Table of contents

Investigations of what increasing digital connectivity and the digitalization of the economy mean for people and places at the world's economic margins. Within the last decade, more than one billion people became new Internet users. Once, digital connectivity was confined to economically prosperous parts of the world; now Internet users make up a majority of the world's population. In this book, contributors from a range of disciplines and locations investigate the impact of increased digital connectivity on people and places at the world's economic margins. Does the advent of a digitalized economy mean that those in economic peripheries can transcend spatial, organizational, social, and political constraints—or do digital tools and techniques tend to reinforce existing inequalities? The contributors present a diverse set of case studies, reporting on digitalization in countries ranging from Chile to Kenya to the Philippines, and develop a broad range of theoretical positions. They consider, among other things, data-driven disintermediation, women's economic empowerment and gendered power relations, digital humanitarianism and philanthropic capitalism, the spread of innovation hubs, and two cases of the reversal of core and periphery in digital innovation. Contributors Niels Beerepoot, Ryan Burns, Jenna Burrell, Julie Yujie Chen, Peter Dannenberg, Uwe Deichmann, Jonathan Donner, Christopher Foster, Mark Graham, Nicolas Friederici, Hernan Galperin, Catrihel Greppi, Anita Gurumurthy, Isis Hjorth, Lilly Irani, Molly Jackman, Calestous Juma, Dorothea Kleine, Madlen Krone, Vili Lehdonvirta, Chris Locke, Silvia Masiero, Hannah McCarrick,Deepak K. Mishra, Bitange Ndemo, Jorien Oprins, Elisa Oreglia, Stefan Ouma, Robert Pepper, Jack Linchuan Qiu, Julian Stenmanns, Tim Unwin, Julia Verne, Timothy Waema

Mobile money, e-commerce, cash cards, retail credit cards, and more—as new monetary technologies become increasingly available, the global South has cautiously embraced these mediums as a potential solution to the issue of financial inclusion. How, if at all, do new forms of dematerialized money impact people’s everyday financial lives? In what way do technologies interact with financial repertoires and other socio-cultural institutions? How do these technologies of financial inclusion shape the global politics and geographies of difference and inequality? These questions are at the heart of Money at the Margins, a groundbreaking exploration of the uses and socio-cultural impact of new forms of money and financial services.

In this increasingly neoliberal gig economy, exponentially expanding with technological advances, the ability to work online remotely has led some western millennials to travel the world to work and play, while making a subsistence living as digital platform workers.

How xerography became a creative medium and political tool, arming artists and activists on the margins with an accessible means of making their messages public. This is the story of how the xerographic copier, or “Xerox machine,” became a creative medium for artists and activists during the last few decades of the twentieth century. Paper jams, mangled pages, and even fires made early versions of this clunky office machine a source of fear, rage, dread, and disappointment. But eventually, xerography democratized print culture by making it convenient and affordable for renegade publishers, zinesters, artists, punks, anarchists, queers, feminists, street activists, and others to publish their work and to get their messages out on the street. The xerographic copier adjusted the lived and imagined margins of society, Eichhorn argues, by supporting artistic and political expression and mobilizing subcultural movements. Eichhorn describes early efforts to use xerography to create art and the occasional scapegoating of urban copy shops and xerographic technologies following political panics, using the post-9/11 raid on a Toronto copy shop as her central example. She examines New York's downtown art and punk scenes of the 1970s to 1990s, arguing that xerography—including photocopied posters, mail art, and zines—changed what cities looked like and how we experienced them. And she looks at how a generation of activists and artists deployed the copy machine in AIDS and queer activism while simultaneously introducing the copy machine's gritty, DIY aesthetics into international art markets. Xerographic copy machines are now defunct. Office copiers are digital, and activists rely on social media more than photocopied posters. And yet, Eichhorn argues, even though we now live in a post-xerographic era, the grassroots aesthetics and political legacy of xerography persists.

You’ve Got Mail meets The Proposal—this romance is one for the books. Savannah Cade’s dreams are coming true. The Claire Donovan, editor-in-chief of the most successful romance publishing company in the country, has requested to see the manuscript Savannah’s been secretly writing. The only problem: she’s an editor for a different company, and their philosophy is only highbrow works are worth printing and romance should be reserved for the lowest level of Dante’s inferno. But when Savannah drops her manuscript during a staff meeting and nearly exposes herself to the whole company—including William Pennington, the new boss and son of the romance-despising CEO herself—she has no choice but to hide the manuscript in a hidden room. When she returns, she’s dismayed to discover that someone has not only been in her hidden nook but has written notes in the margins—quite critical ones. But when Claire’s own reaction turns out to be nearly identical to the scribbled remarks, and worse, Claire announces that Savannah has six weeks to resubmit before she retires, Savannah finds herself forced to seek the help of the shadowy editor after all. As their notes back and forth start to fill up the pages, however, Savannah finds him not just becoming pivotal to her work but her life. There’s no doubt about it: she’s falling for her mystery editor. If she only knew who he was. “Meet Me in the Margins is a delightfully charming jewel of a book that fans of romantic comedy won’t be able to put down!” — Kristy Woodson Harvey, New York Times bestselling author of Under the Southern Sky

Between the advent of print advertising and the dawn of radio came cinema ads. These ads, aimed at a captive theater audience, became a symbol of the developing binary between upper-class film consumption and more consumerist media. In Profit Margins, Jeremy Groskopf examines how the ad industry jockeyed for direct advertisement space in American motion pictures. In fact, advertisers, who recognized the import of film audiences, fought exhibitors over what audiences expected in a theater outing. Looking back at these debates in four case studies, Groskopf reveals that advertising became a marker of class distinctions in the cinema experience as the film industry pushed out advertisers in order to create a space free of ads. By restricting advertising, especially during the rise of high-class, palatial theaters, the film industry continued its ongoing effort to ascend the cultural hierarchy of the arts. An important read for film studies and the history of marketing, Profit Margins exposes the fascinating truth surrounding the invention of cinema advertising techniques and the resulting rhetoric of class division.