Adrian Athique (University of Queensland)

The Embeddedness of Everyday Fintech in Southeast Asia

In this talk, I will begin by exploring the systemic import of transaction platforms as everyday fintech in Asia, where they facilitate simultaneous exchanges across the architecture of mobile Internets. Moving to the grassroots, I will draw attention to the interplay between transaction chains ‘baked in’ to platform ecosystems and ‘plugged in’ transaction chains assembled by users from affordances available across multiple apps. My analysis will emphasize the duality of embeddedness as a concept used to refer both to the insertion of market logics into social relations and to the naturalization of those systems within existing transactional cultures.