"The Innovator’s Dilemma: Bitcoin in El Salvador"

When: ​Tuesday, April 5, 2022, @ 12pm-1:00pm
Where: In-Person: MidWestOne Bank  102 S. Clinton St., Iowa City, IA
Speakers: Dr.Eric Vazquez 

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This talk examines bitcoin enthusiast's arguments about the viability of bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador. It raises specific concerns about bitcoin adoption in a context of growing authoritarianism, a history of unstable monetary policy, and limited technology.

Eric Vázquez is an assistant professor in American Studies and Latino Studies at University of Iowa. His scholarship emphasizes the cultural, political, military, and economic bonds that link populations and institutions in the United States to Central America.His current book project, States of Defeat: US Imaginaries of Central American Revolution, explores how thwarted ambitions for revolution in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala give rise to ambivalent, outraged, cynical, and mournful affects for novelists, intellectuals, immigrants, and military technocrats living in the US. Out of these experiences of defeat and disappointment American intellectuals retreat into questions about the viability and legitimacy of state power. Dr. Vázquez argues that by deploying a mode of analysis that is speculative about the future and discouraged by the past, at once, these texts prefigure later war-on-terror era anxieties about state failure, the rise of non-governmental organizational forms, and raison d'etat secrecy and securitizationIn his research, Eric Vázquez has enjoyed the support of the Ford Foundation with a 2013-2014 Dissertation Writing Fellowship. Dr. Vazquez received his PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University in 2015.

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