http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/irvine_law/rss Recent eScholarship items from School of Law Sun, 23 Aug 2026 22:48:08 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9fs0z26k Repressed Futures: Financial Derivatives' Theological Unconscious https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9fs0z26k Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/78p1415x Feminist Challenges to Archaeology: Avoiding an Epistemology of the Other https://escholarship.org/uc/item/78p1415x Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/748132dd Empire's New Clothes, Reading Hardt and Negri https://escholarship.org/uc/item/748132dd Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56f426xf Women’s Place is Every Place: Merging Domains and Women’s Roles in Dominica and Barbuda https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56f426xf Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 Berleant-Schiller, R https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4h22x36k Internet-based banking products, electronic commerce transactions, and internet-based offshore financial services are new objects of proprietary and regulatory concern. Each seems to circumvent state apparatuses such as community investment and taxation regimes designed, at least in principle, to serve the public weal. In this chapter I ask whether these new objects of property necessitate a rethinking of property's moral form. They are not merely challenging regulatory frameworks; they are challenging moral obligations involved in territorial state jurisdictionality. If property always entails moral claims, then new kinds of proprietary objects that trouble legal and regulatory obligations unsettle the moral orders in which property is constituted. Cyberspatial properties, by unsettling these moral orders, make visible the contours and the limits of liberal and critical theories of property, themselves bound up with its moral orderings. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4h22x36k Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7fm0d312 Wiseman's and Fool's Gold https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7fm0d312 Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fx4j54k Re-formatting the economy: Islamic banking and finance in world politics https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fx4j54k Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4wf0j9z5 Of Law and Belief https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4wf0j9z5 Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4s88m13c Lateral Reasons for a Post-reflexive Anthropolog INTRODUCTION https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4s88m13c Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4jr1h7pg Innumerate Equivalencies: Making Change with Alternative Currencies https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4jr1h7pg Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48r4v6vs In the Matter of Islamic Banking and Local Currencies https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48r4v6vs Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3cz4s77j Mutual Life, Limited ISLAMIC BANKING, ALTERNATIVE CURRENCIES, LATERAL REASON Preface https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3cz4s77j Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32w366t5 Of Monetary Alternatives and the Limits of Values Past https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32w366t5 Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32g5x46b Mutual Life, Limited: Insurance, Moral Value, and Bureaucratic Form https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32g5x46b Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/12d1v875 Restaging Abstraction and Adequation CONCLUSION https://escholarship.org/uc/item/12d1v875 Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5391p49s The future outlines of the new global order are the constant object of speculation-economic, political, and metaphysical. From the sunny new world proclaimed by global free marketers to the rebellion against globalization unleashed in the streets of Seattle and Genoa, to the doomsdays envisioned by transnational terrorists and counterterrorists alike, this emerging global-millennial epoch is foretold alternately as redemption or apocalypse. The authors consider these sweeping descriptions of humankind's future, as well as the discourses of globalization that filter and frame them, from perspectives in anthropology, geography, law, sociology, and cultural studies. Their goal is not to resolve the ultimate semantic or philosophical question of what "globalization" really is; instead, their essays explore the forms, practices, and effects of governmentality integral to global modernity's architecture. In Globalization under Construction, the authors ask: What are the rationalities... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5391p49s Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 Perry, RW https://escholarship.org/uc/item/82t7b0jz Finance https://escholarship.org/uc/item/82t7b0jz Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fabozzi, Frank J Drake, Pamela Peterson https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6np8r9jc Foreword: Rusing Risk https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6np8r9jc Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66r7262t Recent discussions of globalization are founded on an assumption about the movement of capital, goods, people, and images—that movement generates change, and that movement is a self-evident phenomenon. Cultural approaches to globalization, such as Appadurai’s (1996) and Hannerz’s (1996), tend to posit thatincreasingmobility characterizes the contemporary era. Critics of these approaches note that capital, goods, labor, and ideas have been moving from place to place ever since the rise of capitalism, if not before, through trading routes and ancient empires (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1989; Friedman 1995). Within political science, “international political economy” (IPE) scholars, while not dipping quite... