Living with debt has become a widespread experience that has evolved alongside the housing crisis. Structurally produced by income stagnation, unemployment, rising living costs, prolonged austerity, inflation, and the retrenchment of social benefits, housing financialization exacerbated overindebtedness over the last decade. While access to subprime mortgages for single-family housing indebted lower- and middle-income populations in some cities, elsewhere, the financialization of and speculation with rental housing fostered indebtedness through rising rents and resulting rent arrears. Mortgage debts or rent arrears have developed in conjunction with other forms of formal and informal debt – platforms, credit cards, loan sharks – and in a global conjuncture of national and municipal debt. Our aim in this series is to advance conceptual groundwork on the nexus of technological, political and financial change as it is experienced at the household level. We seek to bring international scholars and activists into a global conversation that places debt in the techno-political conjuncture of our times.
While extending financial actors’ influence into intimate domains and over existential needs of debtors, today’s politics of fin-techno-capitalist change plays out in a new political conjuncture defined by the global rise of illiberal and authoritarian forms of governance, the resurgence of far-right movements, and associated forms of financial violence. Scholars have not only witnessed ever more extractive and predatory debt regimes under far-right governments, but they have also traced the entanglement of far-right politics and industry development, a relationship that is especially visible in the emergence of Silicon Valley–driven technocapitalism. In the first episode of our series, Between FinTech and Far-Right: Placing Debt in a New Conjuncture, we ask: How do household debt, technological transformations in the financial sector, and the rise of authoritarian and far-right movements intersect today?
Guests
Verónica Gago
Verónica Gago is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and a professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires as well as Universidad Nacional de San Martín.
She is author of Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Duke University Press, 2017) and co-author of A Feminist Reading of Debt with Luci Cavallero (Pluto Press, 2021).
Ben Anderson
Ben Anderson is a Professor of Human Geography at Durham University. He currently co-edits Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, having previously co-edited The Geographical Journal.
Ben has published extensively on affective and emotional life as articulated with politics, how futures are governed amid uncertainty, and the politics of emergency. His current research focuses on the politics of intensity in right-wing populism and on climate change disaffection, in particular the implications of boredom, resignation and indifference for climate action.
He is co-author of The Politics of Feeling: Populism, Progressivism, Liberalism with Anna J. Secor (Goldsmiths/MIT, 2025) and Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (Routledge, 2014). Ben is currently working on a public-facing book entitled The Politics of Boredom which focuses on historical occasions in which boredom became political.
Erin McElroy
Erin McElroy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and director of the Anti-Eviction Lab.
They are author of Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times (Duke University Press, 2024) and co-editor of Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press, 2021).
Hosts
Hanna Hilbrandt
Hanna Hilbrandt serves as a Professor in Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Zurich’s (UZH) Geography Department. In addition to researching urban climate finance and governance, Hanna’s work explores spaces of mundane transgression, planning conflict, and housing marginality.
Her book Housing in the Margins (Wiley 2021) explores informal dwelling practices in the context of Berlin’s increasingly tight housing market.
Jess Linz
Jess Linz is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich. She is currently involved in the SNSF research project The Home-Debt Nexus: Feminist perspectives on housing, gender, and everyday life in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá.