Karen Ho

Karen Ho is faculty in the Department Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and former Director of The RIGS (Race, Indigeneity, Gender, and Sexuality) Studies Initiative. Her research centers on the problematic of understanding and representing financial markets, sites that are resistant to cultural analysis and often disavow various attempts to locate or particularize them. Her domain of interest is the anthropology of economy, broadly conceived, with specific foci on finance capital, capitalism, globalization, corporations, inequality, and comparative race/ethnicity/indigeneity. Her ethnography, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Duke University Press, 2009) was based on three years of fieldwork among investment bankers and major financial institutions. Recent publications include “Finance and Morality” (A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Fassin, Didier, ed., 2012), “Corporate Nostalgia: Managerial Capitalism from a Contemporary Perspective” (Corporations and Citizenship. Urban, Greg, ed., 2014), and “Gens: A Feminist Manifesto for the Study of Capitalism” (Theorizing the Contemporary Series, Cultural Anthropology Online, co-authored, 2015); “Markets, Myths, and Misrecognitions: Economic Populism in the Age of Financialization and Hyperinequality. (Economic Anthropology, 2018). Her latest projects analyze dominant finance’s production of contemporary inequality, tracing the afterlives of corporate liquidation, the worldviews of investment funds, and the relationship between elite white fraternal networks and dominant financial markets.