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66r7262t Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5f5806rf Moral Economies, Economic Moralities: Consider the Possibilities! https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5f5806rf Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3sc8h7nx This chapter contains section titled: Making Reasonable Accounts Mudarabah Accounting in Theory Mudarabah Accounting in Practice Accounts of Islamic Accounting Toward Anthropological Tawhid Notes Making Reasonable Accounts Mudarabah Accounting in Theory Mudarabah Accounting in Practice Accounts of Islamic Accounting Toward Anthropological Tawhid Notes https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3sc8h7nx Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3kx0k4j7 Fractions of Blood on Fragments of Soil: Capitalism, the Commons, and Kinship in the Caribbean https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3kx0k4j7 Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2r75j6j8 [This corrects the article DOI: 10.1016/j.fsisyn.2026.100675.]. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2r75j6j8 Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cole, Simon A https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1709-6219 Schamp, Myleigh https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8qd4632m Entry for "Globalization" https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8qd4632m Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rc3346q Entry for "Anthropology" https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rc3346q Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3mr3x45f Shared memories of event details are crucial to eyewitness testimony. When different people encode or recall the same event, similar scene-specific neural activity patterns emerge across individual brains. However, it remains unclear whether these patterns are specific to event details and how test expectancy (i.e., expecting free recall or general memory tests) and misinformation affect them. In this study, 100 participants were randomly assigned to view one of two versions of each event. Both versions featured identical scenarios, but with different details. About half of the participants were informed about the upcoming free recall before viewing events, while the others were told to expect a general memory test. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to record their brain activity during four stages: viewing original events, initial free recall, reading misinformation, and final free recall of original events. The neuroimaging data were analyzed based on the similarity... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3mr3x45f Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Shao, Xuhao Chen, Chuansheng https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8224-1005 Loftus, Elizabeth F https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2230-6110 Zhu, Bi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2tj7669j Conspiratorial thinking is an indelible part of American politics; indeed, conspiracy theories proliferated in North America even before the founding of the United States. A current headwind of trends appears to facilitate a surge in conspiratorial thinking, including the increased spread and accessibility of misinformation, steady declines in public trust in authority figures, and an increasingly polarized electorate marked by mutual partisan animosity. The annual symposium of the UC Irvine Center for Neuropolitics brought together experts in law, political science, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology to discuss why and how conspiracy thought develops and persists. This paper synthesizes the insights from that symposium, addressing the foundations of conspiracy thinking in both individuals and society as a whole, and its place in the current American political landscape. Through integrating various disciplinary perspectives, the symposium aimed to identify possible pathways... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2tj7669j Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gong, Steven Phoenix, Davin Marcus, George E Santillan, Laiyla O'Connor, Cailin https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8351-2575 Ditto, Peter Douglas, Karen M Kakkar, Hemant Kaye, David Levy, Neil Ross, Lauren Fisher, Mark https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9802-8826 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1gc412qg Sans les idéaliser, les exagérer, ou les diaboliser, incontestablement, les technologies de l'information et de la communication transforment le monde et ses habitants. Bien que la rapidité de ces transformations, en cours en rende l'appréhension ethnographique difficile, le point de départ de notre cadre conceptuel est qu'il est non seulement possible, mais impératif, de mieux cerner le caractère multiple et souvent inattendu de ces changements. L'émergence des technologies en ligne et mobiles oblige à repenser les questions de mondialisation qui ont été un theme majeur de l'enquête anthropologique dans les années 1990. Les . travaux de cette période ont porté principalement sur les medias de masse comme la télévision èt' le cinéma,_sur l'impact des développements politiques et économiques, ainsi que sur le marché du travail mondial. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1gc412qg Fri, 7 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Mazzocchetti, J Servais, O Boellstorff, T https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8580-3747 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8vk4n5sr SERIES PREFACE https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8vk4n5sr Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7m88s51d Blockchain https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7m88s51d Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6tr5337d SERIES PREFACE https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6tr5337d Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6k95325c Series Preface https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6k95325c Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6gx27958 Linguistic and Material Intimacies of Cell Phones offers a detailed ethnographic and anthropological examination of the social, cultural, linguistic and material aspects of cell phones. With contributions from an international range of established and emerging scholars, this is a truly global collection with rural and urban examples from communities across the Global North and South. Linking the use of cell phones to contemporary discussions about representation, mediation and subjectivity, the book investigates how this increasingly ubiquitous technology challenges the boundaries of privacy and selfhood, raising new questions about how we communicate. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6gx27958 Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kuipers, Joel C https://escholarship.org/uc/item/69p2n8vr SERIES PREFACE https://escholarship.org/uc/item/69p2n8vr Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5xp389zp John Maynard Keynes is often credited with the creation of the theory of the “national economy,” since the components of hisGeneral Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money(1935) are all economic aggregates measured over a given geopolitical space (Radice 1984:112). Hence Keynes’s association with Fordism and Fordist nation-based systems of mass production and mass consumption. Also central to Keynes’sGeneral Theorywas the explicit threat, as he saw it, of external forces of instability. Hence Keynes’s arguments for limits on capital mobility, fixed exchange rates, and a model of international order based on economically sovereign nation-states interlinked by trade... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5xp389zp Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5s10z4n0 Channels and Codes, Rails and Freight: Can You Hear Me Now? https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5s10z4n0 Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5js0d078 Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5js0d078 Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4m02t34x Signatures https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4m02t34x Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4gp0d4zj Abstract Drawing on anthropological perspectives, this paper argues that the fungibility of objects and the ability to exchange them for money is a defining characteristic of capitalist markets. In contrast, other systems of reckoning value emphasize the unique relationships within which objects are embedded and their inability to stand for just any other thing. This paper further highlights the role of slavery in the origins and continued dominance of capitalism and the existence of alternative systems such as cooperativism and sharing that are often overlooked. This paper then examines the Saussurean and Peircean semiotics underlying the concept of money as an abstract sign and argues that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in blockchain technology contradict these theories by emphasizing pure uniqueness and rendering objects non-transformable or inconvertible. This paper concludes by warning against the dangers of a future where fungibility is absent, as it is necessary for life and... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4gp0d4zj Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3zf927pz Money, Ritual, and Religion: Reason, Race, and the Re-Enchantment of the World https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3zf927pz Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3ct9h86h Redecorating the International Economy: Keynes, Grant and the Queering of Bretton Woods https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3ct9h86h Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1kb2p0vt SERIES PREFACE https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1kb2p0vt Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0mt8s0bb SERIES PREFACE https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0mt8s0bb Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/01c5w0g4 Afterword https://escholarship.org/uc/item/01c5w0g4 Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7x72h4fg This chapter reflects on the implications for the anthropology of law. As anthropologists turn to transnational and international legal processes, the question of the ‘social’ takes on a particular salience and has the potential to create productive theoretical muddles. The chapter serves as a demonstration of Thrift’s statement, and points toward a less linear, less causal account of the role of the ‘social’ in transnational, multilateral governance today. It proceeds by reviewing the notion of soft law and its incorporation/creation of a category of the social. It then analyses the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) effort to curb harmful tax practices as an initiative designed to incorporate ‘society’ into governance. It concludes by reflecting on the observation among legal anthropologists and law and society scholars that international legal processes resemble and contingently re-assemble something called ‘society’ in the process of trying to... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7x72h4fg Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7wb0g882 Structural Inequalities in the Global Legal System https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7wb0g882 Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Darian-Smith, Eve https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1971-0323 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4zq4h5ts The primary function of the intelligence analyst is to make sense of information about the world, but the way analysts do that work will look profoundly different a decade from now. Technological changes will bring both new advances in conducting analysis and new risks related to technologically based activities and communications around the world. Because these changes are virtually inevitable, the Intelligence Community will need to make sustained collaboration with researchers in the social and behavioral sciences (SBS) a key priority if it is to adapt to these changes in the most productive ways. A Decadal Survey Of The Social and Behavioral Sciences provides guidance for a 10-year research agenda. This report identifies key opportunities in SBS research for strengthening intelligence analysis and offers ideas for integrating the knowledge and perspectives of researchers from these fields into the planning and design of efforts to support intelligence analysis. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4zq4h5ts Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sackett, PR Berntson, GG Carley, KM Contractor, NS Cooke, NJ Dosher, BA Johnson, JC Keller, S Matsumoto, D Medina, C Moore, FP Moreno, JD Rohde, J Taliaferro, JW Treverton, GF Wolfe, JM Bhatt, S Beatty, A Schuck, JA Townsend, E Wilson Gaines, RL Cox, T Fiske, ST Baugh, J Carstensen, LL Dubno, J Eberhardt, J Goldstone, RL Ilgen, DR Kanwisher, NG Kiecolt-Glaser, J Maurer, BC https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 Petersen, SE Small, DM Strauman, TJ Wanchisen, BA https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4bh7801c The article highlights the critique of science put forth by Wilhelm Dilthey and subsequent discussions of technology by members of the Frankfurt School and in the phenomenological tradition, may appear to have had little effect within the scientific tradition itself. It reports that positivist science works that permits a technical mastery of the world it presupposes and simultaneously constructs. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4bh7801c Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/43p5r7nt A ruse, says the Oxford English Dictionary, is a ‘‘detour; a doubling or turning of a hunted animal to elude the dogs.’’ The term derives from the French ‘‘ruser,’’ from which English also acquired the word ‘‘rush,’’ as in a frontal impact that drives an opposing force away, leading it in turn to ruse, to flee and scatter in all directions. This quality of turning about and scattering in all directions, like game in the hunt, also lends the word its more common and more modern English meaning of trickery. Hunted animals, it would seem, deceive in order to escape their pursuers. In doing so, they take unexpected tacks and twists in direction, thwarting the hunters’ forward rush. The chapters assembled in this fascinating collection lend new sig- nificance to the techniques of misdirection and meandering of the ruse. For, in documenting efforts to govern through risk in the recent history of the ‘‘war on terror,’’ the authors demonstrate that new forms of governance are attempting... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/43p5r7nt Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58t9f6md Trauma-Informed Lawyering Leads to Movement Lawyering in International Human Rights Work https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58t9f6md Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sweetser, Catherine https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zc2f334 Money's technologies have undergone rapid change since the global financial crisis altered people's credit, debt and payment practices, and revenue models from new entrants into the business of moving money began to disrupt the banks and card networks. Anthropologists and other social scientists have only just begun researching the world of payment technology–but they are not alone in being newcomers to the field, the area having been largely the domain of payment industry professionals, not scholarly researchers. This entry provides a historical overview of anthropologists’ and others’ engagement with payment infrastructures, taking note of its relationship to allied work in social studies of money and finance. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zc2f334 Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/36w492cd Does Money Matter? Abstraction and Substitution in Alternative Financial Forms https://escholarship.org/uc/item/36w492cd Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0963010h Value transfer and rent: Or, i didn’t realize my payment was your annuity https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0963010h Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9fh9x1jr Credit Crisis Religion https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9fh9x1jr Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8md8g026 That Touch of Money https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8md8g026 Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7c70b2g4 The digital revolution is changing money, moving it from paper and coins to mobile devices, smart cards and virtual worlds. From ethnographic studies of existing sites of monetary innovation, Intel social scientists and designers have been exploring future implications of the emerging landscape of digital payment, transfer and banking methods on everyday life. Here is a short animated video which sketches some possible future scenarios. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7c70b2g4 Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 Mainwaring, S George, C Hirsch, T https://escholarship.org/uc/item/75c5w43g "Belonging," Citizenship and Flexible Specialization in a Caribbean Tax Haven (British Virgin Islands) https://escholarship.org/uc/item/75c5w43g Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6tb298n1 This article considers how the field of Caribbean Studies constructed and defined its objects of study. It critically reflects on the history of the field, drawing mainly from the discipline of anthropology but also attending to the institutional sites of scholarly production and their impact on the worlding of the Caribbean as an 'area' fit for 'area studies'. As it does so, the paper considers the limits of the modes of fact-making implicit in Caribbean Studies, the scalar imaginaries bound up in it, and their implications for the problems of generalizability and distinctiveness subtending social inquiry and 'area' formations more broadly. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6tb298n1 Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6ch4b1d3 From the Editors https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6ch4b1d3 Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 Merry, Sally Engle https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5r77c02w Statemaking at the Fringes of Development https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5r77c02w Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 Merry, Sally Engle https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58z1v4xr This article is the result of our inquiry into two proximate fields in which issues of law, custom and markets arise in sociolegal scholarship and praxis: the mid-20th century jurisprudence of the legal realist Karl Llewellyn and the contemporary debates surrounding efforts by tribal governments in the U.S. to issue tax-exempt bonds. Both are sites for efforts by legal scholars and practitioners to grapple with the convergence of social categories that, until very recently, are normally held apart – Native Americans, law, and commerce. We first explore Llewellyn’s efforts at drafting the Uniform Commercial Code, and the extent to which in this and his The Cheyenne Way (written at virtually the same time), he drew considerable influence from the American pragmatist philosophical tradition. In so doing, we find that his jurisprudence and lawmaking (often maligned for its circular reasoning) can be better understood as an effort to announce a philosophy of law and enact commercial... