In this podcast, Tanya Matthan speaks with Dr. Taylor Nelms about his research within and outside the academy. In particular, we discuss his ongoing research on and with credit unions, and its relationship to his disciplinary training as an economic anthropologist. Dr. Nelms shares his insights on mentorship, graduate school curricula, and the futility of insider/outsider distinctions vis-a-vis the contemporary academy.
GUEST BIO
Dr. Taylor C. Nelms is an anthropologist and ethnographer with fifteen years of experience studying money, technology, and banking in the United States, Latin America, and around the world. He is currently the Senior Director of Research at the Filene Research Institute, an independent, non-profit think tank focused on consumer and cooperative finance, especially credit unions. At Filene, Taylor manages a team of researchers and a portfolio of partnerships with leading scholars to pursue research that explores people’s changing economic lives and the business of financial services. Before joining Filene, Taylor worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Irvine, where he received his PhD in Anthropology. He also holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and Ohio State University.
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A cultural anthropologist, Dr. Tami Navarro is Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies at Drew University. She is a founding member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO) and a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Dr. Navarro is co-host of the podcast, “Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean” and the Co-director of the Transnational Black Feminisms working group at Columbia University. She is the author of Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands (SUNY Press 2021) which has been recognized by the Association for Feminist Anthropology and the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.