Bridget Kustin

Bridget is a Research Fellow and Qualitative Lead on the Oxford Ownership Project at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Bridget is an economic anthropologist (PhD, Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, 2017) who studies the complexity and ethics of corporations, financial systems, and the humans interacting with them.

Her research engages the breadth of the global wealth spectrum, from large family businesses (annual revenue above $1 billion) and their advisors/service providers, to Islamic (micro)finance institutions in Bangladesh and Pakistan serving the world's poorest, to international development finance, through fieldwork at the Islamic Development Bank in Saudi Arabia and a position as a 2018-19 Fellow on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Development Finance.

Bridget conducted nearly 20 months of full-time ethnographic fieldwork across 2010-2014 in Dhaka and primarily in a semi-rural community along the Bangladesh/Myanmar border, funded by several international, national, and Johns Hopkins University fellowships including the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Program. She examined how risk management, Shariah compliance, and Islamic concepts of public well-being (maslaha) and intention (niyyat) are challenged by poverty conditions and household financial management of clients at one of the world’s largest consumer Islamic banks, the Islami Bank Bangladesh Ltd.

Bridget has consulted on financial inclusion for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Financial Services for the Poor division and Islamic Relief Worldwide, and was appointed to the international board of the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion in 2016. She speaks and reads Bangla, held a 2012 research residency at the Berlin Centre for Social Science Research (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung) as an Irmgard Coninx Stiftung Fellow, and has taught at Johns Hopkins University and SOAS, University of London.