Description

Money is often treated as a personal matter. With financial independence widely seen as a marker of competence and adulthood, each person is expected to manage their money all by themselves.

At the same time, many people experience financial life as increasingly complex and fragile. Yet the responsibility to handle it alone has not diminished. Instead, this intensifies the tension between what is expected—self-reliance—and what is often experienced—vulnerability.

Drawing on interview-based research conducted across 13 countries in the world, our lab’s webinar examines how norms of individual financial responsibility shape everyday relationships around money.

Further, the webinar turns to community-led financial practices, such as rotating savings groups. These practices are not presented as alternatives to mainstream finance. Instead, they serve as a lens for understanding when acting together financially becomes possible, what kinds of rules and commitments it requires, and where cooperation becomes fragile, tense or exclusionary.

Through these lenses, we will look at something often missing in financial life: viable forms of financial practice between individual responsibility and institutional delegation.

Join the webinar to explore how recognising the social dynamics of money can inform more approaches to long-term financial well-being.

Xueyi Yao is a researcher at Open Future Lab with a background in Cognitive Science, especially the intersection of psychology and language. She is a PhD candidate at the Central European University, working on how we talk about events affects our memory.

Naoki Matsuyama is a researcher at Open Future Lab with a background in science and technology studies, and artistic research. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, doing research on the co-development of technology and finance.