Books
Archer, Matthew. (2024.) Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability. New York: New York University Press.
Journal Articles
Archer, Matthew. (2024). "Governing through ESG and the Green Spirit of Asset Manager Capitalism." Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. Available open access here.
Calvão, Filipe, Matthew Archer, and Asanda Benya. (2023.) "Introduction: Global Lives of Extraction." International Development Policy | Revue Internationale de politique de développement. Available open access here.
Calvão, Filipe, Asanda Benya, and Matthew Archer. (2023.) "Introduction: Global Afterlives of Extraction." International Development Policy | Revue Internationale de politique de développement. Available open access here.
Souleles, Daniel, Matthew Archer, and Morten Sørenson Thaning. (2023). "Introduction to special issue: Value, values, and anthropology." Economic Anthropology. Available open access here.
Archer, Matthew. (2022). "The ethics of ESG: Sustainable finance and the emergence of the market as an ethical subject." Focaal: The Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. Available open access here.
Thylstrup, Nanna, Matthew Archer, and Louis Ravn. (2022). "Transparency." Internet Policy Review. Available open access here.
Archer, Matthew and Hannah Elliott. (2021). "'It's up to the market to decide': Revealing and concealing power in the Kenyan tea supply chain." Critique of Anthropology. Available open access here.
Archer, Matthew and Daniel Souleles. (2021). "Introduction: Ethnographies of power and the powerful." Critique of Anthropology. Available open access here.
Archer, Matthew. (2021). "How to govern a sustainable supply chains: Standards, standardizers and the political ecology of (in)advertence." Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. (.pdf)
Archer, Matthew. (2021). "Imagining Impact in Global Supply Chains: Sustainability Standards and the Production of Surveillable Space." Surveillance & Society. Available open access here.
Calvão, Filipe and Matthew Archer. (2021). "Digital Extraction: Blockchain Traceability in Mineral Supply Chains." Political Geography. Available open access here.
Archer, Matthew. (2021). Review of Organic Sovereignties: Struggles over Farming in an Age of Free Trade by Guntra A. Aistara. In the Anthropology of Work Review 42(1).
Archer, Matthew. (2020). "Navigating the Sustainability Landscape: Impact Pathways and the Sustainability Ethic." Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. Available open access here.
Archer, Matthew. (2020). "Stakes and Stakeholders in the Climate Casino." GeoHumanities 6(1): 171-187. DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2020.1738257 (.pdf)
Archer, Matthew. (2020). "Appreciation." In Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon. Archer, Edited by Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian. Punctum Press. (.pdf)
Archer, Matthew. (2019). "Sustainable Finance." Oxford Bibliographies: Environmental Science. (link)
Archer, Matthew. (2018). "Reflections on Jen Sandler and Renita Thedvall (eds.). 2017. Meeting Ethnography: Meetings as Key Technologies of Contemporary Governance, Development, and Resistance. New York: Routledge." Journal of Business Anthropology.
Chatti, Deepti, Matthew Archer, Myles Lennon and Michael R. Dove (2018). "Exploring the Mundane: Toward an Ethnographic Approach to Bioenergy." Energy Research & Social Science.
Matthew. (2017). "Cellular Networks." Part of "Our Electric Biomedicine" in Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, December 19, 2017. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1262-our-electric-biomedicine.
De Haes, Jan and Matthew Archer. (2017). "Nostalgia for the Way Things Never Were: Ambivalence and Ambiguity in the Mississippi Delta." Lo Squaderno.
Archer, Matthew. (2015). "Benjamin in China, or the Silk Market Project: On the Changing Nature of the Commodity." Semiotica. (.pdf)
Reports
Baral, Prajwal, Mikkel Larsen and Matthew Archer. (2019). "Does Money Grow on Trees? Reforestation Financing in Southeast Asia." Washington, DC: Atlantic Council. (.pdf)
Conferences and Workshops
Calvão, Filipe and Matthew Archer. June 2023, paper presentation at Energy Ethics 2023: Financing the Future. “Flaring the Grid: Residue Economies of Crypto Energy.” St. Andrews, Scotland.
Archer, Matthew and Filipe Calvão. June 2022, organized a panel on “Managed by the Machine: AI and the new politics of supply chains” at RAI (Royal Anthropological Institute) 2022: Anthropology, AI, and the Future of Human Society.
