Papers by Jorge Núñez
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Dec 3, 2021
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
FLACSO, Quito, 2006
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Anthropology News, 2018
Last year, our small group of three anthropologists trained in the United States and Great Britai... more Last year, our small group of three anthropologists trained in the United States and Great Britain decided to attempt a rare professional move: to forego participating in the more normative, individualized pursuit of tenure-track work in the global North in order to create a novel space of team-oriented scholarly production in Ecuador—a country we call home. Our decision was admittedly somewhat frightening; not seeking tenure-track work or affiliations with academically better-known universities, colleges, or research centers is often viewed as tantamount to rejecting one’s disciplinary conventions. Unfortunately, North-centric labor conventions or expectations are rather commonplace in academia, even within a patently internationalist or comparativist discipline such as anthropology. Nevertheless, in the current and increasingly global context of academic labor precarity, what we call “mobile research teams” can carve out rewarding and highly innovative academic spaces—often vis-à-vis unlikely partnerships or unexpected national contexts.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cultural Anthropology, 2017
This article concerns itself with financial traders in Spain who have been diagnosed with gamblin... more This article concerns itself with financial traders in Spain who have been diagnosed with gambling disorder. It analyzes what I call the clinical economy of speculation, in which the category of problem gambler is repurposed to draw new lines around proper financial trading. In exploring the expansion of post–financial crisis regulatory mechanisms for credit and debt, as well as widening inequalities across the field of investment, I depict how both traders and clinicians become invested in medicalizing trading as gambling disorder. My theorizing interrogates whether and why common speculative practices are seen as sick and unsafe when everyday people, instead of banks and other financial institutions, perform them. I argue that the pathologized trader is an attempt to regulate, at the individual level, the increasing use of borrowed capital to make financial profits. The commodification of debt, however, is not a gender-neutral development. Female traders pay a greater price for ve...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
JRAI - Virtual Issue, 2021
One central demand is that anthropology needs more collaborative authorship and symmetric engagem... more One central demand is that anthropology needs more collaborative authorship and symmetric engagement with ethnographic interlocutors and minoritized scholars (Kennemore & Postero 2021). Partly as an engagement with these calls, but also due to changing requirements of funders, anthropologists today often participate in large interdisciplinary and transnational research teams. Yet, balanced collaboration and authorship are difficult, especially when pursued with international partners in the Global South and junior postdocs in the Global North. This essay interrogates the anthropological record in the JRAI as a way to contextualize this new push for anthropological collaboration. The selected articles offer comparative and critical lenses on anthropological collaboration by asking how decolonial perspectives fit within market-driven academic spaces, where neoliberal rules have dramatically impacted the ways in which academia operates.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Íconos - Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 2014
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cultural Anthropology , 2017
This article concerns itself with financial traders in Spain who have been diagnosed
with gambli... more This article concerns itself with financial traders in Spain who have been diagnosed
with gambling disorder. It analyzes what I call the clinical economy of speculation,
in which the category of problem gambler is repurposed to draw new lines
around proper financial trading. In exploring the expansion of post–financial crisis
regulatory mechanisms for credit and debt, as well as widening inequalities across
the field of investment, I depict how both traders and clinicians become invested in
medicalizing trading as gambling disorder. My theorizing interrogates whether and
why common speculative practices are seen as sick and unsafe when everyday people,
instead of banks and other financial institutions, perform them. I argue that the
pathologized trader is an attempt to regulate, at the individual level, the increasing
use of borrowed capital to make financial profits. The commodification of debt,
however, is not a gender-neutral development. Female traders pay a greater price for
venturing into the heights of finance. This focus on gender brings into view the
redefinition of credit and debt within the domain of trading, and shows the role of
debt-fueled financial speculation in the expansion of financial markets. These ethnographic findings are particularly relevant in a country like Spain, where the Great
Recession has bred more new millionaires than ever before, even as the smaller fish
of the economy are being medicalized and sometimes even incarcerated.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Books by Jorge Núñez
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Articles by Jorge Núñez
Journal of Cultural Economy , 2023
