Podcasts Culture Money on the Left Kenya in the Digital Finance Revolution with Sibel Kusimba

Kenya in the Digital Finance Revolution with Sibel Kusimba

Published: June 1, 2021, 4 p.m.

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\u2019s 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 \u201cfinancial inclusion.\u201d 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 \u201cwealth-in-people,\u201d she traces mobile money\u2019s 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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