Randle, Sayd and Matthew Archer. March 2022, organized a panel on “New Political Ecologies of Storage: Holding Matter and Value in Place in the 21st Century” at the AAG (American Association of Geographers) annual conference.
Archer, Matthew. March 2022, paper presentation at the AAG annual conference. “Powering the Planetary Mine: Electrification, Automation, and the Political Ecology of ‘Smart’ Extractivism.”
November 2021, Anthropology of Technology Conference. “Tracing Knowledge: The Politics of Blockchain Epistemologies” (with Filipe Calvão). Aarhus, Denmark
March 2021, Society for Economic Anthropology and Culture & Agriculture joint conference. "Sustainability and the standardization of the unstandardizable."
January 2021, Workshop (online) on the anthropology of power and the anthropology of the powerful. Co-hosted with Daniel Souleles.
September 2020, Royal Anthropological Institute/Royal Geographical Society Joint Annual Conference, “Accounting for impact in sustainable supply chains,” (with Hannah Elliott)
April 2020, The HAU of Finance: Ethnographic inquiries into impact investing and the moral turn in finance, “Accounting for Impact in Sustainable Finance,” University of Bologna, Italy (online)
June 2019, European Conference on African Studies (ECAS), Organized a panel on "Ethical Certification between Transparency and Traceability" (with Filipe Calvão and Matthieu Bolay) and presented a paper on "Digitalizing Africa" (with Martin Skrydstrup), Edinburgh, Scotland
May 2019, Transparency Qualities and Technologies of Gemstone Trading (invited workshop), "Transparency against sustainability," Geneva, Switzerland
May 2019, Beijing Impact Investing Days, Sino-Danish Center, Beijing, China
April 2019, American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting , "Emergent Sustainability in a Scandinavian Bank," Washington, DC, USA
October 2018, Transregional Forum on Infrastructures, Regions, and Urbanization, National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore.
September 2018, Association of Social Anthropology of the UK and Northern Ireland (ASA), "Corporate Sustainability and the Narrative of Smooth Transitions," Oxford, UK
June 2018, Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) Biannual Meeting, Organized and chaired a panel on the "Political Ecology of Sustainability Indicators," Oslo, Norway
April 2018, American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, "Sustainability in the Shadow of Big Data," New Orleans, LA, USA
November 2017, American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Meeting, "Who do you know?: The status of networking in corporate ethnography," Washington, DC, USA
April 2017, American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, "Infrastructures of Climate Governance," Boston, MA, USA
March 2017, “Social Finance, Impact Investing, and the Financialization of the Public Interest” (University of Hamburg, Centre for Globalisation and Governance), "Financializing Ecology: Techniques and Technologies of Sustainable Investing," Hamburg, Germany
November 2016, American Anthropological Association (AAA) annual meeting, "An ethnography of sustainable finance in/from Geneva," Minneapolis, MN, USA
October 2016, New Topics in Global Justice Conference (Yale Global Justice Program), chaired a panel on "Illicit Financial Flows and Their Impacts," New Haven, CT, USA
July 2016, Anthropological Legacies and Human Futures, European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) bi-annual general meeting, "Meaningful Meetings: on the infrastructure of corporate sustainability," Milan, Italy
May 2016, Anthropology, Weather and Climate Change, Royal Anthropological Institute and the British Museum, "Value Chains as Infrastructure: corporations, climate change and sustainable development," London, UK
October 2015, Anthropology and Sociology of Development Colloquium, Graduate Institute in Geneva, "Sustainable Supply Chains and the Anthropology of Business," Geneva, Switzerland
March 2015, "Affecting Labor" Conference, Johns Hopkins University Department of Anthropology, presented on "The Affective Labor of Supply Chain Management," Baltimore, MD, USA
May 2013, In ‘Transformation’: Assessing Architectural and Urban Change in Modern China, presented a paper on Chinese architecture in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties, Hong Kong, China
September 2011, Shanghai International Conference on Social Science, invited to present undergraduate thesis, Shanghai, China
June 2009, International Youth Summit on Energy and Climate Change, Beijing, China
Media
Yale Economic Review (podcast) interview on sustainable supply chains in Ghana. (link)
"Dit had Jonathan Holslag wellicht niet verwacht," 18 December 2015 in De Morgen (link)
"这还是我的美国吗?特朗普当选和英国退欧不是一回事儿!" 10 November 2016 in 澎湃 (The Paper) (link)
Archer, Matthew. (2024.) Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability. New York: New York University Press.
