 we'll make a start. Okay, so hello everybody and welcome to the South economics webinar series on intensifying inequality and the limitations of global capitalism. Apologies, I know we are beginning with a few minutes of delay, but we've had some technical issues that we'll make up for this and perhaps so we can finish five minutes later. My name is Sarah Stefano. I am a lecturer in the economics department at South. I'm really delighted that you welcome you all to today's webinar, which is quite special. So it is special because it's the last webinar in this series for this academic year 2020-2021 and although he's there in the background and he will not be participating in this webinar really, I do want to acknowledge my colleague Tobias Franza, who's been a co-organizer of this webinar series. We will have a mini series in Term 3 quite separate from this one that we have been having since October, so do watch this space because there will be a few webinars that are taking place between May and June. So this webinar is also special because it is part of the South economics webinar series, but it is co-organized with the Department of Development Studies and the Global Feminist Political Economic Group at South. So here I need to acknowledge and introduce my dearest, in fact, feminist colleagues, Alessandro Mazzadri from the Department of Development Studies and Hannah Burgawi from the Department of Economics, who's also co-head of department. So we are absolutely thrilled to have a wonderful panel of feminist scholars and activists to discuss with us these important topics, social reproduction, financial exclusion and alternatives. So the speakers are Serena Nathile from the University of Warwick here in the UK, Veronica Gago and Lucy Cavallero from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and also they are activists in Níona Menosa and Caroline Senes-Cocena from your university in Canada. So I'm keeping the biographies of the speakers incredibly short, but I do want to give you a glimpse of their fantastic work, at least some of their work in recent years. So Serena got her book published last year on the exclusionary politics of digital financial inclusion. She will tell us a little bit about this book later. Lucy and Veronica have a book coming up in next month in April, a feminist reading of that. And I should also say that Lise Maison-Dies, who was the translator for this book and has won a prize for this translation, is with us today. And we are very grateful because she's going to help us with the translation of some parts of the conversations that we're going to have with Lucy and Veronica. And last but not least, the fantastic book by Caroline on politicized microfinance, which indeed won the International Association for Feminist Economics inaugural Agarwal book prize in 2019. So I wanted to mention this because I think for many of our audience that will be interested in looking at your work, unless they have already done so. So what is going to happen next? So what is the format of this webinar? Next I'm going to hand over to my colleague Alessandra Mazzadri, who's going to provide an overview of the rationale of this panel. And then we will have a conversation with Serena, Lucy, Veronica, and Caroline. So we will be putting some questions to them and they will be answering those questions. This should take about an hour, an hour and a bit. And then we will have a space for Q&A at the end of this workshop, and I will be sharing that session. And so you're all very welcome to put your questions and comments throughout the webinar in the chat box so that you have on your screens. And we will pick up your questions and comments in the Q&A session at the end. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Alessandra for the introduction to the panel. Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. And I just really we echo your words in the day how excited to be part of this webinar today and to introduce the rationale behind it. First, let me send our solidarity to Las Madres, the Plaza de Mayo for the 24th of March. That is an historic day for the demonstrations. In fact, it's just partially by chance, but also it's great that we hold this seminar here today. And I'm so pleased to actually be part of this conversation, of course, because of the stellar lineup of fellow feminist scholars and activists, those work I found not just theoretically and politically inspiring, but in the last few years in particular, when my own work has verged towards issues of social reproduction. But also, second, I'm so excited to have this panel because it deals with the key concern that is integrating how processes of financialization increasingly impact upon the everyday in many different ways, reinforcing and re-crafting gender and racial inequalities. So the relevance of finance in structuring contemporary capitalism is an issue that is very well researched and explored, that it engages with the processes of financialization that led, for instance, to two financial crises we saw in the notice in 2001 and 2007. And this stressed how financial capitalism triggered multi-processing of this session, hitting labor in classes in harsh ways. Now, these accounts have provided key capabilities, of course, on poverty reduction since the 1980s. The feminist scholars have been at the forefront of debates on financialization, inequality and poverty, and the ubiquitous effect that neoliberal capitalism has on people across the planet. They have highlighted the shortcomings of microfinance and how austerity has been socialized by William Ancivolta groups that explored how the processes of this possession triggered by finance have magnified gender and racialized aspects of austerity. So, for instance, the recent book Race for Profit by the American academic writer and activist Keanga Yamata Taylor, there's a key voice in the Black Lives Matter movement, trace the racial and gender implication of the crisis in the US, for instance. Despite these