AAG 2019, Washington, D.C. 3rd-7th April 2019

Debt: Coping, Supporting, Overcoming, Resisting and Enduring
 
Please send abstracts to Christopher Harker ([log in to unmask]), Mark Kear ([log in to unmask]) and Richard Johnson ([log in to unmask]) before 21st October 2018.

The reallocation of risk from collective institutions and employers to households and individuals is producing forms of financial insecurity not well captured by conventional metrics of poverty and inequality. This downward distribution of social risk is also productive of new markets, financial practices, and, along with them, spiraling levels of debt. This session seeks papers examining coping strategies and practices of mutual support arising in response to conditions of indebtedness. 

Our interpretation of “debt” is broad, encompassing its personal, state and social forms. We also understand debt as relational – not only with respect debtor-creditor relations – but also in connection with broader social processes that cross scales and borders, including evictions, low quality work and unemployment, heightened precarity and failing state social support networks, and migration. 

We are interested in alternative frameworks of mutual solidarity, dependency and obligation developed and maintained to sustain life. These might include: existing and new types of social networks, collective forms of practice that are ‘quiet’, hospitality networks and broader narratives of ‘sanctuary’, local organisation of pro-bono and peer-to-peer legal advice, and new types of economic provisioning. 

We invite papers exploring the creation, maintenance, as well as failure, of mutual support and the plural methods through which individuals and groups endure and potentially enact change in broader political, social and legal arenas. We also invite papers that take a critical perspective on the relationship between mutual aid and the circumstances – colonial and state violence, political-economic crises – that necessitate its expansion.