Journal Articles
Archer, Matthew. (2024). "Governing through ESG and the Green Spirit of Asset Manager Capitalism." Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. Available open access here.
Calvão, Filipe, Matthew Archer, and Asanda Benya. (2023.) "Introduction: Global Lives of Extraction." International Development Policy | Revue Internationale de politique de développement. Available open access here.
Calvão, Filipe, Asanda Benya, and Matthew Archer. (2023.) "Introduction: Global Afterlives of Extraction." International Development Policy | Revue Internationale de politique de développement. Available open access here.
Souleles, Daniel, Matthew Archer, and Morten Sørenson Thaning. (2023). "Introduction to special issue: Value, values, and anthropology." Economic Anthropology. Available open access here.
Archer, Matthew. (2022). "The ethics of ESG: Sustainable finance and the emergence of the market as an ethical subject." Focaal: The Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. Available open access here.
Thylstrup, Nanna, Matthew Archer, and Louis Ravn. (2022). "Transparency." Internet Policy Review. Available open access here.
Archer, Matthew and Hannah Elliott. (2021). "'It's up to the market to decide': Revealing and concealing power in the Kenyan tea supply chain." Critique of Anthropology. Available open access here.
Archer, Matthew and Daniel Souleles. (2021). "Introduction: Ethnographies of power and the powerful." Critique of Anthropology. Available open access here.
Archer, Matthew. (2021). "How to govern a sustainable supply chains: Standards, standardizers and the political ecology of (in)advertence." Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. (.pdf)
Archer, Matthew. (2021). "Imagining Impact in Global Supply Chains: Sustainability Standards and the Production of Surveillable Space." Surveillance & Society. Available open access here.
Calvão, Filipe and Matthew Archer. (2021). "Digital Extraction: Blockchain Traceability in Mineral Supply Chains." Political Geography. Available open access here.
Archer, Matthew. (2021). Review of Organic Sovereignties: Struggles over Farming in an Age of Free Trade by Guntra A. Aistara. In the Anthropology of Work Review 42(1).
Archer, Matthew. (2020). "Navigating the Sustainability Landscape: Impact Pathways and the Sustainability Ethic." Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. Available open access here.
Archer, Matthew. (2020). "Stakes and Stakeholders in the Climate Casino." GeoHumanities 6(1): 171-187. DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2020.1738257 (.pdf)
Archer, Matthew. (2020). "Appreciation." In Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon. Archer, Edited by Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian. Punctum Press. (.pdf)
Archer, Matthew. (2019). "Sustainable Finance." Oxford Bibliographies: Environmental Science. (link)
Archer, Matthew. (2018). "Reflections on Jen Sandler and Renita Thedvall (eds.). 2017. Meeting Ethnography: Meetings as Key Technologies of Contemporary Governance, Development, and Resistance. New York: Routledge." Journal of Business Anthropology.
Chatti, Deepti, Matthew Archer, Myles Lennon and Michael R. Dove (2018). "Exploring the Mundane: Toward an Ethnographic Approach to Bioenergy." Energy Research & Social Science.
Matthew. (2017). "Cellular Networks." Part of "Our Electric Biomedicine" in Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, December 19, 2017. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1262-our-electric-biomedicine.
De Haes, Jan and Matthew Archer. (2017). "Nostalgia for the Way Things Never Were: Ambivalence and Ambiguity in the Mississippi Delta." Lo Squaderno.
Archer, Matthew. (2015). "Benjamin in China, or the Silk Market Project: On the Changing Nature of the Commodity." Semiotica. (.pdf)
Reports
Baral, Prajwal, Mikkel Larsen and Matthew Archer. (2019). "Does Money Grow on Trees? Reforestation Financing in Southeast Asia." Washington, DC: Atlantic Council. (.pdf)
Conferences and Workshops
Calvão, Filipe and Matthew Archer. June 2023, paper presentation at Energy Ethics 2023: Financing the Future. “Flaring the Grid: Residue Economies of Crypto Energy.” St. Andrews, Scotland.
Archer, Matthew and Filipe Calvão. June 2022, organized a panel on “Managed by the Machine: AI and the new politics of supply chains” at RAI (Royal Anthropological Institute) 2022: Anthropology, AI, and the Future of Human Society.
