Hermes Research Collective

At the end of 2020, our research team founded FRIBIS NetFi. After years of successful experiences, we decided to continue working on this journey. Our main objective is to support research on alternative economic and monetary systems. Our methods cross different disciplines and we believe in the importance of mixed methods - i.e., quantitative and qualitative. We are constantly looking to improve ourselves by putting together cutting-edge methodologies with old-but-gold traditional approaches. Our goal is to offer new innovative ways to observe and study reality free from ideological and partisan biases. The problem we have today is the unexpected outcome of a solution offered yesterday. Let's start from this.

We are Hermes Lab.  We want to create a space for the production of knowledge about “economy” that is holistic, founded on theoretical and methodological pluralism. We leverage methods and insights from different disciplines such as anthropology, history and mathematics, specifically in the field of network science. Hermes Lab departs from the understanding of human beings as enmeshed in a complex web of  interdependencies, living within interlocking forms of mutualism, hierarchy and exchange.

We understand any economy is fundamentally a human economy, understood in its original sense of oikos in Greek which means household, where household does not imply the private property over land but a shared planet where we were all born in. 

Hermes goal is to develop analytical tools to investigate the role that money plays within our planetary household at different emergent levels of reality (social, ecological, physical). We are a team of researchers interested in alternative economic and monetary systems that centre care for people and the planet.

In this context, the term “alternative economic and monetary systems” describes projects which do not align with the values of the dominant economic, financial, and monetary structures of our times. In doing so, we also aim to develop new research methods which do not align with the current sectarian disciplinary system of social sciences. Our team explores new ways of integrating methodologies coming from different disciplines, in order to overcome their qualitative-qualitative methodological divide by means of immanent critique.

Economics as it exists resembles a set of broken tools, which were built to solve the problems of a different century. We envision HERMES to be a hub for researchers creating tools to address the economic challenges of the 21st century, specifically in the field of monetary and exchange systems.