Projects
Impact Hau: a comic about finance
Project
Marc Brightman is leading an ERC project, Impact HAU, hosted by the University of Bologna. At the core of Impact HAU, there is a new point of view on the world on finance, and especially the phenomenon of impact bonds “going green”. Indeed, the world of finance is more and more involved in financing sustainable projects. For example, the big actors of finance are building wind turbines in Europe, safeguarding the sea in the Maldive, promoting entrepreneurship in Africa and many other good deeds. Sound good, right? But IMPACT Hau’s research is trying to dive deeper.From an ethnographic standpoint, IMPACT Hau wants to understand whether this phenomenon, called “impact investing “, is helping to bring about the radical transitions and systems change that can lead to greater sustainability or whether is merely opening new frontiers for financialization and deepening the political crisis of the developed world. The IMPACT Hau case study illustrated in the comic is the one of Giulia Del Maso, postdoc, which is a good example of the ambiguity of the outcomes that impact bonds may have. Giulia is researching the case of China’s first Certified Climate Bond: the Chinese Three Gorges Corporation funding wind energy in Portugal. In the storyboard we tried to give a panoramic view of the different actors brought together through impact bonds and explain the role of the researcher in understanding this complex scenario.
Client
The ERC-funded project Impact HAU is an innovative, critical and comparative anthropological study of the moral and political dimensions of impact investing. Inspired by Marcel Mauss’s classic use of the Maori concept of hau, the ‘spirit of the gift’. It focuses on the designers, traders and beneficiaries of impact bonds to produce an empirically driven analysis of the multiple moral orders within contemporary capitalism.
Artist
Ira is a cartoonist, author and teacher living in Upstate New York with his wife, two cats, a dog and lots of books he’s been meaning to read.
His love for stories about ancient magic, mythical monsters, and possible futures has led him to work with the European Research Council to speculate on future-tech, create a warehouse of esoteric objects for the Hugo Award Winning magazine, Weird Tales, and discuss world building in this episode of the PBS series, A House for the Arts. He teaches 1,000+ students a month on Skillshare and ihas published Shark Summer, a new graphic novel for Little, Brown Publishing. His proudest moment was when Understanding Comics author, Scott McCloud wrote a thoughtful blog post about his work.
