Mergers & Acquisitions

Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA)
  • 5.0 (7)
  • Society & Culture
  • Bimonthly

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.

  1. Oct 20

    Popular Economies and the Limits of Informality: a conversation with Cristina Cielo and Alioscia Castronovo

    Rethinking Informality, Episode 3: Final Episode 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.   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.   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.

  2. Sep 14

    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.

  3. Aug 21

    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.

  4. Aug 18

    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.

  5. Jul 21

    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.”

  6. Jun 24

    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.”

  7. May 22

    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 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.” 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.”

  8. Apr 6

    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.

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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA)
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    65
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    Copyright © Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA)
  • Show Website
    Mergers & Acquisitions