Dr. Ferda Nur Demirci is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Economic Experimentation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Her research explores the intersections of financial inclusion policies, resource extraction economies, authoritarian state practices and shifting kinship obligations, with a particular focus on cycles of indebtedness among working-class families in Turkey. Her dissertation, “Rescaling Family and Intimacy via Indebtedness in the Soma Coal Basin,” employs “indebtedness” as a novel analytical lens, emphasizing moral-transactional dimensions of monetary indebtedness within gender and kinship obligations. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, her work further examines emerging forms of national financial belonging in a globally financialized landscape, with attention to Turkey’s long history of financial dependency, dating back to the Ottoman Empire, which continues to inform authoritarian financial inclusion policies today.
Dr. Mohammad Ashraful Mobin is Assistant Professor of Finance at the International Islamic University Malaysia. His research examines money, finance, and technology from Islamic and comparative perspectives, with a focus on fintech innovation, monetary ethics, and sustainable finance. He has previously served as a Research Specialist at the Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB) and as a Research Scientist at Universiti Teknologi Petronas. In addition to his academic and research roles, he is the founder of Ifintell, a Malaysia-based research and analytics firm that he has expanded to the Middle Eastern and North American markets. Dr. Mobin has published on Islamic finance, fintech, and development in journals and edited volumes, and his current projects explore Islamic approaches to digital currencies and the future of money.
Marlena Rycombel, a PhD candidate at the University of Warsaw, is primarily interested in the techno-economic imagination of social movements, with multi-sited ethnography as her preferred research method. Her doctoral thesis titled “Between Nostalgia, Utopia, and the End of the World – Visions of the Future among Activists for Local Currencies” is funded by a grant from the National Science Centre. It compares three local currency systems: the Polish movement Zielony (The Greener), Brixton Pound in London, and La Monnaie Léman in Geneva. The latter two incorporate blockchain technology to support their aspirations, creating cryptocurrencies with social and localist purposes. She was a visiting scholar and research associate at the Counter Currency Laboratory in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria (2021). This experience enabled her to explore the roots of modern local currency movements and significantly enriched the context of her research on economic imagination.