Rethinking Informality, Episode 2

In the second episode of Rethinking Informality, hosts Marta Massera and Daniela D’Urso are joined by Alba Valenciano-Mañé, social anthropologist and historian at Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, whose long-term ethnographic research with women traders in Equatorial Guinea has shaped a distinctive approach to the study of informal economies and practices. The conversation traces Alba’s intellectual trajectory into informality, from her fieldwork encounters to her positioning within the broader literature on African economies. The episode interrogates the classic tripartite framing of informality – as passive adaptation, resistance, or prefiguration – and asks how this framing shapes, and sometimes distorts, our understanding of women’s agency in informal trade. It also pushes further, moving beyond the formal/informal binary to think in terms of gradients of informality, and how these materialize concretely in Alba’s own fieldwork among second-hand clothing traders in Equatorial Guinea. The conversation closes by turning to how informality is imagined and instrumentalized also outside academia – from the ILO to everyday public discourse – and what that tells us about where the concept stands today.

Guest

Alba Valenciano-Mañé is a social anthropologist and historian, currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her work explores the political economy of everyday life in Central Africa, with a long-term focus on Equatorial Guinea. Her research on female second-hand clothing traders and moral economies of redistribution sits alongside broader interests in popular economies, recycling and waste, coloniality, and the political economy of museums. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Barcelona (2017), with a thesis on clothing, circulation, and power in Equatorial Guinea, and was previously a visiting fellow at Hofstra University, the University of Liverpool, and the University of Manchester.

Hosts

Marta Massera is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow completing a doctorate in socio-economics at Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines within the European project PRESILIENT. Her research integrates ethnographic and quantitative methods to bridge everyday practices and broader structural dynamics. Her work examines self-employment in informal economies, gendered labor relations, and food provisioning practices in the Dakar region, Senegal.

Daniela D’Urso is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research assistant at the University of Latvia and PhD student at Ku Leuven. She is part of PRESILIENT, a large network committed to exploring informality in 15 different countries. Her work focuses on urban informality in Morocco, examining how different urban spaces regulate, enable, and shape informal practices.

Series Summary
Pastoralists face the dual challenge of a rapidly changing climate and the transformative potential of global capitalism. In this series, we check in with interdisciplinary scholars who are working with pastoralists from around the world in diverse political, economic, and cultural settings to assess current challenges and the future viability of these complex livelihoods.

Episode 2
In this episode, our co-hosts engage prominent senior anthropologists and globally recognized experts in pastoralism, Drs. Dawn Chatty and Peter Little, in a long range discussion of how pastoralists have both impacted and been impacted by globalizing processes. In this panel, the hosts and our guests discuss global commodity markets, conservation, state-making, and an array of other pressures and forces impacting the livelihoods of pastoralists around the world. They also consider the future of pastoralism and the relevance of pastoral research for economic anthropology.

Guests:

Dr. Dawn Chatty, Fellow of the British Academy, Professor of Anthropology and Forced Migration, University of Oxford

Dr. Peter Little, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Program in Development Studies, Emory University

Hosts:

Dr. Daniel Murphy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Cincinnati.

Dr. Ariell Ahearn is a Departmental Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Oxford.

Series: Rethinking Informality

Episode 1
In the first episode of “Rethinking Informality”, hosts Miria Gambardella and Daniela D’Urso (MSCA PRESILIENT) are joined by Alena Ledeneva, political sociologist at UCL and founder of the Global Informality Project, whose work has fundamentally reshaped the comparative study of informal practices. The conversation retraces Ledeneva’s intellectual journey into informality, exploring how the concept evolved from the study of everyday practices in the Soviet and post-Soviet context into a broader analytical lens for understanding governance, trust, power, and economic life across societies. The episode examines the ambivalences of informality, its porous boundaries with formality, and its capacity to illuminate how people reproduce and transform existing social and political orders. It also reflects how informality could evolve as an analytical category, asking whether it still retains its critical purchase in a rapidly changing world and what new directions may shape the field in the years to come.

Guest

Alena Ledeneva is a Professor of Politics and Sociology at University College London and founder of the Global Informality Project. She authored a trilogy: Russia’s Economy of Favours (1998), How Russia Really Works (2006), and Can Russia Modernize? (2013) and edited three volumes of The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality (2018; 2024). Alongside her academic work, she is a conceptual, mixed-media artist working on informal power and social complexity. In 2019, she participated in the Palace of Ritual, parallel program of the 58th Venice Biennale, at Palazzo Donà Brusa, San Polo. Her first solo exhibition The System Made Me Do It took place at the Galerie de Buci in Paris (2024). Her performances are available at www.alenaledeneva.com.

Hosts

Miria Gambardella is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Researcher at the Centro per la Cooperazione Internazionale (CCI) and a PhD candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research explores informal and autonomous economic practices through long-term ethnographic fieldwork with European social movements and Zapatista communities in Chiapas, focusing on the ethics and politics of coffee circulation. She is part of PRESILIENT, a Horizon Europe MSCA Doctoral Network (Grant Agreement ID 101073394) investigating informality through collaborative research globally.

Daniela D’Urso is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research assistant at the University of Latvia and PhD student at Ku Leuven. She is part of PRESILIENT (EC/MSCA-DN Grant Agreement ID 101073394), a large network committed to exploring informality in 15 different countries. Her work focuses on urban informality in Morocco, examining how different urban spaces regulate, enable, and shape informal practices.