Stephen Rea and Taylor Nelms: An anthropological conversation about Mobile Money and Financial Technologies

In this episode we talk to Stephen Rea and Taylor Nelms about mobile money and financial apps. Stephen Rea and Taylor Nelms are two anthropologists who work at University of California, Irvine. We talk about their research, people’s relationship/interaction with mobile money, debate ethical concerns and the nature of money itself and much more. We really dive into what mobile money is and the structures, relationships and beliefs built around it.

Stephen C. Rea is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on how digital and mobile technologies intersect with issues of community, labour, and health. He has done extensive ethnographic fieldwork on digital gaming culture in South Korea, and has published on the social and technical infrastructures involved in mobile money for development.

Taylor C. Nelms is an anthropologist and ethnographer of money, technology, bureaucracy, and everyday economic and political life. He has done extensive work in Latin America and the United States on the intersections of money and technology and how they shape the lives and livelihoods of the people who use them.

Stephen and Taylor’s work:
Maurer, Bill, Taylor C. Nelms, and Stephen C. Rea. (2013). “‘Bridges to cash': channeling agency in mobile money.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (1): 52-74.
Rea, Stephen C. and Taylor C. Nelms (2017). “Mobile Money: The First Decade.” Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion working paper. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/574243f9
Rea, Stephen C., Ursula Dalinghaus, Taylor C. Nelms, and Bill Maurer. (2016).
"Riding the Rails of Mobile Payments: Financial Inclusion, Mobile Phones, and Infrastructure." In The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography
Their work can be found on the website of the Future of Money Research Collaborative: https://moneyfutures.org/

Follow their work at:
https://www.stephencrea.com/
http://www.taylornelms.net/ and after our publications, could you include a link to our joint website with the follow line: