Paper short abstract:

This paper shows Chinese migrant labourers' attempts to accumulate increasing amounts of credit via online finance platforms, understanding these practices through local ideologies of 'nurturing credit' and revealing the specific monetary repetoirs migrants deploy in the face of financial precarity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents results from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a small factory on the outskirts of Shenzhen, China, amidst the growing proliferation of digital money platforms within migrant workers' lives.

Specifically, we focus on features that form part of the Zhima Credit platform, offering users access to multiple novel forms of formal credit that act as alternatives to (largely unpopular) credit cards. Migrant labourers are shown to make sense of their ability to successfully accumulate increasing amounts of credit through local ideologies of nurturing, situating these ideals alongside other concepts of nurturing persons (such as kin or friends) which permeate in everyday life.

The nurturance of credit by participants comes to represent more than simply managing debt responsibly, but instead reveals migrant workers desire to enact a very different philosophical understanding of debt. The credit-accumulating practices workers partake in constitute an attempt to rebuke the "economy of interest" that has come to govern modern financialised forms of debt (Graeber, 2011). Somewhat contradictorily, workers' practices of nurturing credit also seek to maintain the possibility of being able to access larger amounts credit if needed, as a safeguard against the precarity of everyday urban life facing low-class migrant workers.

We argue that nurturing credit constitutes a significant way of understanding the specific-and inherently ambivalent-monetary repertoires (Guyer, 2004) and forms of agency migrants seek to deploy in an era of financialisation.

Paper short abstract:

Urban poor in Brazil juggle a double burden of debt in the informal cash economy and the formal economy. Exploring intricate debt relations among neighbours and relatives, this paper argues that these relations are characterized by care and exploitation, showing the limits to debt as care (Han 2012)

Paper long abstract:

This paper traces new lending practices in Brazil among urban poor. Government policies of financial inclusion in Brazil have facilitated the proliferation of consumer credit and credit cards and a drive towards the use of digital money instead of cash payments (Nakane and Rocha 2012). The urban poor have hereby gained access to credit based consumption in the formal economy and new livelihood strategies and now face a double burden of debt in the informal cash economy as well as the formal cashless economy. Based on fieldwork conducted in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, among families in an impoverished peripheral neighbourhood, this paper shows how urban poor juggle debt and emotionally experience the rising levels of household debt. The paper explores the debt relations among neighbours and relatives, as people are indebted to each other in various ways and debts are not always repaid, which reconfigures the role of the creditor and debtor. This paper will show that these relations of debt are characterized by asymmetry and instability, and as I will argue of both care and exploitation. This brings new evidence to previous work on credit based consumption in Brazil and the moral stakes of being a modern consumer that led people to pay their debts (Holston 1991) and extends the argument of understanding indebtedness in the formal economy as care in intimate family relations (Han 2012) by showing the limits to such care.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how residents of a remote Mongolian township are navigating protracted formal bank indebtedness through an explosion of local gift-economy-esque relations of lending. As bank interest pressure mounts, however, so does the financialization of these gift-like lending networks.

Paper long abstract:

In his 2010 review, Peebles notes that historical ethnographic work on the credit/debt dyad has frequently distinguished between the terms based on the evaluation of credit as beneficial and debt as burdensome. However, in the remote Mongolian countryside town of Khalkhgol, residents do not morally distinguish between the terms of loans (credit) and debt, but rather along a spectrum within each term—both loans and/or debt can be locally sanctioned or unsanctioned (Roitman 2003) based on their social circumstances. Inspired by Robbins' revisitation of the gift/commodity dyad (2008), I thus discuss how contemporary Khalkhgol residents participate in multiple moral forms of loans/debts that construct a gift/commodity spectrum differentiated through mutual social recognition (also Graeber 2011). Consequently, residents are not responding to increasingly pervasive formal bank indebtedness by limiting lending, but by openly engaging in a plethora of bank and kinship-based loaning that moves the limited pool of money around in the community, building social relations, whilst temporarily deferring the community members' bank debts. This 'temporary possession' of money/debt (Empson 2014) has resulted in novel arrangements like the inclusion of interest into forms of social lending—not out of a motivation of individual advantage, but to contribute to social harmony in an economically beleaguered township. This paper thus contributes to the panel's investigation of emerging financial regimes and the movement of money by exploring how remote residents are reinterpreting the increased mobility of finance/bank wealth by appropriating its circulation into community-based channels and moralities.

Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork in Wisconsin, USA, this paper explores the impact of student loan debt on present and former university students. This particular debt is temporal and ambiguous, enabling current students to live their everyday life but disabling graduates from achieving the life they envisioned.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how student loan debt affects present and former American university students. Around 44 million Americans owe $1.48 trillion in student loan debt, and sociologists advocate a "wake-up call" to attend to the lived experience of student loan debtors (Goldrick-Rab 2016).

Based on fieldwork in Wisconsin, USA from August to November 2017, I argue that for people who regard higher education as a means to achieving the American Dream, student loan debt is an ambiguous force that shapes their everyday lives. Americans who have taken on educational loans express vastly different feelings towards debt depending on their status as students or graduates.

Among current students, debt constitutes an inevitable condition for obtaining a degree. Unlike Graeber's argument that debt creates inequality between equals (Graeber 2014), for many students, debt generates a temporary feeling of being equal to others from wealthier backgrounds; they are able to obtain the degree that is widely perceived as a gateway to a financially solid future.

Yet, the impact of student loan debt changes when students become graduates. Those with high amounts of debt indeed experience it as a burden that produces inequalities as graduates compare themselves to peers who are financially better off despite having chosen shorter, if any, educational paths, as well as disappointment and uncertainty due to a lack of employment or lower wages than expected.

Overall, this paper will explore how the affects - and social effects - of debt shift temporally during the course of student loans.

Paper short abstract:

Hawala system provides Syrians in exile a continuation of pre-war socio-economic arrangements and a new response to conditions of warfare and displacement. It is subject to governance and securitization, demonstrating tensions between local protection and international responses to refugees.

Paper long abstract:

Hawala, the remittance system of the unregulated transfer of money via passcode, plays a vital role for Syrians in conditions of exile. While the system was utilized in Syria prior to the war, it has seen an upsurge in usage due to the dissolution of financial institutions within Syria and financial exclusion in second- and third- host and resettlement countries. Humanitarian aid and development organizations, stymied by security obstacles to aid distribution and development, now turn to Hawala to inject funding for aid delivery and development projects into those trapped populations and spaces. The sector has become targeted for money laundering, terrorism funding and counter-terrorism surveillance. Furthermore, the sector has proven to be such an important avenue that humanitarian aid organizations and local and foreign governments are attempting to co-opt it, regulate it, securitize it, and - eventually - monetize it. Based on interviews with Syrian refugees and first-hand observations inside money exchange businesses in Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, this paper explores the ways that the Hawala system represents both a durable continuation of pre-war socio-economic arrangements and a new response to conditions of warfare and displacement to offer modes of protection that reflect distinctly local people, places, and economic systems and governance formations. The sector relies upon local social capital for its functioning, which renders outside actors at a significant disadvantage. Hawala demonstrates the tensions that exist between local formations in agency and protection of vulnerabilities and the standardized international provisions and expectations in responses to refugee conditions.

Paper short abstract:

Through an ethnographic engagement with an Estonian government initiative, this paper considers the techno-legal work necessary to produce subjects capable of accessing debt/relations online.

Paper long abstract:

Launched in late 2014, e-Residency is an Estonian state initiative that aims to "unlock the entrepreneurial potential of every world citizen" by allowing almost anyone to become an Estonian e-resident. Though they cannot live or work in Estonia, e-residents receive a digital ID from the Estonian state and can remotely found and operate Estonian limited liability firms. By relying on Estonia's digital identity authentication infrastructure, it is hoped, e-residents around the world can sidestep the discriminatory protocols and limited service landscapes that limit their capacity to engage in online entrepreneurship.This paper draws on my extended institutional ethnography with the e-Residency team to argue that the service the program offers e-residents is effectively the ability to achieve the requisite individuality for credit/debt relations online. This argument unfolds in three parts. First, I summarize the critical literature and show that many authors consider a self-contained individual subject characterized by a unity of body and mind as a necessary pre-condition for debt/credit relations. Second, I review the literature on personhood in cyberspace and show that scholars have historically conceptualized the Internet as a space that elicits highly-relational modes of being and complicates the process of identification. Finally, I describe how both the individuality necessary for commerce and the difficulty of enacting it online are discursively constructed in the context of Estonian e-Residency. I argue that e-Residency is a set of laws, technologies, and commercial contracts that enables entrepreneurs to achieve the individuality necessary for Internet-mediated debt/credit and exchange relations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines digital bank systems that automate the repayment of debt, and how these systems impact the everyday social and political geographies of Palestinians living in the conurbation of Ramallah-Al Bireh.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines digital bank systems in Palestine, which automate the repayment of debt for many Palestinians with bank loans. The automatic repayment system deducts up to 50% of a borrower's salary each month. This process, in concert with a digital credit registry and historical and contemporary practices of Israeli colonialism, underpins the formal debt economy in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This debt economy, which only (re)emerged in 2008, has in turn transformed both informal credit-debt relations among kin and friendship networks, and everyday financial practices that are ostensibly not connected with debt. While stories of strained social relationships and altered consumption practices are common, they are not ubiquitous. Ethnography thus illustrates how new kinds of debt and debt repayment both capacitate and constrain practices of enduring (rather than resisting) Israeli colonialism and its foreclosure of liveable life. Thus, while the banking technologies enabling automatic repayment are highly mobile, the practices of endurance they feed into are defined by the specific geographies of Ramallah.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates everyday lives of indebted young Danes and discusses credit/debt constellations involved in the 'financialization' of the everyday. The paper outlines emotions and experiences as linked to different forms of debt and carves out the emergence of new moral hierarchies.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates the everyday lives of indebted young Danes and discusses emerging meanings and usage of credit and debt involved in the 'financialization' of the everyday (Gonzalez 2015). A growing number of Danish young adults have problems navigating digital money in a market offering easy access to credit and a complexity of credit forms. Debt problems severely impacts life and in a Danish context living in debt is characterized by loneliness, shame and fear. Being indebted also alters temporal orientation in a context valuing independence by imagining one's life as 'moving backwards' e.g. living like a teenager with mum and dad. Young people's narratives' reflect financing characterized by continual movements in and out of debt, sometimes default debt, and highlight an ongoing struggle to control personal finances where the boundary between 'having money' and 'owing money' is blurred. People in their late twenties outsource their everyday budgeting to their parents or bank manager, while others wonder: 'Why am I allowed credit at all'? Building on anthropological notions of emotional and moral connotations linked to the credit/debt dyad (Peebles 2010) the analysis of emotions and experiences with various forms of debt points towards a variety of credit/debt constellations transgressing the temporal spectrum outlined by Gregory (2012). In particular, while debt in itself is not considered problematic, the increasing usage of 'overindebtedness' in the Danish context simultaneously normalizes debt and stigmatizes 'default debt'. The Danish case therefore carves out a more complex moral hierarchy of debt forms.