Kirk J Fiereck
Kirk Fiereck, Ph.D., M.P.H. is an anthropologist (Columbia, 2015) of biomedicine and industrial and financial cultures.
He is currently working on two long-term ethnographic research projects. The first translates three-plus years of field research in South Africa into a book-length monograph, “Queer Customs: Race, Sexual Ideology, and HIV Science in South Africa.”
His second project is a multi-sited, global ethnography of what he has termed “biofinance,” which explores the rapid financialization of political economies by examining “the derivativization of multi-species sociality,” which is to say the datafication of human, animal, microbe, and viral populations globally.
Trading financial derivatives contracts creates a massive global market in derivatives by way of datafying commodity prices over time so derivatives can hedge risk through informed speculations, all of which acts to create never before seen levels of connectivity and unknown vulnerabilities between national pools of capital globally, such as stock and bond markets. An example are credit-default swaps. These were derivatives based on underlying mortgage debt commodities which were datafied and sorted into tranches according to the likelihood or not of default on mortgage debt repayment, which were central to the global systemic reach of the 2007/8 financial meltdown.
Similarly, biofinance explores how Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Edu corporate platforms are currently undermining life itself.
Platform cultures (Web 2) have given rise to global derivative markets increasingly formalized and referred to as “big data.” These data-as-capital pools are produced through informal (bio)derivative markets which have emerged through global datafication platforms, such as clinical trials, social media platforms, short-term rental platforms (e.g., Airbnb, Booking.com, and VRBO, etc.), animal science research, and "citizen-science" research advocacy networks such as "The Ambeesedors"(https://www.ambeessadors.com), etc.
Biofinance is a paradigm to help us understand what it will take to save us from ourselves.
Supervisors: Richard G. Parker, Hylton Whyte, Neville Hoad, and Lance Wahlert
Address: 234 East 78th Street, Apartment 2B
New York, NY 10075
2121 Market Street, Apartment 620
Philadelphia, PA 19103
He is currently working on two long-term ethnographic research projects. The first translates three-plus years of field research in South Africa into a book-length monograph, “Queer Customs: Race, Sexual Ideology, and HIV Science in South Africa.”
His second project is a multi-sited, global ethnography of what he has termed “biofinance,” which explores the rapid financialization of political economies by examining “the derivativization of multi-species sociality,” which is to say the datafication of human, animal, microbe, and viral populations globally.
Trading financial derivatives contracts creates a massive global market in derivatives by way of datafying commodity prices over time so derivatives can hedge risk through informed speculations, all of which acts to create never before seen levels of connectivity and unknown vulnerabilities between national pools of capital globally, such as stock and bond markets. An example are credit-default swaps. These were derivatives based on underlying mortgage debt commodities which were datafied and sorted into tranches according to the likelihood or not of default on mortgage debt repayment, which were central to the global systemic reach of the 2007/8 financial meltdown.
Similarly, biofinance explores how Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Edu corporate platforms are currently undermining life itself.
Platform cultures (Web 2) have given rise to global derivative markets increasingly formalized and referred to as “big data.” These data-as-capital pools are produced through informal (bio)derivative markets which have emerged through global datafication platforms, such as clinical trials, social media platforms, short-term rental platforms (e.g., Airbnb, Booking.com, and VRBO, etc.), animal science research, and "citizen-science" research advocacy networks such as "The Ambeesedors"(https://www.ambeessadors.com), etc.
Biofinance is a paradigm to help us understand what it will take to save us from ourselves.
Supervisors: Richard G. Parker, Hylton Whyte, Neville Hoad, and Lance Wahlert
Address: 234 East 78th Street, Apartment 2B
New York, NY 10075
2121 Market Street, Apartment 620
Philadelphia, PA 19103
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