Yichen Rao
Fall 2023
W2-5 (E15-335)
It is often said that “money makes the world go around”, but what, actually, is money? How do money and other financial technologies mediate our lives in the global world? From cowries to cryptocurrencies, this course examines the material properties, exchange uses and mediating values of money. We will explore commonly encountered perspectives on money’s functions of exchange, payment, storage, and measurement of value. We will complement this with sociological, anthropological, and philosophical understandings of money and the comparative angles about financial technologies in media studies. Through the course materials we will “travel” from Papua New Guinea to the trading floors of London and Chicago. We will ‘visit’ Chinese and Vietnamese communities burning ‘ghost money’ and the machine gamblers in the casinos of Las Vegas. We will also critically examine the changing roles and representations of money in digital fintech platforms such as Robinhood, M-Pesa and Alipay, and in alternative media such as video games and cryptocurrency forums.