terrible shortcomings, finance capitalism and financialization have hardly slowed their pace across both the global north and the global south. In fact, quite the opposite. Their pace has accelerated tremendously, enabled by advances in technology, digitalization and the reinforcement of the policy consensus around the needs for financial inclusion. First, it's specified by the multiplication of microfinance programs, despite the many criticism mounted for the troubling effects in countries like Bangladesh or India. We can refer to the work of Naila Kabir here, for example, and what such effect has been obviously the rising levels of debt. And there's a clear evidence that these programs trigger spirals over over indebtedness. In the case of Cambodia, the use of land as collateral for micro indename of credit provisioning support for the poor. Second, it also is further confirmed, however, by the progressive financialization of social policy programs, many of which are stressed by the Brazilian journalist Elena Lavinas, imply now that even the collateralization of social security is at work. That is the commodification of social entitlement into assets against credit. So henceforth, gaining ground from the initial era of microfinance, this novel rampant wave of financial inclusion enabled financialization to enter far deeper into people's lives. So even social entitlements are now being transformed from into assets to serve as collateral. So by drawing working classes more and more into finance, this process also drives them increasingly into debt. And on the other hand, that based life already characterizes the life of working to the north as highlighted by economists like Mary Robertson, by housing consumption and socially shaped capitalism. But it shapes life and life making under capitalism. What generations of feminist scholars from Selma James, Maria Rosa Della Costa, Silvia Federici, Titi Batarceria, Nancy Fraser, and others, and many of us sitting on this panel called social reproduction. So in this process, finance increasingly subdues social reproduction to the logics of capital and the organization and regeneration of life increasingly embrace the functioning mechanisms of capital. This financialization of life is central to what Nancy Fraser as term, the neoliberal reproductive regime. This takeover of finance is hardly uncontested. And I think a lot of attention is paid, for instance, to the Occupy movement. However, there are far more numerous voices that are calling out these processes from across the world economy, focusing on many different pernicious effects that finance might have on people's lives. These voices not only speak about the financialization of the everyday, but crucially also stress the interconnections between neoliberal financial inclusion, exclusion, racial and reproductive oppression. Look at the user as well and propose alternatives, either in ways of fighting debt and the violence he imposes on informal or popular economies or amplifying and elevating a number of bottom up alternative paradigms that already exist and that provide credit and financial support to labour in classes. Some of these are centered on indigenous knowledge or may have been deployed by black communities. These voices could not be more needed in the age of pandemic neoliberalism, where debt and exclusion on one side and racial and gender inequality on the other are amplified massively by the COVID-19 crisis. These brief considerations are the reasons why we see them as reading of financial inclusion, exclusion and debt as fundamental and the reason why we organize this conversation and no one better than the speakers we invited can share crucial insights on these processes and we really look forward to hearing from them and to kick off this conversation. Without further ado, I just pass the word back to you, Sarah. Thank you so much, Ale. Wonderful overview. So I really would like us to hear as much as we can from our speakers. And the first speaker will be Serena Matilda. So hello Serena and thank you so much for joining us in this webinar. I've been enjoying very much reading your book, which I showed on the slide before, the exclusionary politics of digital financial inclusion. In this book, you develop a feminist critique of digital financial inclusion agendas. So can you please explain to us the conceptual framework you deployed to situate a digital financial inclusion within the nexus of finance production and social reproduction? Thank you so much, Sarah. And thank you so much to Hannah and Ale for organizing this. And I'm very delighted to be a source as well, which I consider a great community of thinkers and fellow feminists. So it is a great pleasure for me to have this platform and also, of course, to share my voice with the other feminist speakers on the panel, which I'm very delighted and honoured to be with today. So yeah, just in introducing and addressing your question, Sarah, just what would be helpful to explain what my key aim was when I approached this research and when I started the book. So as you explained, my work is on digital financial inclusion. So over the last few years, we have seen an increased focus on digital finance. So using digital technology in order to include more and more people in the financial system. This, of course, has been a follow up to what Ale was mentioning before in terms of microfinance and the grassroots finance and informal finance. So digital technology has been considered as a way to formalize these kind of informal financial relations as well as providing a different platform, an easier, more accessible platform comparing to mainstream banking, for instance, but also providing a more secure platform comparing to informal finance. So this has been kind of the way through which digital financial inclusion has been promoted. And what it was interested in is to actually explore this relationship at this nexus that has been so much advocated at the international level between digital financial