Margie Cheesman

Margie Cheesman is an Affiliate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.

Margie is also an Assistant Editor at the academic journal Big Data & Society.

Margie is an anthropologist who works with communities using and making digitalisation projects in contexts of international aid and migration. She researches global migration governance and socio-economic inequality, with specific expertise on how money and identity infrastructures are changing in the digital age. This includes the impacts of novel payment systems, demonetisation, biometrics, and decentralised ID.

Her PhD, ‘Infrastructure Justice and Humanitarianism: Blockchain’s Promises in Practice’, based at the Oxford Internet Institute and funded by the ESRC, was the first ethnography of blockchain technology in humanitarian settings.

Margie has conducted research with refugee groups in Jordan and international organisations such as InfoMigrants, GSMA Mobile for Development, and United Nations agencies.

She has previously worked for the civil liberties initiative, Open Migration, the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CReSC), and The Observer.