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58z1v4xr Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 Richland, Justin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4p02945c Articulating Islamic Knowledge to an American Dream: Islamic Home Financing Alternatives after September 11, 2001 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4p02945c Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nn906nq This paper draws from a specific ethnographic example to elucidate the connections among gender, sexuality, eroticism,. and work, and argues for a method of analysis encompassing both the symbolic and the economic. Symbolic meanings embodied in sexuality cannot be reduced to the gendered economics of production and reproduction, yet neither can production and reproduction be explained away or ignored completely by a symbolic approach. In the Commonwealth of Dominica in the West Indies, men' s work and sexuality are linguistically marked and conceptualized as highly differentiated. Women's sexuality and work, on the other band, are unmarked and undetermined. Parallel meanings are attached to work and to sexuality, and these parallel meanings inform an economic and symbolic system in which women' s power over their own bodies and economies is undermined. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nn906nq Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, W https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4cb8w8j5 The British Virgin Islands became a tax haven shortly after the U.K. enacted changes to citizenship policy for itself and its colonies. The new citizenship law disaggregated an old citizenship category into several new categories and emphasized legal paternity and descent rather than place of birth. The law encouraged BVIslanders to position themselves against increasing numbers of immigrants from other Caribbean islands by imagining BVIslander identity as an attribute of descent, thereby naturalizing it. Citizenship law also enabled BVIslander legislators to craft tax haven services in the BVI for another new class of foreigners—the British. BVIslanders and immigrants recreate their families in order to guarantee the “stability” required by this new industry, while BVIslanders monopolize the few good jobs created and shunt immigrants into menial work. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4cb8w8j5 Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/22q4d1sf Recent calls for ‘cashlessness’ – for abolishing paper money as a medium of exchange – draw attention to the operations of payment, the act of value transfer through electronic and other infrastructures. Exploring payment infrastructures and their multiplication through new networks, especially but not limited to mobile telecommunications, this paper argues that the attempt to eliminate cash from the palette of payment ‘choices’ throws into relief the role of the state as arbiter of value, and the credibility of institutions, persons, and networks subtending value. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/22q4d1sf Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, B https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/11d6h2cg Alternative Globalizations: Community and Conflict in New Cultures of Finance https://escholarship.org/uc/item/11d6h2cg Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, William https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0tv9g7hn Children of Mixed Marriages on Virgin Soil: Citizenship, Descent and Place in the British Virgin Islands https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0tv9g7hn Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/041558p0 Subjects of Law, Objects of Politics https://escholarship.org/uc/item/041558p0 Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 Merry, Sally Engle https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9n44q39b Review Symposium: Michel Callon’s Markets in the Making: Rethinking Competition, Goods, and Innovation. Zone Books https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9n44q39b Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Callon, Michel Langley, Paul Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 Mitchell, Timothy Roth, Alvin Caliskan, Koray https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9k86m3dr In her foundational study of Neolithic clay tokens, the renowned archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat identified that different token shapes represented different goods and were used in accounting and distribution. When these tokens came to be stored in sealed clay envelopes (likely representing a debt), each token was impressed on the outside of the envelope before being placed inside (thus allowing people to see quickly what was within). Three-dimensional objects were thus reduced to two-dimensional representations, the first form of writing (and contributing to cuneiform script). These clay envelopes in turn developed into pictographic tablets; here each token did not have to be impressed into the clay in a 'one, one, one' system, but instead quantity was indicated by a numerical symbol - abstract number was born. Much of Schmandt-Besserat’s work can be found online at https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/. Her book ‘How Writing Came About’ was listed by American Scientist magazine... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9k86m3dr Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wilding, Denise Rowan, Clare Maurer, Bill Schmandt-Besserat, Denise Wilding, Denise Rowan, Clare Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 Schmandt-Besserat, Denise https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vx7m3bs There are a thousand more silly ideas for every utopian blockchain project to heal the planet, foster financial justice, transform cultural production or democratize practically anything and everything. Non‐fungible tokens (NFTs) are one of them. The funny thing is that the more you pick at them, the more they harmonize with certain longstanding anthropological arguments. Non‐fungibility lurks in the anthropological imagination of non‐capitalist economies. This article uses the common law of fungibility to explore the elevation of the very idea of non‐fungibility presumed in many NFTs. This idea might have more in common with saints’ incorruptible flesh or the Crown Jewels than the standard fictions of capitalist finance. They cut social ties by insisting on their singularity and immutability. In doing so, they crowd out other blockchain conversations about regeneration and ways to reckon the debts we owe any number of possible futures. