Catherine Comyn is a PhD Candidate in European and International Studies at King’s College London. Her research critically analyses the political economy of ‘financial democratisation’ post-2008, focusing on cryptocurrency as the salient contemporary form of this democratisation.

Research interests

Finance, financialisation, colonialism, value-form theory, cryptocurrency, new international division of labour.

PhD research

My PhD research critically engages with the development of 'financial democratisation' as an academic concept and political practice in the post-2008 context, focusing on cryptocurrency as the salient contemporary form of this democratisation. Drawing on a historical-geographical approach and ethnographic fieldwork, my project critically analyses the relations of labour and social reproduction underpinning social applications of cryptocurrency in both traditional ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ economies. In this way, I seek to unravel the materialities beneath 'financial democratisation', addressing its tendency to obscure questions of production and subjectivity. As a broader contribution to international political economy, my project situates nationally specific and locally embedded experiments in the digital economy within the global shifting forms of the new international division of labour.

PhD supervisor

Dr Thomas F Purcell

Latest publications

Comyn, C. (2026). ‘Fictitious Money: Cryptocurrency as a Social Form’. New Political Economy, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2026.2643434

Comyn, C. (2023). The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa. Auckland: Economic and Social Research Aotearoa.

Comyn, C. (2022). ‘Te Peeke o Aotearoa: Colonial and Decolonial Finance in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1860s–1890s’. In C. Bourne, P. Gilbert, M. Haiven, J. Montgomerie (eds.) The Entangled Legacies of Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press.