Arjun Appadurai is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, as well as Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. Since 2016 he is Guest Professor at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University Berlin. He has published numerous essential books within the field of globalization studies, more recently “Banking on Words. The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance” (2015), offering an unconventional approach to the economic collapse of 2008.