The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

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Description:

These sessions focus on the spatiality and economic geographies of blockchain and cyrpto-currencies (broadly defined). Following the crypto crash of early 2022, cryptocurrencies and their various derivatives are currently experiencing a lull in the speculative fervour that characterised the last five years. They are, however, unlikely to disappear particularly since the underlying technologies and the processes they enable continue to attract significant capital investment. With a handful of notable exceptions (Zook & Grote 2022; Zook & McCanless 2022, Zook & Blankenship 2018, Rella 2020), economic geographers have yet to make significant contributions to debates over cryptocurrencies and related blockchain technologies. Financial geographers have considered blockchain as part of broader techno-spatial transformations of money and finance including but not limited to questions of de- and re-intermediation of financial services (Lai 2020, Wojcik 2020, Lai & Samers 2019) and the geographies of seignioral power (Muellerleile 2020). The distinct political economies of digital platforms (Langley and Leyshon 2020) are an important dynamic in the uneven development of crypto, as are broader infrastructural dynamics (Caliskan 2020, Rella 2021, Power 2019). This raises questions of how and through what institutional/material/discursive spaces crypto markets and economies are being enrolled into more conventional financial economies and the risks of such entanglements (see Allen 2022). In particular, the role of state in regulating, and (re)producing cryptocurrency markets and economies remains a research area needing more attention from geographers (although see Wakefield, Molinari & Grove 2022). Furthermore, while the politics, ideologies, and imaginaries of cryptocurrencies have attracted a great deal of attention in other disciplines (Campbell-Verduyn 2018, Maurer et al. 2016, Golumbia 2016, Eich 2019), the spatial implications of these crypto-politics remain understudied with in Geography.

Non-Presenting Participants