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Lab short abstract

The Household Finance Lab is a collaborative space to explore borrowing, (non)repayment and default as key sites of accumulation, governance and state coercion. We will discuss and collage mundane paper artefacts as ways to examine economic polarisation and to imagine more equitable futures.

Lab long abstract

Thematic outline: Financial lending to households drives economic polarisation, and interrelated divisions of class, race, gender, citizenship and in/formality. State practices, including enforcement, regulation and algorithms, shape how households borrow, repay, default and imagine their financial futures. Connecting daily life with large-scale processes, this Lab takes empirical artefacts as analytical gateways for exploring financial exploitation and domination. Thus we treat the state as an assemblage of practices and artefacts, debt as a moral and political relation rather than purely economic, and household finance as a site where state power and capital accumulation coalesce and are encountered. We will envision less coercive, more equitable financial systems, drawing on interlocutors’ hopes, already-existing alternatives and our own imaginations.

Format: Participants should be researchers focusing on household finance and/or debt. Each participant brings one empirical artefact related to household finance – a paper document, or print-out – for instance, contracts, amortisation schedules, legal documents, spreadsheets, letters/SMS/emails to debtors, central bank communications, court decisions, credit scores. Each participant presents (10mins) on the artefact’s context and everyday usages (including subversions and non-usage). We proceed onto small group (3-4) discussion and collaging. Participants are pre-assigned discussant for one another, opening discussion with a 5-minute response structured around 3 questions:

1) What state capacities, modes of accumulation, and moral claims are associated with this artefact(s)?

2) How do they compare with other settings?

3) What alternatives can we envision?

We will collage the paper artefacts in small groups. After the Lab we will digitally exhibit the collaged artefacts.