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vx7m3bs Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7r44z99q Payments are political in that they are a function of state sovereignty, and also an extension of it. This is old news, of course: money itself emanates from state sovereignty. But digital payments, obviating the anonymity of cash transactions and generating vast quantities of data in their wake, provide new opportunities for states to extend their reach. These politics of payments are not, of course, limited to authoritarian regimes. Payment providers have been enlisted into government service almost since their inception, whether in the tracking of cash to hamper criminal activities or in the regulations around customer due diligence and identification for cross‐boundary payments of all kinds. With more attention to payments, and payment data, people can also hear the rumblings of another politics. Data activism has emerged as a potential social movement and political force. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7r44z99q Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, By Bill https://escholarship.org/uc/item/76t9d6fg Money from nothing: indebtedness and aspiration in South Africa https://escholarship.org/uc/item/76t9d6fg Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6tp6h2xf Feathers, beads, shells, copper bracelets, and giant stones – objects that Western observers have assumed serve the functions of money in so-called simple societies and other non-Western contexts – come in all shapes and sizes. This chapter reviews the literature on “primitive” currencies, from early ethnology to contemporary anthropology and archeology. Showing how analysts frequently misunderstood the use of such objects in context, it hones in on the social relationships and political systems those objects operated within and reflects back on the limitations of the Western imagination of currency revealed by what collectors call “odd and curious money.” It also takes up the question of whether and how standards determine value and expands the social scientific vocabulary for the diversity of forms of political authority that constitute money. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6tp6h2xf Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6gq473kd Money, Rank and the Frailty of Authority: Schurtz’s World and Ours. An Outline of the Origins of Money By Heinrich Schurtz. Translated and Annotated and With an Introduction by Enrique Martino and Mario Schmidt (eds.), HAU Books, London. 2024. 274 pp. ISBN: 9781914363078 [paperback]; ISBN: 9781914363276 [PDF]; ISBN: 9781914363283 [e‐book]. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6gq473kd Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6f9620xk Jane Guyer’s negative capability https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6f9620xk Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6c41f04n Book review: Crowdfunding and the Democratization of Finance https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6c41f04n Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6770q9sf Professor Bill Maurer is a renowned cultural anthropologist who conducts research on law, property, money and finance, focusing on the technological infrastructures and social relations of exchange and payment. Professor Maurer graduated from Stanford University in 1994 with a PhD in Anthropology. He moved to UC Irvine in 1996 as Assistant Professor, going on to become Chair of UC Irvine’s Department of Anthropology (2005-2011) and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences (2011-2013). In July 2013 he assumed his current role as Dean of UC Irvine’s School of Social Sciences. Professor Maurer has published on topics ranging from offshore financial services to mobile phone-enabled money transfers, Islamic finance, alternative currencies, and the future of money. He is founding director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and was the founding co-director of the Intel Science... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6770q9sf Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tooker, Lauren Tooker, Lauren https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6566h79b Schmidt, Mario, and Sandy Ross (eds.): Money Counts. Revisiting Economic Calculation. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. 141 pp. ISBN 978-​1-​78920-​685-​2. (Studies in Social Analysis, 10) Price: € 30,99 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6566h79b Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6224v9hr In a recent issue (Vol. 67, No. 2), we published a new translation, by Matthew Carey, of Claude Lévi-Strauss's seminal but often overlooked essay “The Mathematics of Man,” which was originally published in French in 1956. As Susanne Küchler suggested in her introduction to the text, Lévi-Strauss's insistence on seeing mathematics as more than just a means of quantification and statistical analysis should be of enduring inspiration to anthropologists interested in how models and other forms of patterned transformation operate within social and cultural life, as well as in how we attempt as anthropologists to gain an analytical handle on them. In continued collaboration with Küchler, in the present issue we have invited anthropologists whose work speaks to these concerns to comment on the contemporary relevance of Lévi-Strauss's argument, encouraging them to be as explicit about the shortcomings and potential dangers of Lévi-Strauss's call to mathematics as they may be of its enduring... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6224v9hr Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Martin, John Levi Seaver, Nick Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 Moutu, Andrew Rio, Knut Corona, Alonso Rodrigo Zamora Agbetu, Toyin Green, Sarah https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5mr4r4sr ABSTRACT Experiments in money often recapitulate long‐standing human concerns over finality and fixity, despite money's reference points in political authority, trust, and the memorialization of relationships of credit and debt. From the point of view of the primary set of infrastructures facilitating the movement of money in 2050, those concerns are misplaced. Recounting the history of those infrastructures, this love letter from a future intelligence is addressed to those humans who would reimagine money so that they will recognize the human and technical infrastructures on which it has always depended. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5mr4r4sr Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/53f9h2w7 Crypto, charisma, and Trump's chaos economy https://escholarship.org/uc/item/53f9h2w7 Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 Vasantkumar, Chris Trnka, Susanna Grayman, Jesse Hession Wynn, LL https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4vf6c5cf Interview with Bill Maurer https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4vf6c5cf Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Silva, Patrícia Kunrath https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4v20t1wd From its traditional concern with ‘primitive’ moneys and definitional quandaries over the nature of money in small-scale and nonmarket societies, anthropology more recently has considered money’s meanings in multiple, overlapping spatial, cultural, and temporal milieu, as well as the pragmatics of money – what it does and how it signifies, rather than what it is or what it signifies. Early twenty-first century business interests in divesting the state of its monopoly over the legitimate means of exchange open new frontiers for the anthropology of money and value. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4v20t1wd Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, WM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4sr333cj The Work of Teaching the Canon: Reflections on Jim Ferguson’s Legacy at UC Irvine https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4sr333cj Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Boellstorff, Tom https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8580-3747 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 Zhan, Mei https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nx5x8xz Markets and finance have long attracted ethnographic interest but the nature of their activity – opaque, secretive and increasingly placeless – precludes traditional ethnographic fieldwork. In this article, we propose documents as an alternative access point to these organisations as an ethnographic object of enquiry. Documents do not only present a written record, but they also enact relationships and encode tacit understandings. We develop Geertz’s work on the bazaar by taking an indirect route to access the field site – collateralised debt obligation – through documents. In reading these documents, we assume the position of investors who, in the absence of alternative publicly available information, are dependent on the documentary accounts made available to them by the sellers. These media act in ways that are similar to tourist guidebooks, a comparison we use to reframe the exchange as one that builds upon sociocultural relations rather than the abstract market relationships... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nx5x8xz Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tischer, Daniel Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 Leaver, Adam https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48n3v5xc Studies of identity politics have often overlooked the role of bourgeois law in eliciting and confirming people's experience of themselves as persons with inherent qualities that they have a right to express. By constituting people as proprietors of their persons and capacities, bourgeois law requires those who come before it to display difference. Yet bourgeois law disclaims its role in producing difference, for by declaring all men equal before the law, in constitutes differences as developed outside its purview. Although the cultural logic of bourgeois law encourages people to imagine themselves as unique persons with rights, people achieve rights only through specific historical struggles. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48n3v5xc Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Collier, Jane F Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 Suarez‐Navaz, Liliana https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4175n6sc What is the source of ethnographic truth? One might just as well ask what is the real economy, for neither has a clear-cut empirical referent. Critical efforts to counter economic abstractions or finance’s fictions often seek a grounding truth in something “real.” In anthropology, this has meant variously the household (oikos) or kinship, or the lived experiences that ethnography supposedly evokes. But none of these concepts are innocent. This essay considers efforts like this special colloquium in HAU and allied projects like the Gens Manifesto, by way of a detour through method acting and the history of other anthropological attempts to theorize the connections among different economic formations. The focus on the real economy falters wherever there are seams or articulations among diverse or plural practices delimited as economic. Ethnography falters when we see it as a representation of a reality rather than as a bridge permitting conversions from one form of action to others.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4175n6sc Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3qr5618s How would you like to pay: how technology is changing the future of money https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3qr5618s Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 McGoun, Skip https://escholarship.org/uc/item/39w1m5qw Ten individuals who played key roles in formalizing veterans studies at American universities or within professional associations reflect on the field’s origins, key developments, institutional support, social and historical influences, and its evolution over time. Their responses, condensed and edited for clarity, elucidate the invisible, arduous, and complex labor involved in attempting to establish an academic discipline in 21st century America. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/39w1m5qw Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Grohowski, Mariana Dubinsky, James M Avilés-Santiago, Manuel G Bradford, Anita Casavantes Craig, Jim Hart, D Alexis Hinton, Corrine Hodges, Eric Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 Pencek, Bruce Wright, Wanda https://escholarship.org/uc/item/396738vj From the founding of the University of California (UC), Irvine School of Social Sciences in 1964, anthropologists were supposed to learn math. James March, the founding dean (who would go on to become a major figure in organizational sociology), had joined the campus from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (later, Carnegie Mellon), bringing with him its vision of interdisciplinary social science unified by a commitment to mathematics, formal models, cognitive theorizing, and computational methods (Kavanagh 2020). The undergraduate curriculum in the new school required math or statistics every quarter for the first three years of study—nine courses in math, minimum, before graduation. The first year also included a required “Introduction to Analysis” course, which was taught by March himself. This course turned into a textbook, coauthored with founding faculty member Charles Lave: An Introduction to Models in the Social Sciences (Lave and March 1975). A copy was... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/396738vj Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Seaver, Nick Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/34d140w6 Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean, by Peter James Hudson https://escholarship.org/uc/item/34d140w6 Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2ds8m3xw Data forward: an afterword https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2ds8m3xw Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1444m36s Money's ends and epistemic burdens https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1444m36s Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0fc1z9h4 Partant de la démonétisation en 2016 des grosses coupures en roupies indiennes, cet essai reconsidère la position chartaliste sur le « don » d’argent de l’État et s’inspire de Marilyn Strathern sur les distinctions entre partage, emprunt et vol. Keynes a fait valoir que l’argent devait avoir un pédigrée, une lignée continue. La démonétisation semble interrompre cette lignée. Dans le contexte plus large de la numérisation et de la dématérialisation de l’argent, la dématérialisation n’est pas simplement une redénomination des billets matériels, mais une affirmation de l’autorité de l’État à « écrire le dictionnaire » de l’argent, alors que de nouveaux débats politiques et des lobbies se forment autour des infrastructures monétaires, tant publiques que privées. La démonétisation peut couper la lignée et affirmer le contrôle de l’État, mais, après Mauss, la lignée brisée offre aux gens l’occasion de ressentir la possibilité de renouer des relations à travers d’autres... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0fc1z9h4 Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maurer, Bill https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5339-9893 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8t97z0r9 Problem, research strategy, and findings: Multigenerational living arrangements have become more common in the United States as housing costs rise and family structures evolve. Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) could support this shift by allowing relatives to live nearby while maintaining privacy and independence, and advocates have invoked this promise to justify laws intended to facilitate ADU development. In the past decade, at least eight U.S. states have adopted such laws. We present the first large-scale, parcel-level test of this claim, linking permit records from 14 California counties, covering approximately two-thirds of the state’s population, to geocoded voter registration and consumer reference data, identifying multigenerational households from shared surnames and age differences across single-family parcels. Parcels with ADU permits are, on average, slightly less likely to be multigenerational than comparable parcels without permits, by roughly 2 to 3 percentage... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8t97z0r9 Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Marantz, NJ Tanrisever, I Kim, JH https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zv6q3h7 Small Suburbs, Large Lots: How the Scale of Land-Use Regulation Affects Housing Affordability, Equity, and the Climate https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zv6q3h7 Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Biber, Eric Gualco-Nelson, Giulia Marantz, Nicholas O'Neill, Moira https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5358m0zc Metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) in the United States develop long-range Regional transportation plans (RTPs), which are required in order for municipalities to receive federal funds for transportation projects. Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires MPOs to submit an equity analysis to demonstrate that their RTPs do not discriminate against protected groups. This paper (i) identifies and evaluates the current range of practices in transportation equity analysis in RTPs for the largest MPOs, and (ii) provides practical steps for MPOs to improve their equity analyses. To identify the range of practices, we assess how MPOs define equity goals, identify populations of concern, integrate their equity analysis into their RTP documents, use community input, and whether they meet or exceed legal standards. Additionally, we evaluate how MPOs use travel forecasting models in their equity analyses and the quality of their models; we also describe practical steps... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5358m0zc Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cabello, Maxwell Hyland, Michael https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8394-8064 Marantz, Nicholas https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2h63f7b6 Examining Entitlement in California to Inform Policy and Process: Advancing Social Equity in Housing Development Patterns https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2h63f7b6 Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 O'Neill, Moira Biber, Eric Gualco-Nelson, Giulia Marantz, Nicholas https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1z78q5zj California’s seminal Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008—Senate Bill (SB) 375—includes two provisions specifically intended to help streamline transit-oriented development (TOD) projects through environmental review (California SB 375, 2008). One provision exempts qualifying TODs from environmental review entirely. The other provision streamlines environmental review for qualifying projects. This study explores the use and effect of those provisions. We first quantify how much and where the provisions have been used. We then use interviews and email communications with planning and development practitioners to explore why streamlining is used, whether streamlining actually helps reduce the time, cost, and uncertainty of permitting TOD projects, and how streamlining could be improved to better facilitate TOD projects. We find that SB 375 streamlining is a mixed bag. Neither streamlining provision has been used extensively. The full exemption appears to have... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1z78q5zj Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Affolter, Bailey Volker, Jamey Marantz, Nicholas Pike, Susan DeLeon, Graham