ABSTRACT
This article draws on insights from digital media theory and design methodology to contribute to sociological and anthropological understandings of money. It postulates the rise of a new money-form, or rather money-forms, referred to (in the plural) as experience money. The notion of experience money is developed through an analysis of Apple Pay, where I suggest that experience contains both economic and design qualities. Experience, that is, is both a way of thinking about and producing value, and a set of concrete design techniques for realizing such value. Each instance of experience money therefore embodies a distinctive ‘value proposition’ – an experience value, if you will – which forms the basis of differentiation and competition. While there is a vast literature dedicated to troubling and challenging the modern accounts of money and economy in terms of abstraction – from anthropology to economic sociology, social studies of finance or even behavioural economics – experience money poses new challenges for these empirically-nuanced theories of money. Experience money performatively incorporates and recodes the diversity and specificity of money and monetary practices as described by sociologists and anthropologists. It participates in the critique of (modern) money as abstraction, but it by no means does away with abstraction. The article concludes with a reflection on what money’s new relationship to abstraction entails for how we study economy.

CIM Assistant Professor Matt Spencer has been awarded a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship for his project ‘Scaling Trust: An Anthropology of Cyber Security’.

More information coming soon!

Monash Warwick Alliance Catalyst Fund – May 2019 Round

Professor Sarah Pink, Monash University, Emerging Technologies Research Lab (ETLab) and Professor Noortje Marres, University of Warwick, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM), are bringing together the work of two world-leading research units in an innovative project that will produce novel interdisciplinary approaches in futures research, experimentation and impact.

Both groups have pioneered innovative research methodologies for anticipating technological, environmental and social futures. CIM champions an inventive approach to interdisciplinary research which configures new interfaces between fields by combining creative, computational and scientific methodologies. ETLab members pioneer new interdisciplinary methodologies, which combine social science with engineering, IT, design and creative practice to imagine and anticipate futures.

There will be a talk from Dr Paolo Gerbaudo, Senior Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society, Director of the Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London, on Wednesday 20 November, 5–6:30pm. Room to be confirmed.

The title will be: “React: The Public Sphere at the Time of Reactive Media”

Watch this space for further details!

Nerea Calvillo’s project Yellow Dust has been selected to be part of the international exhibition project Eco-Visionaries, which in Matadero Madrid focuses in “Art for a planet in a state of emergency”. In the exhibition forty visionary artists and architects respond to the urgency of the environmental crisis threatening our planet, condemning the situation but first and foremost presenting proposals. Curated by Pedro Gadanho, Mariana Pestana and the Matadero Madrid team, Eco-Visionaries is structured into four themed sections: Disaster, Extinction, Co-existence and Adaptation.

Eco-Visionaries was originally organised by the MAAT (Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnología) in Lisbon (Portugal), Bildmuseet de Umeå (Sweden), House of Electronic Arts (HeK) in Basel (Switzerland) and LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón.

The exhibition is open to the public until 6 October 2019.

http://www.mataderomadrid.org/ficha/10103/eco-visionaries.html

A new paper from Dr Nathaniel Tkacz:

Link to paper

“What’s on your mind?”

These words, subtly greyed out in an input box on the user interface. Inviting users to write over them, replace them, respond. Pitched somewhere between an inquiring friend and a therapist, such is the gentle nudge fuelling content generation on the Facebook platform. What’s on your mind? Consider it a general declaration of the cognitive orientation of contemporary media. An underwhelming apotheosis when contrasted with the World Brains, augmented intellects or man–machine symbioses of days past...

CIM Academics Noortje Marres and Michael Castelle are at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science  (4S) in New Orleans this week.

On September 5, Professor Marres will speak at the Conference's Opening Plenary on Innovations. The other speakers are Maria Belen Albornoz (FLASCO-Ecuador), Lesley Green (University of Cape Town), Shobita Parthasarathy (University of Michigan). In the words of 4S President Kim Fortun (UC Irvine), the Innovations Plenary addresses the following:

To innovate is to move beyond, out of line, skirting predictable directions and outcomes. This is far from straightforward -- imaginatively, analytically and logistically. To innovate means being outside usual frames, working counter-culturally, against intuition and usual method. In many settings, innovation is a matter of great urgency: lives and prosperity depend on it. All too easily, however, innovation serves and even exacerbates entrenched hierarchies of privilege, creating something new but sustaining old structures (of wealth, authority, and so on). Innovation is subject -- even prone -- to capture -- becoming a carrier rather than critique of capital and empire. Innovation can also become an empty ideal, cover for business as usual. Innovation is pursued and promised in industry, government, education and NGOS -- and in scholarly fields like STS. Scholars need and promise to innovate; indeed, their charge is to create “new knowledge.” Their scholarly organizations -- like 4S -- promise to scaffold and help sustain this, though what this looks like in theory and practice often receives little attention.

When the Name for World is Soil - Chair's Plenary Lecture by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference

 https://www.rgs.org/research/annual-international-conference/chair-s-theme/

Royal Geographical Society, London, from Thursday 29 August 2019, 1.10pm

When the word for world is soil. Engaging with the troubles of ecological belonging  

What words shall we invoke to write the troubled Earth? How can we nurture the imagination of caring earthly futures amidst a myriad of ongoing eco-social catastrophes? In her short novel The Word for World is Forest Le Guin tells the story of a peaceful community whose intimate belonging to the forest is threatened by the destructive power of the colonisers. In this tale, harmed forests and soils bear the mark of violence, but also of histories and futures of resistance. Commenting on Le Guin’s fictional worlds, and drawing on my research on contemporary human-soil relations, I approach Earth as soil to speculatively explore what thinking with soils can tell us about the possibilities of ecological belonging in troubled technoscientific worlds. Today’s rise in attention to soils unearths and entangles multi-layered significances – scientific, economic, cultural, aesthetic, affective and political. Engaging with the troubles of ecological belonging brought by any attempt to name “Earth as…” will have to start from acknowledging multiple non-assimilable and conflictive meanings. Imaginaries of human-soil belonging do not need to be reactionary prerogatives, they can also nurture insurgent and hopeful ecological futures.

Chaired by Professor Deborah Dixon (University of Glasgow, UK), who will also serve as discussant. Co-sponsored by Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

CIM assistant professor Michael Dieter will deliver a keynote lecture 'Exit Strategies: Dark Patterns, Interface Critique and the Struggle for Separation' at the 4th Interdisciplinary Summerschool on Privacy held in Nijmegen in the Netherlands on September 2nd: https://isp.cs.ru.nl/2019/programme.php

http://platial19.platialscience.net/

Date and location: University of Warwick, Coventry, 5–6 September 2019.

Places being "the geographical units of lived human life " are an extremely diverse subject, which can only be studied in an interdisciplinary and holistic manner. For this reason, this year's symposium (5 to 6 September, at the University of Warwick) from the PLATIAL series has the motto "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Place". The now finalised programme (see http://platial19.platialscience.net/programme) includes contributions from geography, sociology, psychology, cognitive science and cartography. In this way, the symposium will give a broad and stimulating impetus to the Place community, as well as promote and strengthen interdisciplinary cooperation. In addition to the regular contributions, we are particularly proud of two distinguished keynote addresses: Nigel Thrift (University of Oxford) will give a talk on "Big: The Originality Machine and Place"; Thora Tenbrink (Bangor University) will put "The Language of Place" on the agenda. A panel will further address the issue of a stronger and more sustained promotion of an interdisciplinary research agenda on place. The entire event is highly interactive. In this way, participants can expect a maximum of knowledge gain and networking, which will be further strengthened by a conference dinner. Registrations can be made on the symposium website: http://platial19.platialscience.net/participation. We are looking forward to your participation!