Treating technologies as social worlds that both shape—and are shaped by—how we live, what we value, and what kinds of futures we imagine.
My scholarship focuses on the social life of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. While blockchain in finance promises “trustless” money and the democratisation of finance, my research shows how these systems remain deeply social, reintroducing new power structures and organising participation through imaginaries, everyday rituals, and cultural norms.
I am particularly excited about the following topic areas:
Digital Economies
What keeps people coming back to specific financial platforms, but not others?
My research focuses on how digital economies hold together, not just through incentives or technology, but through social ties, identity, and boundary-making in peer-to-peer blockchain systems.
Gamification & Finance
What makes money fun?
Profit and pleasure have long been intertwined in finance—from early markets to crypto trading today. Rather than asking how investing can be made more “fun”, I use gamification as an analytic lens to study motivation. What does gamified engagement tell us about our relationship to money and the world?
Knowledge-Making
Who gets to produce legitimate knowledge?
Cryptocurrencies and their communities are often dismissed as mere hype. I study how critique determines what we come to see as legitimate, and what gets ignored. How do the questions we ask shape the kinds of insights we can produce—and the futures we imagine?