Spaces of debt resistance and the contemporary politics of financialised capitalism

This article is about debt and power within the contemporary political economy of austerity. It investigates how the power relations of debt manifest through scale: the body, the household, the community, the nation state, and the global financial system. This is accomplished by integrating the conc...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geoforum 2019-01, Vol.98, p.309-317
Main Authors: Montgomerie, Johnna, Tepe-Belfrage, Daniela
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Audits
Capitalism
Debt
Economic geography
Empirical analysis
Expenditures
Financial systems
Financialisation
Freedoms
Household
Households
Meaning
Morality
Nation states
Norms
Political economy
Politics
Power
Public debt
Resistance
Social reproduction
Social space
Space
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This article is about debt and power within the contemporary political economy of austerity. It investigates how the power relations of debt manifest through scale: the body, the household, the community, the nation state, and the global financial system. This is accomplished by integrating the concepts of Debt Space (Harker, 2017) and social reproduction (Steans and Tepe, 2010) to analyse the empirical material collected from two parallel projects into the practices of debt auditing at the national and household level. In doing so we explore key sites of intersubjective meaning making, where moral norms of indebtedness connect to action and agency. From the analysis of the evidence this article makes two interrelated interventions. Firstly, we contend that debt is a transformative force. We observe the effects of debt’s presence as it changes and reconfigures the social space around it. Secondly, bringing together the national and household analysis makes visible how debt audits are a progenitor of resistance. Debt audits invite people to 'care' about their debt (Montgomerie and Tepe-Belfrage, 2016) and consider debt to be a force causing harm in their households, communities and/or the nation state. With this recognition comes a call to seek freedom from debt and the harm that it is causing. A desire for freedom breeds action against the claims that debt makes. These actions include paying it down, diverting expenditures, defaulting, repudiating, cancelling, or paying it off altogether. Each of these are strategies of resistance to the moral authority of debt simultaneously delegitimizing public and private logics of austerity.
ISSN:0016-7185
1872-9398
DOI:10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.05.012