Money on the Left
Money on the Left is a monthly, interdisciplinary podcast that reclaims money’s public powers for intersectional politics. Staging critical conversations with leading historians, theorists, organizers, and activists, the show draws upon Modern Monetary Theory and constitutional approaches to money to advance new forms of left critique and practice. It is hosted by William Saas and Scott Ferguson and presented in partnership with Monthly Review magazine. Check out our website: https://moneyontheleft.org Follow us on Bluesky
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Money on the Left
Kenya in the Digital Finance Revolution with Sibel Kusimba
Money on the Left speaks with Sibel Kusimba, Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of South Florida, about her work on mobile money and digital finance in Kenya. In her recently published book with Stanford University Press titled Reimagining Money: Kenya in the Digital Finance Revolution, Kusimba both theorizes and critiques Kenya’s thriving M-Pesa mobile phone-based payment system as a constitutive component of Kenyan social life. In doing so, Kusimba explicitly eschews the postcolonial drive to develop more effective approaches to microloans or means for so-called “financial inclusion.” Instead, she offers a sophisticated culturally embedded analysis of mobile money, informed by her twenty-plus years of ethnographic study and archaeological fieldwork in Kenya. Understanding money as “wealth-in-people,” she traces mobile money’s role in shaping complexly gendered social networks and agencies, while simultaneously underscoring the political injustices of public austerity and privatized payment systems.
Theme music by Hillbilly Motobike.
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