ABSTRACT
Fringe Finance takes Lynn Hershman's critical gesture and Rob Walker's reminders as provocations to explore the borders of global finance as spaces which host the most intense practices. Conventionally, international political economy (IPE) has been wedded to conceptions of borders as lines of zero width. The practices of fringe finance are an increasingly important link between the centre of global finance and those populations that exist at its edges. Although finance has always been a relevant theme in traditions of critical political economy, it has now become the object of creative new avenues of analysis in a wide range of disciplinary settings, especially sociology, anthropology and the social studies of technology/science. The diagram of fringe finance pivots on three broad clusters of practices each of which addresses the edges of the financial world, and the populations that exist at and across those edges, in diverse types of ways. These three clusters include the processes of conversion, formalization and incorporation.