During a period of pro-independence mass mobilizations and diminishing financial confidence, the ... more During a period of pro-independence mass mobilizations and diminishing financial confidence, the government of Catalonia attached a traditional idea of the rural household to its market in public debt. This article analyzes how nationalistic understandings of household are mobilized to support the struggle for independence and promote austerity policies. It also examines how an ethos of Catalan kinship drives the expansion of the household frontier of finance into the political imagination of the nation. The ethnographic story of this article is about a bond that transferred 30 percent of the region's public liabilities from institutional investors to Catalan households between 2010 and 2014. I trace out the commercial life of this bond from government offices to bank branches to a small rural town near Barcelona. This approach to financialization shows that the reconstitution of the household as another sphere of market relations has been reoriented after the 2008 financial crisis. My main argument suggests that the financialization of the household in Spain facilitates the making of a financial frontier for Catalonia in which widespread fiscal discontent is transformed into political capital.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Engaging Science, Technology, & Society, 2022
In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon T... more In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon Traweek was awarded the society's John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Langdon Winner. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. This is a reflection on Traweek's work on epistemic authority in relation to Kaleidos-Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography in Ecuador.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cultural Anthropology , 2017
This article concerns itself with financial traders in Spain who have been diagnosed with gamblin... more This article concerns itself with financial traders in Spain who have been diagnosed with gambling disorder. It analyzes what I call the clinical economy of speculation, in which the category of problem gambler is repurposed to draw new lines around proper financial trading. In exploring the expansion of post–financial crisis regulatory mechanisms for credit and debt, as well as widening inequalities across the field of investment, I depict how both traders and clinicians become invested in medicalizing trading as gambling disorder. My theorizing interrogates whether and
why common speculative practices are seen as sick and unsafe when everyday people, instead of banks and other financial institutions, perform them. I argue that the pathologized trader is an attempt to regulate, at the individual level, the increasing use of borrowed capital to make financial profits. The commodification of debt, however, is not a gender-neutral development. Female traders pay a greater price for venturing into the heights of finance. This focus on gender brings into view the redefinition of credit and debt within the domain of trading, and shows the role of debt-fueled financial speculation in the expansion of financial markets. These ethnographic findings are particularly relevant in a country like Spain, where the Great Recession has bred more new millionaires than ever before, even as the smaller fish of the economy are being medicalized and sometimes even incarcerated.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Economic Anthropology , 2020
This article analyzes nonprofessional trading in derivatives during the Great Spanish Recession. ... more This article analyzes nonprofessional trading in derivatives during the Great Spanish Recession. It depicts playful engagements with speculative forms of credit and debt on the part of everyday people facing mass unemployment. The article calls into question contemporary theories of debt that characterize it as inherently destructive or inherently productive. My main argument suggests that credit‐debt dyads are constant sites of manipulation, negotiation, and improvisation informed by multiple registers of affect, knowledge, and value. In showing how play and playfulness arise in the field of finance, my research sheds light on extractive business models that exploit socioeconomic uncertainties as well as labor reforms advanced in times of recession. My ethnography traverses a variety of social terrains ranging from social media to brokerage firms, trading courses, stock exchanges, and self‐help workshops in order to complicate further the anthropological work on financialization. Without denying the negative and damaging effects of financialization, I focus on the contradictory ways in which ordinary citizens become financial subjects.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Member Voices, Fieldsights, 2020
In this short essay, we approach the October 2019 protests in light of what Covid-19 illuminates ... more In this short essay, we approach the October 2019 protests in light of what Covid-19 illuminates regarding renewed global activisms as well as citizen mobilizations in Ecuador. Here, these mobilizations are connected to three decades of Indigenous political struggle against inequality and discrimination, feminist and LGBTQ+ demands for diversity and democracy, and student and labor union responses to neoliberalism and authoritarianism. By approaching the October 2019 protests in this manner, we ask how Covid-19 may retroactively show the ways in which the October protests were embedded in a system of political and economic instability based on new forms of capital accumulation, the dismantling of public institutions, and a regression in civil rights. What does Covid-19 reveal about the October protests? And what might these protests teach us about the Ecuadorian government’s current approach to the pandemic?
