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Erin B. Taylor is an Australian sociocultural anthropologist and author who writes about material culture, socioeconomics, mobile phones, and consumer finance. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais at the Universidade de Lisboa in Portugal and a Research Fellow at the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.[2]

She received her PhD from The University of Sydney, Australia, in 2009. [3]

Taylor is the author of Materializing Poverty: How the Poor Transform their Lives (2013, AltaMira).[4]

Her research has been published in journals such as Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power,[5] the International Journal of Cultural Studies [6] and Dialectical Anthropology.[7] She edited the book Fieldwork Identities in the Caribbean (2010, Caribbean Studies Press).[8] She is also a co-founder of the popular anthropology website PopAnth: Hot Buttered Humanity[9] and is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Cultural Economy. [10]

Education
Taylor began her tertiary education at The University of Newcastle, Australia, where she completed a degree in Fine Arts (1996-2000).[11] She began a Bachelor of Arts at the same institution in 1998, graduating with Honours in Anthropology in 2002.

Taylor's PhD in Anthropology was supervised by Professor Diane Austin-Broos at The University of Sydney, Australia, with the support of a University of Sydney Postgraduate Research Award [12]. From September 2004 until December 2005 she conducted fieldwork in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, spending most of her time in an inner-city squatter settlement where she investigated the relationship between materiality and poverty. Taylor was awarded her PhD in June 2009, for her thesis, Abajo el Puente: Place and the Politics of Progress in Santo Domingo. [13]

Career
Taylor was a full-time Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at The University of Sydney from January 2008 until December 2010.[14] She primarily taught introductory anthropology, urban anthropology and global studies. She was Director of the Bachelor of Global Studies in 2008 and 2009.

She remained an Associate Fellow until December 2013.

Since July 2011, Taylor has held a research fellowship at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais at the Universidade de Lisboa in Portugal.[15]

Research
Taylor's research focuses on the interception of culture and economy in relation to material culture. She has a particular interest in consumer finance and technology.

Materiality and poverty
Between 2004 and 2009, Taylor conducted research in Santo Domingo into how the material environment and possessions constrain the life chances of the poor but are also mobilized as an expression of social relations and a strategy for socioeconomic advancement. Taylor contends that 'most studies of tend to view poverty as a lack of resources, missing the fact that poor people can indeed have positive relationships with material forms.' Rather, Taylor argues that 'the constraints of poverty can engender highly creative applications of material resources to social problems faced by broad sections of society, not just by the poor. Furthermore, a society’s poorest sectors may give far more relativistic and realistic appraisals of social status and potential for socioeconomic mobility than other social classes, or indeed, academics.' [16]

Mobile money
Between 2010 and 2012, Taylor worked with Heather Horst and Espelencia Baptiste on a project called Mobiles, Migrants and Money: A Study of Mobility in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, funded by the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) at the University of California, Irvine.[17] This project investigated the role of mobile phones in the economic and social wellbeing among some of the world's poorest people living at and moving across the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

The research resulted in two reports. The first report, Haitian Monetary Ecologies: A Qualitative Snapshot of Money Transfer and Savings, which focuses on formal and informal domestic remittance routes in Haiti.[18] The second report, Mobile Money in Haiti: Potentials and Challenges, documents the early months after the introduction of mobile money.[19]

Consumer finance
From 2014-2015, Taylor worked with Gawain Lynch on the Consumer Finance Research Methods Project for the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) at the University of California, Irvine.[20] The goal of the project was to assist researchers in adapting to changing conditions in consumer finance globally and to better understand the consumers of financial products.

Mobility and inequality
Part of Taylor's research with Dr. Heather Horst to investigate the relationship between mobility and inequality, with an extended case study of the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.[21] This research examines the role of materiality and mobility in the persistence of social stratification along national lines, despite a long history of trade and socialization between the border towns of Anse-à-Pitres and Pedernales. This project uses a material culture framework to examine a range of other cultural and economic indicators to affect the experiences of Haitians travelling between their home country and the Dominican Republic.

British Museum
In 2012, the Citi Money Gallery at The British Museum [22] featured money-related objects and photographs collected by Taylor, Baptiste, and Horst in the course of their research in Haiti.

PopAnth: Hot Buttered Humanity
Taylor is a co-founder of the popular anthropology website PopAnth: Hot Buttered Humanity.[23] According to the PopAnth website, a conversation in the Open Anthropology Cooperative [24] led Taylor's husband, Gawain Lynch, to register the PopAnth domain name on the 21st July, 2012. They describe their purpose as making accessible anthropological discoveries that are often only available in academic journals.[25] PopAnth now has authors, editors and advisors based in Australia, Portugal,Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, USA, Mexico, and the Netherlands.[26]

Publications
Mobile money: Financial globalization, alternative, or both? In MoneyLab Reader: An Intervention in Digital Economy, edited by Geert Lovink, Nathaniel Tkacz and Patricia de Vries, pp.244-256. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2015

The aesthetics of mobile money platforms in Haiti (Erin B. Taylor and Heather A. Horst). In Routledge Companion to Mobile Media, edited by G. Goggin and L. Hjorth, pp.462-471. Oxon and New York: Routledge.

The role of mobile phones in the mediation of border crossings: A study of Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Heather A. Horst and Erin B. Taylor). TAJA 25(2): 155-170, 2014

When crisis is experienced as continuity: Materialities of time in Haiti. In ‘Biographical Time in

Contexts of Radical Social Changes: Methodological Questions,’ edited by I. Rivoal and M. Heinz.

Ethnologie Française 3(44): 491-502, 2014

Why the cocks trade: What a transnational art market can reveal about cross-border relations. In Visualising Ethnography: Ethnography’s Role in Art and Visual Cultures, edited by H. Horst and L. Hjorth, Visual Studies 29(2):181-190, 2014

Materiality and the making of moral economies. ICS Working Papers, 4, 2014

Materializing Poverty: How the Poor Transform their Lives. Altamira, 2013

From street to satellite: Mixing methods to understand mobile money users (Erin B. Taylor and Heather A. Horst). Proceedings of the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, London, September 15-19,

2013

Fieldwork Identities in the Caribbean. Caribbean Studies Press., 2010

A Reluctant Locality: The Politics of Place and Progress. In Local Lives: Migration and the Politics of Place. C. Trundle and B. Bönisch-Brednich (Eds.) Surrey, U.K.: Ashgate, pp.101-117, 2010

''¡Crisis is Coming! Material Manifestations of Immaterial Ends''. Online proceedings of the symposium Anthropology and the Ends of Worlds, University of Sydney 25./26. March 2010. Sydney http://anthroendsofworlds.wordpress.com, 2010

Poverty as Danger: Fear of Crime in Santo Domingo. In Heather Horst and Anna Pertierra (Eds.) Media Worlds in International Journal of Cultural Studies 12(2):35-52, 2009

Modern dominicanidad: Nation-Building and Politics of Exclusion in Santo Domingo Since the 1880s. Dialectical Anthropology 33: 209-217, 2009

From el campo to el barrio: Memory and Social Imaginaries in Santo Domingo. Identities: Studies in Global Power and Culture 16(2):157-78, 2009