inclusion and gender equality. So there is this assumption that by including more women, providing women and addressing the gender inequality in access to finance by using digital platforms, this would result in more gender equality, would contribute to gender equality, which of course, gender equality itself is a very controversial idea, which we can spend hours criticizing. But in terms of providing women with more means and instruments to have, of course, economic opportunities as well as other forms of political voice and other forms of opportunities. Now, in exploring this nexus, I was very interested in, of course, engaging with the work of feminist political economists, with grassroots feminists, the colonial feminists, and using a methodology which goes from socio-legal studies. So I look at the kind of implications of legal instruments, as well as ethnography and empirical research, which I conducted more extensively in Kenya, but also in other countries, such as Ghana, Tanzania, and a little bit in Brazil as well. So I wanted to explore this nexus, and I was very interested in seeing how the key question around digital financial inclusion was very much about how to include more women within the financial system. And the question was never why financial exclusion is gendered. So I tried to trace this exclusion, and in tracing this exclusion, I had to understand when, at what point, women have been excluded from the financial systems. And I traced this back to the colonial time. So I think that one of the key points that I want to make in this first answer is recognizing the colonial legacy of financial exclusion, which is very much linked to the introduction of capitalist relations during colonialism. These capitalist relations have been introduced through gender norms and rules, through particular gendered legal institutions, such as the commodification of land. So by creating land titles in the name of man, this, of course, didn't provide women with land to be used as a collateral, for instance, to access credit. As well as property rights, again, in the name of man, this has excluded women and created an asymmetry of gender relations. But also the introduction of the wage economy. The wage economy has created the gender rule of the male breadwinner, who is the primary worker. And women, at this point, have been relegated to the status of secondary workers, and also to the status of unpaid workers. So mainly having to deal with the household, creating this kind of dichotomy that we have seen before with, of course, with the industrial revolution and introduction of capitalist relations in the global north, the increase in disproportionate work of women in terms of social reproduction work, so unpaid work. So all these dynamics, of course, are important when we look at the colonial legacy, because this creates a third layer of inequality, comparing to gender relations in the global north, because of course, of the racial asymmetry in addition to the gender asymmetry, as well as to the aspect of coloniality, which creates a third layer of exclusion. So the question that we can ask at this point is whether new forms of financial inclusion, such as the use of digital technology, actually can address these forms of gender disadvantage that have forced women to be excluded from financial services, because of course, if you create a wage economy, which creates the idea of the male breadwinner and women don't have access to money, they will need to create forms of self-help groups and informal finance to support themselves, because they don't have access to the economy. So all these dynamics, of course, have been partly addressed through the development process, which, as we know, and as Alessandra was explaining before, included women on conditional terms within the economy, but never really addressed this unbalance of power in terms of addressing the disproportionate amount of unpaid work and social reproduction work. So if we look at the nexus that you were explaining before between finance production and social reproduction, which is of course extremely important because we have been looking from a political economy point of view for many years at the relationship between social reproduction and production. So thinking about the immaterial unpaid work, which of course includes care work, all the training of capabilities for the future generation, as well also activist work and community work and self-help groups and all this kind of unpaid work, as well as the production, of course, which includes the production and distribution of products and services, but we also need to consider in this framework the aspect of finance, which has become more and more important in thinking about the global political economy system. So a key framework that I developed, also drawing, for instance, in the work of Diane Nelson on the gender implications of a financial crisis, is to look at the national as well as the global system as organized in finance production and social reproduction. And by looking at the system and the different networks that cross these systems, such as international economic law, such as trade aid, social networks, as well as digital technology, we can ask the question to what extent these framework is gendered. And of course, we can realize that there is gendered in terms of, of course, social reproduction is disproportionately performed by women, production and finance are also very gendered. But we can also ask the follow-up question as digital finance. And so these new kind of platforms and technologies, have they contributed to a more equal distribution of responsibilities and power in between these three spheres of finance production and social reproduction? And the answer is no, they have even increased social reproduction work, which still serves the power and the wealth that is necessary for finance and production. So the ideal system would be for finance and production to serve the needs of social reproduction work by