May 6, 2024 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Platform Economies: Beyond the North-South Divide Dr. Janet Roitman RMIT University

ABSTRACT: Platform economies are depicted as the foundation for a new era of economic production. This transpires through the incorporation of digital technologies and algorithmic operations into the heart of economic and financial practices. However, different assumptions are made about the effects of digital platforms depending on geographical location. While digital platforms are approached as inherent to processes of financialization globally, they are reduced to processes of financial inclusion when referencing the ‘Global South.’ Analyses of financialization as a one-way-vector – Global North to Global South – overlook variability and the limits to financialization. In contrast, a focus on market devices illustrates the fault lines of value creation that are obscured by the Global North/Global South frame.

BIOGRAPHY: Janet Roitman is Professor at The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Australia). She is Co-Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre, an associate member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-making and Society (ADM+S), and founder-director of The Platform Economies Research Network (PERN). Her research focuses on the anthropology of value and emergent forms of the political. She is the author of Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton University Press) and Anti-Crisis (Duke University Press). She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Cultural Economy, Cultural Anthropology, Finance & Society, and Platforms & Society. Her research has received support from the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, The Institute for Public Knowledge, and The National Science Foundation. 

Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Roitman’s talk.

Please join us on May 20 in Haskell Hall 315 for this year’s Anthropology Undergraduate Symposium, which will showcase the work of graduating fourth years who have completed a BA Thesis for Departmental Honors.