Daivi Rodima-Taylor, research associate at the African Studies Center (ASC) of Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies, has recently contributed new scholarship on collaborative economies, debt, diaspora, and digital platforms, with a focus on Africa and the Global South.

Her recent work includes contributions to the forthcoming Routledge Handbook on Debt and Oxford Bibliographies in Gender and Women’s Studies. Plus, Land and the Mortgage: History, Culture, Belonging and Cryptopolitics: Exposure, Concealment, and Digital Media—two volumes that Rodima-Taylor coedited—were reissued in 2026.

Daivi Rodima-Taylor

Rethinking Debt and Rotating Credit Associations

Her chapter “Rotating Credit Associations and Debt” for the forthcoming Routledge Handbook on Debt examines the historical development and continuing importance of rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) in the Global South.

The chapter places ROSCAs within longer histories of cooperative labor, reciprocal exchange, and changing forms of indebtedness. Rather than treating these money-pooling groups as outdated forms of informal finance, it shows how they have adapted to migration, commercialization, economic restructuring, and the expansion of formal and digital finance.

Rodima-Taylor conceptualizes ROSCAs as part of broader “debt ecologies” connecting households, kinship networks, migrant communities, remittance systems, banks, and digital lenders. While ROSCAs can provide access to resources when formal credit is costly or unavailable, they can also absorb or intensify debts generated elsewhere.

This perspective highlights how debt operates not only through financial institutions but also through social relationships, obligations, and networks that extend across local and transnational settings.

Exploring Diaspora Through Gender and Power

Rodima-Taylor’s article “Diaspora,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Gender and Women’s Studies, surveys major scholarship on diaspora across the social sciences and humanities. Drawing on feminist, intersectional, and transnational scholarship, the article examines diaspora as a relational formation shaped by movement, transnational connections, and unequal relations of power. It considers gendered mobility and belonging through topics including marriage and family, sexuality and intimacy, identity, care work, and digital diasporas.

The article also explores relationships between diasporas and states, economies, and civil society, with attention to policy, entrepreneurship, remittances, and forced displacement. It highlights how gender intersects with race, class, sexuality, and legal status in shaping experiences of mobility and belonging, while providing a guide to key debates, regional perspectives, journals, and academic book series in the field.

Digital Mutuality in Africa

Rodima-Taylor’s co-edited volume Cryptopolitics: Exposure, Concealment, and Digital Media, co-edited with Victoria Bernal and Katrien Pype, examines how secrecy, hidden knowledge, and practices of revealing and concealing information shape relations of power. Focusing primarily on African societies and diasporas, the volume explores these dynamics in public culture, social relationships, political protest, and economic life.

Her chapter, “The Cryptopolitics of Digital Mutuality” in the same volume examines how encrypted messaging platforms are reshaping informal savings groups, fundraising networks, and diaspora remittances in Africa. It explores how digital platforms can facilitate financial cooperation and new forms of mutuality while also creating vulnerabilities involving data capture, fraud, and Ponzi schemes.

Preserving African Arabic and Ajami Manuscripts

Alongside her research, Rodima-Taylor continues to contribute to BU’s African Ajami work as program manager. This includes the completion of the multi-year project “Digital Preservation of Fuuta Jalon Scholars’ Arabic and Ajami Materials in Senegal and Guinea,” funded by the Endangered Archives Programme of the British Library.

The project resulted in the largest digital collection of Fuuta Jalon scholars’ Arabic and Ajami manuscripts in the world, preserving more than 52,000 pages from Guinea and Senegal. Some materials date to the 18th century, providing a window into the intellectual, cultural, and religious life of Fuuta Jalon scholars across generations.

Together, these projects reflect Rodima-Taylor’s broader scholarly focus on communities and societies in Africa and the Global South navigating changing economic, social, and technological environments while nurturing language, literature, culture, and belonging.

Daivi Rodima-Taylor, Ph.D. is a social anthropologist and Africanist, and researcher and lecturer at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University. She is Fellow at the Boston University Institute of Culture, Religion, & World Affairs. Her research focuses on collaborative economies, financial technology and inclusion, migration and diaspora, and land and agrarian relations. Her longitudinal field research in East Africa studied local associations of mutual security such as collaborative work groups, savings-credit associations, and informal courts and militias. To learn more about her work and accomplishments, visit her profile.