Professor Janet Roitman
Details
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College: Economics Finance & Marketing
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Department: Economics Finance & Marketing
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Campus: City Campus Australia
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janet.roitman@rmit.edu.au
Open to
- Masters Research or PhD student supervision
About
Janet Roitman is a Professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. She is the founder-director of The Platform Economies Research Network (PERN). She is also an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-making and Society (ADM+S) and an Executive Member of the Digital Ethnography Research Center (DERC) at RMIT University.
She serves on the Council of Advisors for the Platform Cooperativism Consortium.
Her research focuses on financial practices, digital technologies, and emergent forms of value.
She has received support from the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, Agence française du développement, the Institute for Public Knowledge, and The National Science Foundation. She is the author of Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton University Press) and Anti-Crisis (Duke University Press). She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Cultural Economy, Cultural Anthropology, Finance & Society, and Platforms & Society.
Academic positions
- University Professor
- New School
- New York, United States
- 2007 – 2022
- Senior Researcher
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique
- Paris, France
- 1999 – 2007
Supervisor projects
- Can moving to a cashless society worsen financial inclusion? A study of 'Indonesia Menuju Cashless Society'
- 12 Jul 2024
Teaching interests
Qualitative Methods
Social Studies of Finance
Introduction to Actor-Network Theory
History and Anthropology of Money
Topics in African Studies
Research interests
Janet Roitman's research focuses on the anthropology of value and the social studies of finance.
She has conducted extensive field research in West and Central Africa.
Her first book, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton University Press), is a study of unregulated commerce on the borders of Nigeria, Cameroon, and Chad that documents emergent forms of economic value and the consequential transformations in state governance.
Her second book, Anti-Crisis (Duke University Press), investigates the concept of crisis as an object of knowledge and social inquiry, demonstrating its significance as foundational for our understanding and management of contemporary practices, taking The Great Recession of 2007-08 as a case study. This study illustrates how crisis narratives divert our attention away from primary, constitutional questions, such as how debt is constituted as a form of value.
Her current research focuses on the role of digital technologies in emergent and frontier financial ecosystems. This research investigates digital platforms, financial technolgies, and the development of new asset classes.
