The Sociopolitics of Debt

Catalog description

From student and medical to credit card debt, from international to municipal debt, what people can and cannot do is constrained in many ways by the money they owe. In this course, we ask questions such as: What are the connections between debt and inequality, between declining public provision and increasing private indebtedness? We will take the contemporary U.S. and the student debt crisis as a starting point, but we also take a global and historical view. This course does not require prior knowledge of political economy or economics. This is a course about the social organization of debt and money. We look at debt and money as social relations in contexts marked by class, race, and gender at multiple levels, from student loans to international debt. We consider processes of dispossession and disempowerment linked to indebtedness while also thinking about the potential of mobilizing money and debt as a public good. We will be drawing on various social science disciplines including anthropology, sociology, and history, and different schools of monetary thought. No prior knowledge of economics is required. Offered spring.