Randle, Sayd and Matthew Archer. March 2022, organized a panel on “New Political Ecologies of Storage: Holding Matter and Value in Place in the 21st Century” at the AAG (American Association of Geographers) annual conference.
Archer, Matthew. March 2022, paper presentation at the AAG annual conference. “Powering the Planetary Mine: Electrification, Automation, and the Political Ecology of ‘Smart’ Extractivism.”
November 2021, Anthropology of Technology Conference. “Tracing Knowledge: The Politics of Blockchain Epistemologies” (with Filipe Calvão). Aarhus, Denmark
March 2021, Society for Economic Anthropology and Culture & Agriculture joint conference. "Sustainability and the standardization of the unstandardizable."
January 2021, Workshop (online) on the anthropology of power and the anthropology of the powerful. Co-hosted with Daniel Souleles.
September 2020, Royal Anthropological Institute/Royal Geographical Society Joint Annual Conference, “Accounting for impact in sustainable supply chains,” (with Hannah Elliott)
April 2020, The HAU of Finance: Ethnographic inquiries into impact investing and the moral turn in finance, “Accounting for Impact in Sustainable Finance,” University of Bologna, Italy (online)
June 2019, European Conference on African Studies (ECAS), Organized a panel on "Ethical Certification between Transparency and Traceability" (with Filipe Calvão and Matthieu Bolay) and presented a paper on "Digitalizing Africa" (with Martin Skrydstrup), Edinburgh, Scotland
May 2019, Transparency Qualities and Technologies of Gemstone Trading (invited workshop), "Transparency against sustainability," Geneva, Switzerland
May 2019, Beijing Impact Investing Days, Sino-Danish Center, Beijing, China
April 2019, American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting , "Emergent Sustainability in a Scandinavian Bank," Washington, DC, USA
October 2018, Transregional Forum on Infrastructures, Regions, and Urbanization, National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore.
September 2018, Association of Social Anthropology of the UK and Northern Ireland (ASA), "Corporate Sustainability and the Narrative of Smooth Transitions," Oxford, UK
June 2018, Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) Biannual Meeting, Organized and chaired a panel on the "Political Ecology of Sustainability Indicators," Oslo, Norway
April 2018, American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, "Sustainability in the Shadow of Big Data," New Orleans, LA, USA
November 2017, American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Meeting, "Who do you know?: The status of networking in corporate ethnography," Washington, DC, USA
April 2017, American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, "Infrastructures of Climate Governance," Boston, MA, USA
March 2017, “Social Finance, Impact Investing, and the Financialization of the Public Interest” (University of Hamburg, Centre for Globalisation and Governance), "Financializing Ecology: Techniques and Technologies of Sustainable Investing," Hamburg, Germany
November 2016, American Anthropological Association (AAA) annual meeting, "An ethnography of sustainable finance in/from Geneva," Minneapolis, MN, USA
October 2016, New Topics in Global Justice Conference (Yale Global Justice Program), chaired a panel on "Illicit Financial Flows and Their Impacts," New Haven, CT, USA
July 2016, Anthropological Legacies and Human Futures, European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) bi-annual general meeting, "Meaningful Meetings: on the infrastructure of corporate sustainability," Milan, Italy
May 2016, Anthropology, Weather and Climate Change, Royal Anthropological Institute and the British Museum, "Value Chains as Infrastructure: corporations, climate change and sustainable development," London, UK
October 2015, Anthropology and Sociology of Development Colloquium, Graduate Institute in Geneva, "Sustainable Supply Chains and the Anthropology of Business," Geneva, Switzerland
March 2015, "Affecting Labor" Conference, Johns Hopkins University Department of Anthropology, presented on "The Affective Labor of Supply Chain Management," Baltimore, MD, USA
May 2013, In ‘Transformation’: Assessing Architectural and Urban Change in Modern China, presented a paper on Chinese architecture in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties, Hong Kong, China
September 2011, Shanghai International Conference on Social Science, invited to present undergraduate thesis, Shanghai, China
June 2009, International Youth Summit on Energy and Climate Change, Beijing, China
Media
Yale Economic Review (podcast) interview on sustainable supply chains in Ghana. (link)
"Dit had Jonathan Holslag wellicht niet verwacht," 18 December 2015 in De Morgen (link)
"这还是我的美国吗?特朗普当选和英国退欧不是一回事儿!" 10 November 2016 in 澎湃 (The Paper) (link)