In this episode, Tanya Matthan speaks with Dr. Caroline Schuster about her research on themes of finance, gender, and development in Paraguay. Dr. Schuster elaborates on the surprising intersections between speculative fiction, feminist anthropology, and graphic novels. In particular, we discuss the inspiration for her forthcoming collaborative graphic ethnography on weather insurance and the challenges and possibilities of building a more accessible and engaged economic anthropology through the medium of comics.
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Dr. Caroline Schuster is Associate Professor at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology; as well as Co-Director of the Australian National Centre for Latin American Studies at the Australian National University. Dr. Schuster’s research interests include value, credit and debt, development policy and NGOs, finance and climate change, gender and kinship with a regional focus on Latin America. Her first book, Social Collateral: women and microfinance in Paraguay’s smuggling economy (University of California Press, 2015) is an ethnographic account of microcredit and collective indebtedness in Paraguay’s triple-frontier with Argentina and Brazil. Her forthcoming book is a graphic novel titled Forecasts: A story of weather and finance at the edge of disaster, along with the illustrators Enrique Bernardou and David Bueno. Her work has been published in a number of journals, including Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Development and Change, to name a few.
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