UCLIC Research Seminar Series

From cryptocurrencies to mobile banking apps, and QR codes to facial recognition-enabled payment, digital currencies and financial technologies are changing the ways that we think about and use money. The emergence of various forms of digital money and innovative digital financial services allows stores of value to be created, held, moved, measured, and exchanged in novel ways. Yet the success of these new forms of transactional media is largely dependent on the ways that users come to agree on them as useful and credible as viable forms of exchange, and on how they support the ways that their users interact around them and make sense of their ongoing transactional progress. The focus of this seminar lies in ordinary financial interactions: the kinds of consumer payments that are routinely made in everyday transactions, in shops, bars, restaurants, and hairdressing salons. Using data from fieldwork in the UK and China, the presentation will explore the rich forms of interactional work that take place around the use of money and opportunities for design in making financial transactions.