Mariam Humayun

Dr. Mariam Humayun is an 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 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, and Tokyo at various Bitcoin/Blockchain events and conferences.

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 meetup events in Toronto and the Satoshi Roundtable Conference.