Cultures of Speculation is composed of three projects, each examining one key field particularly relevant to post-financial crisis developments: new popular investing, flexible work, and infrastructural planning.
Tanushree Kaushal's current research examines the making of the state as a platform, digital financial infrastructures, and credit economies in India and Brazil, with a focus on shifting developmental imaginaries and their implications for democratic participation and citizenship. Grounded in feminist political economy, economic anthropology, and postcolonial studies of capitalism, her work draws on ethnographies of fintech, photo elicitation, interviews, and financial data analysis to trace the transforming nature of credit and the state. She holds a PhD summa cum laude from the Geneva Graduate Institute, and has taught on racial capitalism, gender and development, and the politics of global capital at Bern and Geneva. She has also held visiting fellowships at the University of Edinburgh and the Centre de Sciences Humaines in New Delhi.
Yara Küng's doctoral research within the project Cultures of Speculation explores the interconnections between seasonal labour, migration, digitalisation, flexibilisation, and climate change, using the hospitality sector of the Swiss Alps as a starting point for broader anthropological inquiry. Their work is situated within economic anthropology, with a particular focus on racial capitalism, neoliberalism, labour, social reproduction, migration, gender, and resistance. Yara holds a Master’s degree in Anthropology of Transnationalism and the State and Gender Studies from the University of Bern, awarded summa cum laude, and a Bachelor’s degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Educational Science from the University of Zurich. Yara is a former member of the Prison Research Group at the University of Bern and has also contributed to the project Children’s Understanding of Well-Being – Global and Local Contexts, a project partly conducted at the University of Zurich. Yara is committed to socially just transformation and draws on decolonial and abolitionist perspectives, as well as queer-feminist research practices.
Giacomo Sartori Veronese's current research in Venezuela examines the (dis)connections between transnational political economy and everyday socio-economic life, focusing on how these relations are mediated through novel financial infrastructures, (post-)colonial formations, and authoritarian statecraft. His empirical interests center on economic transformations at the state-market nexus, from everyday speculation and monetary pluralism to the social life of arbitrage and value extraction, with particular attention to questions of opacity, violence, and temporality. Methodologically, his work also engages with multimodal ethnographic methods and audio-visual production.Giacomo holds an MA in Social Anthropology from the University of Oslo, where he specialized in global political economy. His previous research examined the intersections of smuggling, sovereignty, and terror in the Kurdish borderlands of Turkey and Iraq. Prior to his graduate studies, Giacomo completed a bachelor's degree in Amsterdam, developing an interdisciplinary background in macroeconomics and finance, conflict studies, and visual anthropology.
Stefan Leins is the Principal Investigator of Cultures of Speculation. He is Professor of Social Anthropology with a focus on economic anthropology and conducts research on commodity trading, supply chains, financial markets, sustainable investing, and the social role of economic expertise. His book Stories of Capitalism: Inside the Role of Financial Analysts was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 and was translated to multiple languages. He is currently working on a book on transnational commodity trading networks and the role of moral orders in financial capitalism. Stefan Leins studied social anthropology, economic and social history and Arabic linguistics and literature at the University of Zurich. He then completed his doctorate at the University of Zurich, was a visiting researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science and taught at the Universities of Liechtenstein, Lucerne, NTNU Trondheim and Zurich. From 2019 to 2024, Stefan Leins was an assistant professor of social anthropology at the University of Konstanz.
