Johanna’s current research project “The Emergence of Global Taxpayers” explores transnational legal and fiscal expert networks and the organisational environments in which they negotiate international tax norms, rules and standards for an increasingly digitalized global economy. She currently conducts ethnographic field research at the OECD in Paris, at the UN in Geneva, at G20 treasury and finance ministries and at leading international tax conferences worldwide (from Mumbai to Washington to Berlin and Rio).

By exploring the changing fiscal accountabilities of global tax payers Johanna is interested to (1) provide a tangible understanding of the consequences and effects of the growing disjuncture between the national territorial organization of national states and the increasing transnational organization of today’s economic activity. (2) She perceives international tax policies as a powerful lens into modern societies, since they offer crucial insights into the production of regional, national and global social hierarchies in the distribution of revenue flows. They reveal which inequalities we, as an emerging global society, wish to accept, and those we wish to address and reject collectively. With whom we share what, when and for what reasons?

Her research combines legal, political and economic anthropology, socio-legal studies and classic /new fiscal sociology.