Join students and faculty for a presentation by Bill Maurer, professor of anthropology, and director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine. His topic: “Mobile money: communication, consumption and change in the payments space.” From Dr. Maurer: “This talk seeks to understand the emergent phenomenon of “mobile money” - mobile phone enabled money transfer and storage - both as a set of new services being rolled out and used, and as a globally distributed social network of expertise. Focusing on the stories that circulate in the network calling “mobile money” into being, this talk explores how economic techniques and social narratives about markets, specifically, narratives about the opportunities for profit, financial inclusion and other goals in what participants term the “payments space,” format a consumer market for mobile money. Yet communications technologies are never simply consumed and then finished; they remain in an active state of readiness to forge new relations (as long as they maintain an electrical charge, which is no trivial matter). As people repurpose elements of mobile communications – whether airtime minutes or a full-blown mobile money service – to create new means of exchange or stores of value, they set in motion a vast array of agencies, technologies, individuals and organizations all concerned with money, another consumable communications media, potentially remaking money in the process.” Lunch will be served.