Lana Swartz

During her time at CASBS, Lana Swartz will be completing a book about scams. The word “scam” performs boundary work that determines which forms of economic activity count as legitimate and which do not. Today, amid economic uncertainty, institutional crisis, and rapid technological change, those boundaries seem to be in flux. Scams are exploding. As financial technology reshapes who can participate in the economy and on what terms, platforms have become the primary arena where these lines are drawn. Swartz is also interested in the longer histories of how scams have been legally, culturally, and technologically defined.

Swartz is associate professor of media studies and Shannon Mid-Career Fellow at the University of Virginia, where she directs the Digital Cultures and Economies (DiCE) Lab. Her research examines the social and cultural dimensions of the digital economy, including recent work on finfluencers, crypto assets, and online hustles. Swartz is the author of New Money: How Payment Became Social Media (Yale, 2020) and co-editor of Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff (MIT, 2017). Swartz has held fellowships at the Berggruen Institute and Microsoft Research New England.

Recent work: ”Social Media in the Scam Age,” Social Media + Society (2026) Invited essay for 10th anniversary issue https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051261437922