CV

Marlena Rycombel is an anthropologist specializing in cultural and economic anthropology. She is currently based at the University of Lucerne and the Zug Institute for Blockchain Research. In her current research, she studies how couples organize and imagine their budgets, including the place of crypto investments in household financial life, and conducts ethnographic observations of workshops that introduce more egalitarian, explicitly feminist approaches to budgeting.

She submitted her PhD dissertation, “Between Nostalgia, Utopia, and the End of the World: Visions of the Future among Local Currency Activists” (originally written in Polish), at the University of Warsaw. Her dissertation was based on multi‑sited fieldwork in three alternative currency projects: Zielony (“Greener”) in Poland, a local currency, and the Brixton Pound and La Monnaie Léman in London and Geneva, which developed both local currencies and their local cryptocurrency counterparts. Her research on these currencies was supported by a three‑year grant from the National Science Centre (NCN) in Poland. She also held a research stay at the University of Victoria, working with the Counter Currency Laboratory and its archival collection on community currencies. She is an elected board member of the Economic Sociology Research Network (RN09) of the European Sociological Association (ESA).