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Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the agency of over-indebted people through the lens of citizenship. Based on in-depth narrative interviews with debtors, I examine how the construction of deservingness legitimatise dependencies and unequal power relations – and how people try to oppose and negotiate through it.

Paper long abstract:

Despite formal equality in a democratic society, rights and practices often do not correspond to the legal status of citizens (Gonzales, Sigona, 2017). Citizenship is a dynamic (constantly contested) institution of both domination and empowerment. Both claim-making and imposition of control closely reflect the values and norms of a society.

With the predominance of neoliberal framing, the experience of poverty and economic precarity had often been framed as an individual failure, overlooking the structural context of agency, a wider net of social and power relations, and racial hierarchies. The inability to achieve “economic independence” is seen not only as a lack of competence but also as an inability to live up to the moral values of society - consequently legitimising the transgression of rights of those who are labelled as “failed”, “dependent”, and “undeserving”. It also impacts their social position and self-perception.

With ongoing welfare state retrenchment, many low-income households become dependent on privately provided financial services (Soederberg, 2014). Their position is shaped not only by the welfare-labour nexus but also by the rules of financial actors that accelerate the logic of individualisation of responsibility (Berry, 2015)

Based on thirty in-depth narrative interviews with over-indebted people in the Czech Republic, I explore how can internalised discourses of deservingness legitimatise and reproduce dependencies and unequal, sometimes exploitative power relations. I also look for the ways in which these people try to negotiate their rights, status and dignity, enacting “themselves as citizens by usurping the right to claim rights” (Isin, 2009)