UCL Centre for Capitalism Studies announces its Visiting Research Fellows 2024-25

8 July 2024

The UCL Centre for Capitalism Studies is delighted to announce that their first cohort of Visiting Research Fellows will arrive at UCL in the Autumn Term 2024.

Over the next few months, we will welcome Dr Ana Valdivia (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford), Dr Amin Samman (City, University of London) and Dr Caroline Shenaz Hossein (University of Toronto). They will be working with colleagues at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, SELCS and the Development Planning Unit, and developing relationships between their institutions and UCL.

Dr Ana Valdivia plans to critically investigate the Supply Chain Capitalism of AI to better understand its political and environmental consequences. She intends to develop a theoretical and empirical methodology driven by a research question: What are the means of production of the entire supply chains of AI?

During her fellowship at the CCS she plans to investigate power dynamics and environmental frictions within supply chains of AI—from mineral extractivism to e-waste landfills—by combining ethnographic methodologies together with social science and technology (STS) literature.

Dr Amin Samman's project is called Currency of Nihilism.

This project aims to bring the financial status of contemporary nihilism into historical focus, spotlighting the signal moods and structural dynamics of nihilism in a digital-financial key. This will be the basis for a new theory of financial nihilism that connects global psychological trends to the latest developments in world finance.

Dr Caroline Hossein will be working on her project, Feminist Cooperative Development in Africa and Its Diaspora.

The overarching goal of this project is to document the traditions, philosophies, and experiences at the heart of a range of informal sustaining economic practices found across the African diaspora in order to ensure that this work is fully represented in policy-making discourse and global social economy institutions.

The UCL Centre for Capitalism Studies (CCS) is a world-leading centre for critical interdisciplinary research into the past, present, and future of capitalism. It conducts research on how markets, finance and economic institutions shape our everyday life, structure societies’ capacity to change, and are contested and remade across time and space. CCS is part of the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS).