Minting worlds: Economic minors tracing money in a Global Financial Crisis

This essay engages with the interpretive offerings of worldly ethnography, here understood as a friction, a making of liveable lives, and a minting of life otherwise, to look at children’s and familiesâ™ economic lives during the Global Financial Crisis. The writing moves from analysis to speculation as the authors follow children following the money. In particular, the essay mobilises the metaphor of âmintingâ™ to think about ways in which children performed a different reading of the financial crisis in places as local as their bedrooms. Minting is a practice of making the hidden (money) visible (coins) and of making private money public. Ultimately, the speculative reading that emerges from the collaboration between researchers and children advocates for play, experimentation, and the age-old art of parody as one model for the âunmintingâ™ of our current neoliberal economic moment, where attempts are being made the world over to make everything public private.