Dr Vincent Guermond

Profile

Roles:

Lecturer in Digital Innovation in Business and Society

Profile:

Vincent Guermond is an economic and development geographer. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of the geographies of digital economies, finance and debt, climate adaptation, migration and development, and social reproduction. He has published in leading academic journals in geography, development studies, and international political economy, including Antipode, Progress in Human Geography, Geoforum, Environment and Planning A, Review in International Political Economy, World Development, and Development and Change. His new book Remittances and Financial Inclusion: Contested Geographies of Marketisation in Senegal and Ghana was published in 2023 with Routledge.

Prior to joining QMUL, Vincent was a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. Between 2020 and 2022, Vincent worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in a Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) study in Cambodia and India. The project explored the relationship between climate change, debt, migration and nutrition. It probed at the issue of how to ensure that 'climate resilience' through credit provisioning does not come at the cost of borrowers' emotional and bodily depletion in the context of daily and often slow-onset climate disasters.

Vincent completed his PhD at Queen Mary University of London. His PhD thesis looked at a global migration-development agenda that aims to leverage remittances for development by incorporating remittance flows and households into global finance. Based upon ten months of fieldwork in Senegal and Ghana, his research foregrounded a ‘hybrid’ understanding of uneven and contested geographies of financial incorporation in the global South that requires an integrative approach across economic, financial and development geography. 

Teaching

Vincent is an Associate Fellow of the HEA (2021)

He is currently working towards a Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy through the Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PGCAP) programme at the Queen Mary Academy.

Research

Research Interests:

Vincent works at the intersection of development and economic geography, development studies, and international political economy.  His recent and ongoing works are focused across the following inter-related areas:  

• Digital and micro- finance
• Climate adaptation
• Migration and development
• Social reproduction

Publications:

• Guermond, V. 2023. Remittances and Financial Inclusion: Contested Geographies of Market-Making in Senegal and Ghana. London: Routledge.

Peer-reviewed articles

• Iskander, D., Guermond, V., Brickell, K. 2023. ‘Thinking too much’: Making visible the moral economy that sustains over-indebtedness in rural Cambodia. Etnofoor, 35(1): 31-50.
• Guermond V., Parsons, L., Ly Vouch, L., Natarajan, N., Brickell, K., Fay, G., Iskander, D., Michiels, S., Picchioni, F., Green, W.M. 2023. Depleted by debt: Climate adaptation, microfinance and over-indebtedness in Cambodia. Antipode. Online before print.
• Alami, I. and Guermond, V. 2022. The colour of money at the financial frontier. Review of International Political Economy. Online before print.
• Guermond, V. 2022. Whose money? Digital remittances, mobile money and fintech in Ghana. Journal of Cultural Economy. 15(4): 436-451.
• Guermond, V. 2021. Remittance-scapes: The contested geographies of remittance management. Progress in Human Geography 46(2): 372-297.
• Natarajan, N., Brickell, K., Guermond, V., Parsons., L., and Lawreniuk, S. 2021. Challenging the financial inclusion-decent work nexus: Evidence from Cambodia’s over-indebted internal migrants. Global Public Policy and Governance 1(3): 361-381.
• Guérin, I., Guermond, V., Joseph, N. and Natarajan, N. 2021. Exclusionary, precarious and generative infrastructures: Financial inclusion, informal finance and Covid-19 in Tamil Nadu. Development and Change 52(4): 927-951.
• Guermond, V., 2020. Contesting the financialisation of remittances: Repertoires of reluctance, refusal and dissent in Ghana and Senegal. Environment & Planning A 54(4): 800-821.
• Guermond, V., 2020. Marketisation as financialisation in the making? The construction of remittance markets in Senegal. Geoforum 117: 234-245.
• Brickell, K., Picchioni, F., Natarajan, N., Guermond, V., Parsons, L., Zanello, G., and Bateman, M., 2020. Compounding crises of social reproduction: Microfinance, over-indebtedness and the COVID-19 pandemic. World Development. 136: 1-4.
• Datta, K., and Guermond, V. 2020. Financialisation and/of Migrant Labour, in Mader, P., Mertens, D. and Van der Zwan, N., ed. International Handbook of Financialization. London: Routledge International. pp.330-335.
• Guermond, V., and Samba S. N., 2018. When monetary coloniality meets 21st century finance: development in the franc zone’. Discover Society. Available at: https://discoversociety.org/2018/09/04/when-monetary-coloniality-meets-21st-century-finance-development-in-the-franc-zone/

Research reports

• Guermond, V., Parsons, L., Long, L.V., Michiels, S., Brickell, K., Fay, G., Bateman, M., Zanello, G., Natarajan, N., Iskander, D., and Picchioni, F. 2022. Microfinance, over-indebtedness and climate adaptation: New evidence from rural Cambodia. Available at: https://www.debt-climate-health.org  
• Iskander, D., and Picchioni, F. Long, L.V., Parsons, L., Guermond, V., Michiels, S., Brickell, K., Zanello, G., Natarajan, N. 2022. Trapped in the Service of Debt: How the Burdens of Repayment are Fuelling the Health Poverty Trap in Rural Cambodia. Available at: https://www.debt-climate-health.org

Other publications (selected)

• Guermond, V. 2022. Building up debt traps: Risk, climate adaptation and microfinance. Development Economics.
• Guermond, V., Joseph, N., Natarajan, N. and Parsons, L. 2020. Microfinance loans could spell disaster in the time of coronavirus. The Conversation.
• Guermond, V. and Datta, K. 2020. Coronavirus slump could hit migrant remittances – and millions who rely on them’. The Conversation.
• Datta, K. and Guermond, V. 2020. Remittances in Times of Crisis: Reflections on Labour, Social Reproduction, and Digitisation during Covid-19. Antipode Online.
• Datta, K. and Guermond, V. 2020. Migrant finance under lockdown. Tribune Magazine.
• Guermond, V. 2019. Financialising migration? Remittances, algorithms and digital finance. Development Economics.

Supervision

Vincent is interested in supervising PhDs in the areas of micro-, development and climate finance, migration and development, climate adaptation, and social reproduction.

Public Engagement

Vincent is a member of the Royal Geography Society. He is the current Secretary of the RGS Radical Geography Research Group.