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Short Papers by Jorge Núñez
NACLA , 2022
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Allegra Lab, 2021
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Papers by Jorge Núñez
with gambling disorder. It analyzes what I call the clinical economy of speculation,
in which the category of problem gambler is repurposed to draw new lines
around proper financial trading. In exploring the expansion of post–financial crisis
regulatory mechanisms for credit and debt, as well as widening inequalities across
the field of investment, I depict how both traders and clinicians become invested in
medicalizing trading as gambling disorder. My theorizing interrogates whether and
why common speculative practices are seen as sick and unsafe when everyday people,
instead of banks and other financial institutions, perform them. I argue that the
pathologized trader is an attempt to regulate, at the individual level, the increasing
use of borrowed capital to make financial profits. The commodification of debt,
however, is not a gender-neutral development. Female traders pay a greater price for
venturing into the heights of finance. This focus on gender brings into view the
redefinition of credit and debt within the domain of trading, and shows the role of
debt-fueled financial speculation in the expansion of financial markets. These ethnographic findings are particularly relevant in a country like Spain, where the Great
Recession has bred more new millionaires than ever before, even as the smaller fish
of the economy are being medicalized and sometimes even incarcerated.
Books by Jorge Núñez
Articles by Jorge Núñez
why common speculative practices are seen as sick and unsafe when everyday people, instead of banks and other financial institutions, perform them. I argue that the pathologized trader is an attempt to regulate, at the individual level, the increasing use of borrowed capital to make financial profits. The commodification of debt, however, is not a gender-neutral development. Female traders pay a greater price for venturing into the heights of finance. This focus on gender brings into view the redefinition of credit and debt within the domain of trading, and shows the role of debt-fueled financial speculation in the expansion of financial markets. These ethnographic findings are particularly relevant in a country like Spain, where the Great Recession has bred more new millionaires than ever before, even as the smaller fish of the economy are being medicalized and sometimes even incarcerated.
Short Papers by Jorge Núñez
with gambling disorder. It analyzes what I call the clinical economy of speculation,
in which the category of problem gambler is repurposed to draw new lines
around proper financial trading. In exploring the expansion of post–financial crisis
regulatory mechanisms for credit and debt, as well as widening inequalities across
the field of investment, I depict how both traders and clinicians become invested in
medicalizing trading as gambling disorder. My theorizing interrogates whether and
why common speculative practices are seen as sick and unsafe when everyday people,
instead of banks and other financial institutions, perform them. I argue that the
pathologized trader is an attempt to regulate, at the individual level, the increasing
use of borrowed capital to make financial profits. The commodification of debt,
however, is not a gender-neutral development. Female traders pay a greater price for
venturing into the heights of finance. This focus on gender brings into view the
redefinition of credit and debt within the domain of trading, and shows the role of
debt-fueled financial speculation in the expansion of financial markets. These ethnographic findings are particularly relevant in a country like Spain, where the Great
Recession has bred more new millionaires than ever before, even as the smaller fish
of the economy are being medicalized and sometimes even incarcerated.
why common speculative practices are seen as sick and unsafe when everyday people, instead of banks and other financial institutions, perform them. I argue that the pathologized trader is an attempt to regulate, at the individual level, the increasing use of borrowed capital to make financial profits. The commodification of debt, however, is not a gender-neutral development. Female traders pay a greater price for venturing into the heights of finance. This focus on gender brings into view the redefinition of credit and debt within the domain of trading, and shows the role of debt-fueled financial speculation in the expansion of financial markets. These ethnographic findings are particularly relevant in a country like Spain, where the Great Recession has bred more new millionaires than ever before, even as the smaller fish of the economy are being medicalized and sometimes even incarcerated.