http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/imtfi_nsf/rss Recent eScholarship items from National Science Foundation Sat, 12 Sep 2026 17:56:27 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/27z402jg <p>Encouraging critical multidisciplinary collaboration, learning, and mentorship duly grounded in community engagement, this National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Experience (NSF-REU) brought together faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate researchers in anthropology, computer science, and informatics to understand how organizations that serve minoritized communities conceptualize and utilize data in pursuing justice across various domains. The research aimed to uncover assumptions built into data infrastructures and how they shape the relationships between community organizations, the communities they serve, and the issues they engage with.</p><p>Five undergraduate students participated in this 25-week learning, mentorship, and research experience aimed to critically expose them to methods and issues surrounding data and computing practices. They read and discussed literature across disciplines, designed and populated a database of case studies, interviewed... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/27z402jg Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 University of California, Irvine https://escholarship.org/uc/item/71d9w5nc <p>Encouraging critical multidisciplinary collaboration, learning, and mentorship duly grounded in community engagement, this National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Experience (NSF-REU) brought together faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate researchers in anthropology, computer science, and informatics to understand how organizations that serve minoritized communities conceptualize and utilize data in pursuing justice across various domains. The research aimed to uncover assumptions built into data infrastructures and how they shape the relationships between community organizations, the communities they serve, and the issues they engage with.</p><p>Five undergraduate students participated in this 25-week learning, mentorship, and research experience aimed to critically expose them to methods and issues surrounding data and computing practices. They read and discussed literature across disciplines, designed and populated a database of case studies, interviewed... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/71d9w5nc Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The Department of Informatics, the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion (IMTFI), and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3rf348m7 <p>Community Credit is a collaborative research project at UC Irvine that seeks to connectminoritized and financially underserved communities with credit unions for the purpose of building trust and developing more equitable financial products that address the specific needs of the community.</p><p>The UCI photovoice research team included Melissa Wrapp, UCI anthropology Ph.D. ’21 and postdoctoral project manager; Ellen Garnett Kladky, anthropology graduate student; Bryan Truitt, visual studies graduate student; and Jenny Fan, Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion manager. Photovoice is one method being used within this larger project, which also includes: listening sessions, ethnographic interviews, surveying, financial landscaping, decision modeling, deep data marketing analysis, and more. PhotovoiceWorldwide has been a vital partner to Community Credit, offering consulting, training, and facilitation throughout 2021-22.The following report, by Ellen Garnett... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3rf348m7 Mon, 2 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Kladky, Ellen Garnett https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9f6624bq UCI Community Credit partners with non-profit Abrazar and PhotovoiceWorldwide to capture community stories of financial struggle, resilience in photographs at an exhibit featured at a community event. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9f6624bq Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 UC Irvine School of Social Sciences https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5pm9k7pc <p>Smartphones and other mobile platforms are increasingly being used to access financial services. This is especially the case for the underbanked population who rely on prepaid cards and mobile applications to send and receive funds. In this process, financial service platforms are also becoming content platforms, while banks and credit unions continue to lose ground to financial technology (fintech) services and apps, and to other fringe services. Unfortunately, this shift is also contributing to the spread of disinformation about finance. This project seeks to address a particular harm to minoritized communities arising as a result of disinformation, viz, the harm of being excluded from financial services.</p><p>Almost all extant research on disinformation has focused on political communications. Most studies have also focused on the white population in particular, younger white men as producers of disinformation and the older white population as consumers and spreaders of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5pm9k7pc Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5nt195rz Bitcoin is the most famous of several new online, cryptographic currency or electronic payment system experiments based on an open-source database protocol referred to as a blockchain. The blockchain permits transactions to take place without a central authority, relying instead on a decentralized network of peers verifying and authorizing them. It permits "trust" without trusted third-parties or mediators. In addition, Bitcoin and systems like it are membership-based means of value transfer and only work if people actively join them. This project examines new forms of private digital currency, exploring shifts in blockchain-based systems, and how innovators and regulators have participated in, advanced, and challenged them. The research examines how a new cadre of corporate and regulatory professionals are creating, understanding, monitoring, and regulating blockchain-based experiments in payment and in legal services. Studying the interface between law and technology, this research... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5nt195rz Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://escholarship.org/uc/item/53x5s5v5 <p>Photovoice is a community-based participatory research approach in which participants tell stories about their lived experience through photography. UCI’s Community Credit research project is using photovoice as one method to explore people’s financial lives and identify ways for financial institutions to better understand their community’s actual needs. The UCI photovoice research team included Dr. Bill Maurer, Community Credit’s Principal Investigator, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Institute for Money, Technology &amp; Financial Inclusion (IMTFI); Dr. Melissa Wrapp, anthropologist and Community Credit’s postdoctoral project manager; and Jenny Fan, IMTFI manager.</p><p>In Spring 2022, Community Credit piloted the use of photovoice as a method for understanding people’s financial stories. This pilot included public listening sessions and discussions of the methodology, which were attended by local nonprofits, credit unions, and community members. Among the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/53x5s5v5 Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Fan, Jenny Wrapp, Melissa https://escholarship.org/uc/item/51g2x2qp This Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU)&nbsp;was an interdisciplinary collaborative research exercise, bringing together the technical expertise in Computer Science withapplication, grounding, and methodologies used in Anthropology. The student researchers were given training in Anthropoloy research framings and techniques, which they utilized in their reserch and cataloguing. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/51g2x2qp Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Qureshi, Farah