Dr. Mariam Humayun is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa. Her research interests focus on the intersection of consumer culture, technology, branding, and social media - particularly in the contexts of cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin), consumer privacy, open-source, maker culture, and digital detoxing.
She completed her PhD at Schulich School of Business, York University in 2019 under the supervision of Dr. Russ Belk. Her dissertation is a longitudinal ethnographic and netnographic study of the Bitcoin/Blockchain ecosystem since 2014 and how it has evolved as a decentralized brand through multiple crises. For her dissertation, she conducted fieldwork in Toronto, San Francisco, Miami, Berlin, Amsterdam, New York, Prague, Cancun, Cambridge/Boston, Zurich/Zug, and Tokyo at various Bitcoin/Blockchain events and conferences.
While at Schulich, she was awarded the Seymour Schulich Teaching Excellence Award. For her Master’s thesis at Durham University, she examined consumers seeking privacy and turning towards analogue technologies such as paper notebooks (Moleskine) and film cameras (Leica/Pentax) to escape the banality of the digital realm and how certain brand myths offer avenues of escape. She has presented her work at the Association for Consumer Research Conference, the Consumer Culture Theory Conference, the Oxford Internet Institute, and has also been an invited speaker at Bitcoin/Blockchain events.
Her research is supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
“How Brand Hive Minds Thrive: Understanding Bitcoin’s Resilience”: Drawing on ecological resilience framework as a conceptual metaphor this paper maps how various stabilizing and destabilizing forces in the Bitcoin ecosystem helped in the evolution of a decentralized brand and promulgated more mainstreaming of the Bitcoin brand. PDF
“Satoshi is Dead. Long Live Satoshi. The Curious Case of Bitcoin”: Drawing on Barthes and Foucault’s ideas on the “death of the author”, this paper focuses on the myth of anonymity/pseudonymity and how by remaining pseudonymous, Satoshi Nakamoto, was able to leave his creation open to widespread adoption as it allowed for deeper ownership and varied discourses to emerge around Bitcoin. As long as Satoshi stays on the run, the myth goes on. PDF
“Tracing the United Nodes of Bitcoin”: This paper focuses on the intersection of money/religiosity/ideological elements within the Bitcoin brand and what kept the community faithful in times of crises juxtaposed against the constant “Bitcoin is dead” narrative in its early years. (WIP)