Tareq Radi outlines the struggle for the future through the financialization of Palestinian electricity sector that links capitalist speculation and disciplining. He analyzes the Palestine Real Estate and Investment Company’s (PRICO) solar project in Gaza, promoted by the World Bank, using a critical reading of finance reports against historical and current fights for freedom across Palestine. Tareq relates the connections between cyclical waves of colonial interventions to financial instruments and data gathering in times of extreme violence. He talks about how vulnerability becomes a node of investment for private profit that socializes risk, using innovative concepts like “social rate of return,” decoupled from social improvement, and how economic status such as “credit worthiness” is used as an indicator of sovereign capabilities. Guest Tareq Radi is a Palestinian scholar in exile. He is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and History at UC Merced as well as the Department of Media & Cultural Studies at UC Riverside. Rooted in Palestinian and Black Feminist thought, Indigenous anti-imperialism, and Marxist geography, Tareq is writing his first book, Mortgaged Futures: Financial Intimacies of Turtle Island, Palestine, and the Philippines. Mortgaged Futures charts the history of debt-fueled imperial expansion in Palestine within a larger constellation of state-led, race-making practices and technologies of Indigenous dispossession. 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.”

June 24, 202654 min

Imperialist production of solar energy in India: a conversation with Denise Fernandes

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.”

May 22, 202644 min

Green financing as myth making in Chile: a conversation with Fernando Leiva

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 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. Episode Summary In the first episode of this quarterly series, Fernando Leiva talks about his mapping of the finance-extractivism-climate-change-energy transition nexus focused on Chile, his country of origin. He identifies four areas of research into green financing as a material and cultural project : 1) the depolitization of climate change, veiling its true causes of this crisis; 2) the impacts of carbonization by dispossession and the concentration of wealth; 3) the further subordination of public policy to de-risking investments; and 4) the financialization of nature itself. Leiva presents his bestiario (bestiary) and chronology of financial products as an entry point to analyze the interactions between discourses and power relations in Chile, the birthplace of neoliberalism and other sociopolitical experiments in the last 50 years, and now a leader in the green finance economy. In his view, green finance is also a hegemonic myth project that presents the private sector as the social actor of the future, in an unequal field of cultural creation, against communities betting on collective forms of life. Leiva argues that critical scholarship is needed in these cultural battles of meaning making for the future. Guest 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 Developmen t (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.” 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.”

April 6, 2026Episode 41 hr 5 min

Ventures and Virtues of Crypto: A Conversation with Wei Shi Khai and QZ

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. Final Episode At a moment of industry soul-searching, host Al Lim sits down with venture investors Wei Shi Khai and Qing Ze (QZ) to take stock of crypto from Singapore and Asia. The conversation traces a long arc: from early idealism through hyper-speculation to today’s pragmatism, asking how practitioners make sense of crypto’s shifting meanings and futures. Topics range from privacy and censorship resistance to regulation, infrastructure, AI, and Singaporean governing logics, through to the role of anthropologists from an industry perspective. What does it mean to build in an industry that prides itself on being “the biggest collection of misfits,” and what might the future hold? Guests 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. Series Host 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.

March 11, 20261 hr 3 min

From Everyday Crypto Speculation to its Geopolitics: In Conversation with Wesam Hassan and Antulio Rosales

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. Episode 2 Guests: 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: 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 Urban Geography, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 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.

February 3, 20261 hr 3 min

Ethnography, Crypto, and AI: A Conversation with Koray Çalışkan and Annaliese Merfield

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 In the first episode of “Crypto Through the Years,” host Al Lim speaks with Koray Çalışkan and Anneliese Merfield about crypto as more than just another form of money, framing it instead as “data money” (Çalışkan 2023) or a dynamic set of experiments embedded in infrastructures and communities. The episode traces crypto’s trajectory from Bitcoin and Ethereum’s origins to its applications in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), situating crypto as a store of value and tool for political critique. The episode also looks ahead to the future with crypto’s growing institutional adoption and bold predictions about its convergence with AI. 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.

October 27, 202559 min

Pastoralism and Social Change in Mongolia: a conversation with our hosts

In this episode, our co-hosts take a deep dive into each other’s research on a broad range of contemporary political and economic changes in Mongolian pastoral lifeways. In particular, they explore: the changing nature of work, gender, and household organization; the impact of social and economic policy on herd management; the connections between the Covid 19 pandemic and the rise of social media; the changing value and meaning of livestock; and the rise of a rights-based discourse in global conversations about pastoralism. About this series: Taking the Pulse of Pastoralism in the 21st Century 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. About our hosts Dan Murphy Dr. Daniel Murphy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Cincinnati. Ariell Ahearn Dr. Ariell Ahearn is a Departmental Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Oxford.