Event

First Wolf Conference 2025 | Financial Mediation of Quotidian Life

March 21 & 22, 2025

The “newly mobile” and “newly banked” (erstwhile “unbanked”) populations, particularly in the Global South, have been targeted with financial solutions in payment, lending, and insurance by start-up funded fintech companies and super platforms, entangling entire lifeworlds within digital markets and transactions.Telecom companies and state-backed biometric identity schemes enable fintech to authenticate and procure new financial customers. Some have argued that in this new mobilized platform economy across Global North and Global South, value from data sets is not only being extracted but also created afresh. The conference seeks to interrogate the so-called “financialization of everyday life” extending the focus beyond the usual Euro-American instances. Historically, financial logics have often permeated through intimate life and emerging financial media forms and technologies such as e-wallets, portable ATMs, account aggregators, payment platforms and loan apps are changing, and in some cases, intensifying the way financial and risk calculations are incorporated in everyday life. Financial mediation seems to have resulted in expansion of financialization in non-economic sectors (extra economic realms) because of the incentivization of particular behaviors/consumption patterns enabled by clicks, swipes, and other mediated transactions and interactions. What are the terms on which financial participation is being advocated, what forms of social mobilities are projected? Are new vulnerabilities anticipated, and what safeguard measures are in the works? What are the redistributive effects of financial mediation? Should these myriad processes of mediation of everyday life and data-based governance models be framed within narratives and discourses of control, of "data colonialism," of AI empires, of extraction or is there room for contingency, play, resistance, and freedom?
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Friday, March 21 | 401 Fisher-Bennett Hall | Penn Campus

3:30-4:00pm | Opening Remarks | Ian Fleishman (CIMS Chair) and Rahul Mukherjee

4:00-5:45pm | 1st Panel | Sovereignty | Moderator: TBD

Seyram Avle (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Data as collateral and other stories: Fintech, financialization, and datafication in Africa

Bhaskar Sarkar (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Surplus insurance, or, India Stack and the antinomies of financial inclusion

Jing Jing Liu (MacEwan University)
Cryptocurrency and the Social Repair of Middle-Class Political Potency in Nigeria

6:30pm | Welcoming dinner for speakers at the conference to follow
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Saturday, Marc 22 | Class of 1978 Pavilion | Penn campus

10:00-10:30am | Breakfast

10:30am-12:15pm | 2nd Panel | Futures | Moderator: TBD

Finn Brunton (University of California, Davis)
Small Change: Micropayments, Content, Utopia

Rachel O'Dwyer (National College of Art and Design, Dublin)
Disaster Girls. How do young women manage their finances and reconfigure hope in a rapidly changing economy?

John Cheney-Lippold (University of Michigan)
Futures for Sale: Temporal Commodification in Online Sports Betting

12:15-1:30pm | Lunch Reception

1:30-3:15pm | 3rd Panel | Affect | Moderator: TBD

Yuchen Chen (CUNY, Baruch College)
Affective economies of investment-for-immigration between China and the U.S.

Marc Steinberg (Concordia University)
The Incentives of PayPay versus the Convenience of Cash: On Convenience, Retail, and Cashless Payments in Japan

Sibel Kusimba (University of South Florida)
Digital Money as Mediator in Social and Financial Networks in Kenya

3:15-3:30pm | Coffee Break

3:30-5:15pm | 4th Panel | Platforms | Moderator: TBD

Mariel Garcia Llorens (University of California, Davis)
Unbanking the Bank: how Peruvian Banks Platformized Themselves through Mobile Payments

Rahul Mukherjee (University of Pennsylvania)
Intermediation of Lending: Platforms, Mobile Money, and Data Transactions in India

Adrian Athique (University of Queensland)
The Embeddedness of Everyday Fintech in Southeast Asia

5:15-5:30pm | Closing Remarks | TBD

6:30pm | Dinner for speakers at the conference to follow
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The conference, free and open to the public, has been made possible thanks to the Penn Dick Wolf Cinema & Media Studies Fund with the support of the Wolf Humanities Center, the Advanced Research in Global Communication, the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and the South Asia Center. It has been organized by Rahul Mukherjee, Wolf Associate Professor of Cinema & Media Studies, with the assistance of Penn Cinema & Media Studies Nicola M. Gentili, Senior Department Administrator and Associate Director Undergraduate Studies.