Dr Juli Huang - SPS COP26
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Juli Huang is an economic anthropologist whose research focuses on social enterprise and the use of new technologies, data, and markets for poverty alleviation.
Dr Huang is part of a new research project called Creative Coin.
It focuses on how complementary currencies might incentivise circular economy principles within Edinburgh's creative industries. Here's more on the project:
Creative Coin: Alternative currency as a method for exploring the contributory value of the Creative Industries to a Circular Economy
Researchers:
- Juli Huang (University of Edinburgh)
- Mary Michel (Ostrero)
- Tom Flint (Edinburgh Napier University)
How can the creative industries harness data and technology to build a circular economy? This project uses data and technology to design a 'Creative Coin', an alternative currency as a method for exploring the contributory value of the creative industries to a circular economy.
The key question we will address is:
How can the creative industries harness data and technology to build a circular economy?
Hegemonic measures of value centring on financial wealth fail to recognise the social and environmental effects of economic activity and thus are unable to reward the benefits of a circular economy.
The creative industries embody the notion of values-driven enterprise in their fundamental concern with producing and sharing vital aspects of the human experience. Nurturing the human impulse for creativity, they produce myriad forms of value in aesthetic, experiential, and emotive ways, beyond their contribution to the economic health of society.
Creative Coin as a collaborative research method
This project will use data and technology to design a Creative Coin as an experimental collaborative research method for understanding how these multiple societal and environmental values are expressed and circulated within the creative industries and how these can build a circular economy. Simultaneously, the project will engage key public audiences in these value explorations.
Building a circular economy
Rather than perceiving value in singular, economic terms, this project instead draws from anthropological and ethnographic approaches to value, which seek to understand and appreciate how communities of people themselves assign value to objects, practices, and relations (Graeber 2001; Miller 2008). What is chosen to be measured reflects what, and who, is valued (D’Ignazio & Klein 2020). The research methods allow us to understand what alternative measures might better reflect the ethical and cultural positions within the creative industries and how these could build a circular economy, for example designing for disassembly or sharing materials and tools.
The project is funded by Creative Horizons.
Find out more