Islamic charitable infrastructure and giving in East London: Everyday economic-development geographies in practice

Pollard, Jane; Datta, Kavita; James, Al; Akli, Q

doi:10.1093/jeg/lbv020

Cited by 14 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 85 publications

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“…Our research participants clearly articulated the Islamic principle of helping those closest to you first, not just through their knowledge of zakat rules, but also in the form of helping family and kin in Pakistan, clearly venturing into the territory of what one would usually discuss as remittances (Erdal 2012;Pollard et al 2015). The everyday rituals of helping family in Pakistan were often simultaneously religious and family based -two dimensions that they saw as highly compatible with each other.…”

Section: For People and For God: Islamic Charity As Social And Religimentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Questions about motivations are central in the remittances literature, where identifying the degree to which altruism or self-interest is a driving force has been an important quest (Lucas and Stark 1985). Yet, although with some exceptions (such as Bashir 2014;Erdal 2012;Kelly and Solomon 2011;Pollard et al 2015), studies on remittances rarely explicitly mention religion. Often there is an implicit assumption about 'ethnic' motivations to help 'one's own' (Sinatti and Horst 2015) in studies on migrant development engagements.…”

Section: Conceptualizing Transnational Islamic Charity As Everyday Rimentioning

confidence: 99%

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Transnational Islamic charity as everyday rituals

Erdal

Borchgrevink

2016

Global Networks

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Section: For People and For God: Islamic Charity As Social And Religimentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Conceptualizing Transnational Islamic Charity As Everyday Rimentioning

confidence: 99%

Transnational Islamic charity as everyday rituals

Erdal

Borchgrevink

2016

Global Networks

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“…More broadly, it has also pointed toward the place of remittances and digital payments in the business of poverty capital, or what Maurer (2015a) aptly terms "poverty payment." However, comparatively less attention has been given to payment infrastructures, i.e., the technologies, devices, social and institutional arrangements, and accounting practices, that allow and measure the value transfer from payer to payee (Lindley, 2009;Siegel and Fransen, 2013;Pollard et al, 2016;Rea et al, 2017). Payment systems and their design have to be appreciated in their profound distributional and, indeed, political implications (Desan, 2014;Maurer, 2015b).…”

Section: The Remittance Industry From the Point Of Sale To Cross-bordmentioning

confidence: 99%

Blockchain Technologies and Remittances: From Financial Inclusion to Correspondent Banking

Rella

2019

Front. Blockchain

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Since their emergence, blockchain technologies have shown potential for financial inclusion and the formalization of remittances. Recently, regulators and practitioners have studied the capabilities of blockchain technologies to streamline and, potentially, replace the infrastructure underpinning cross-border payments and remittances, i.e., correspondent banking. Correspondent Banking Relationships, also called "Nostro-Vostro accounts," are continuous bilateral arrangements that enable banks to provide services in countries where they do not directly operate. After the Global Financial Crisis, this infrastructure has undergone "de-risking," i.e., a reduction of correspondent accounts and their concentration in fewer financial institutions, with especially detrimental effects on costs and speed of retail cross-border remittances. The existing literature has mostly focused on the point of sale of remittances, often overlooking correspondent banking. This paper, in contrast, connects remittances, blockchain technologies, and correspondent banking with the growing interest of critical social science in the significance of payment infrastructures for the constitution and configuration of money, finance, and markets. By unpacking the critical case of Ripple, this paper shows that blockchain applications to remittances focus on profits, risks, costs, interoperability, "trapped liquidity," and "idle capital" in correspondent banking accounts, rather than on financial inclusion per se. In so doing, this paper contributes to critical social studies literature on the formalization of remittances, understood as the transformation of remittances into a market frontier. Blockchain applications are shown to foster, rather than resist, remittances formalization, and they are presently being incorporated into existing infrastructures, business models, and regulatory structures. Rather than representing radically alternative monetary systems, blockchain technologies are the latest iteration of technologies heralding frictionless capitalism. Lastly, this paper shows the tensions and ambiguities inherent to interoperability and formalization. Blockchain technologies are dynamic in a way that problematizes dichotomies such formal-informal and mainstream-alternative. Hence, rather than providing a quantitative assessment of the impact of blockchain technologies, this paper investigates the ambiguities and tensions in the political economy and imaginaries inscribed in the materiality and design of blockchain-enabled payment systems.

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“…However, he asserts that the centrality of such materiality does not signify, indeed cannot signify, that economic geographies are necessarily driven by a purely material set of economic logics, and nor can such logics be inculcated solely through, for instance, the insistent promulgation of neoliberally informed market metrics. Rather, as Lee (, p. 368) puts it, “both the potentially infinite variety of ways in which people may make their living across space and time … as well as the necessary non‐economic relations involved in all economic activity” underscore the diverse social relations of value in economic geographies that give rise to such variety and shape the material forms, dynamics, and trajectories of the economy (see also Lee & Wills, ; Massey, ; Pollard, James, Datta, & Akli, ; Sayer, ).…”

Section: What Is Value and How Does It Become Valuable? The Perennialmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I suggest that the answer to both these questions is a qualified “yes.” Of course, when studies of economy are carefully formulated—allowing the questions to determine the methods, designing, and undertaking those methods in a rigorous, appropriate, effective, and testable manner and deploying and developing empirically grounded theoretical frameworks—it is perfectly feasible to deal with complex specificity whilst applying insights to a broader socio‐economic frame, provided that frame is appropriately related. And, in fact, myriad economic geographers have done so (e.g., Fickey, ; Gibson‐Graham, /2006; Gray & James, ; James & Vira, ; McDowell, ; Pollard et al, ). But for me, the qualification is most “essential.” For, taking value as the exemplar, in so doing it may be necessary to acknowledge that in the process of societal reproduction through this complex “thing” we call the economy there is, in fact, an immense diversity of social and material relations of value that inform and shape the ordinary economic geographies that emerge.…”

Section: Reigniting the Conversation: Valuing Complexity While Maintamentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic geographies of value revisited

Pani

2017

Geography Compass

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As the debate continues in economic geography regarding the theoretical, methodological, and empirical need to abstract out from the complexity of real-world economic activity versus the need to examine the multiplicity and specificity of actually existing economies, this article revisits an object the ontology of which sits at the heart of such debates, that is, value. For a sub-discipline that has long-battled to be taken seriously as a social "science," the subject of value in economic geographies has become a battle royal between those who are willing to essentialise and those who are not, with many scholars justify their opposing positions on the grounds of theoretical salience and/or methodological rigour. In this article, I position value as the exemplar of these arguments, contrasting Roger Lee's (2006, 2011) relational understanding of value to the essentialising tendencies of Marx and neoclassicism.The paper posits that far from the openness of a relational approach being theoretically "weak," its strength in being able to deal with real-world complexity allows economic geographers to better explore some of societies' most important questions."… [A]s soon as we accept essences we have a closed system: a system that is impervious to the dynamics, diversity, and difference of the changing contexts in which social practices are embedded … In short, they kill the conversation ….[Instead] denying philosophical bedrocks, privileged vocabularies, and essential essences … keep[s] the conversation going" (Barnes, 1989, p. 301).

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Islamic charitable infrastructure and giving in East London: Everyday economic-development geographies in practice

Cited by 14 publications

References 85 publications

Transnational Islamic charity as everyday rituals

Transnational Islamic charity as everyday rituals

Blockchain Technologies and Remittances: From Financial Inclusion to Correspondent Banking

Economic geographies of value revisited

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