redistributing the power and resources between these three spheres. So this is how I kind of conceptualized, broadly speaking, this aspect. Thank you so much for that. This is great. And I'm very glad you mentioned the colonial roots of a gendered financial exclusion, which I think is one of the most fascinating parts of your book, in fact. But the second question I would like to put to you has to do with a central idea in your work. I think in your book, but also beyond it, which is that of the politics of redistribution. So can you tell us what it means and how it could be used to perhaps transform digital financial inclusion in postcolonial context? Yeah, thank you so much, Sara, for this question. And I hope this is, of course, an open answer to some extent, because we as a feminist keep working on this to address the issues. But I just think it's something that is helpful that my work, in particular my empirical work, I want to think about is to make this distinction in digital finance. So as I mentioned before, when we think about financial inclusion, this can be very controversial because we can think about providing women with more instruments. But do these instruments actually help to challenge these unequal gender relations, these asymmetries of power, and also as they cross other elements such as race, ethnicity, class or coloniality aspects, which of course is an important legacy that we always need to consider. So I try to make this distinction that emerged from my work between a logic of opportunity and the politics of redistribution. So one of my arguments is that digital financial inclusion is based on a logic of opportunity. This means that they provide more opportunities for women who were excluded from financial services from the financial system before, but they don't provide the means to actually allow women to take advantage of these opportunities. So while they create more and more opportunities, they don't actually redistribute the necessary means to take advantage of these opportunities. For instance, all the revenue, all the income, all the investments, all the aid, there was a consequence of the increase of focus on digital financial inclusion has not been redistributed across communities, but new opportunities have been created in terms of creating new products, creating new services to give this opportunity to women. But this also means in social production terms to create a further layer of responsibility for women who need to transform these opportunities into improved livelihood, improved livelihood for themselves, for their communities, for their families, for their countries, which is very much in line with the kind of World Bank gender equality as a smart economics framework. Gender equality is not intrinsically important, but it's important just because it's instrumental to create more growth and development. So this logical opportunity increases the amount of social reproduction work that women need to do because besides the everyday social reproduction work, they also have this new responsibility of transforming these opportunities into success without being provided with actually the means to succeed in this way. So this is the way through which I entered, so was my entry point to then think about this politics of redistribution. So politics of redistribution very much considers, as I mentioned before, the colonial legacy of exclusion. So it takes seriously the aspect of reparations, for instance, thinking about changing some of the structural inequalities embedded in the international economic system, so in terms of redistributing power. So we know that many countries of the global south have less voice and automatically grassroots communities have less voice. And when we use only instruments such as aid, which is an instrument can be strongly instrumentalized, right, because you force particular fundings on particular projects. So actually grassroots communities and grassroots women don't have a voice about what we need the funding for, what are our priorities. So all these instruments need to be challenged. So aid should be replaced with the forms of reparations that actually are politically more grounded in the colonial legacy and the colonial responsibilities, through which of course the processes of exploitation have allowed the countries of the global north to be wealthy. And this is the first step that needs to be recognized. Then of course there are the aspects of redistribution of power. So the institutional level, rethinking some of the key institutions and their representations and voice within the key institutions, the distribution of resources, of course, again, by changing the rules, by changing the structures through which you govern aspects of international trade investment, which is very much done reproduces. This is a strong new colonial logic of reproducing particular power relations. So by challenging these elements, you can also of course contribute to aspects of redistribution of resources. But also redistribution needs to consider aspects of global taxation. So taxation of these financial institutions, as well as taxation of the IT companies that provide funding for digital financial inclusion, as well as taking seriously aspects of wage and transnational labour regulation. So while at the kind of local level, we can think about redistribution as using all the resources and funding accumulated by these digital financial platforms, because of course the people, every time they make a small transaction, they pay a fee. So it's not like in the debt system, on the macrofinance system that you pay an interest on the loan that you take, you pay a fee and you don't even realize that you are paying this fee because it's part of the payment that you make. So this of course contributes to accumulate money and this is a secure source of income in the hands of these financial service providers. So besides taking seriously the redistribution of this income and this wealth that is produced through this system, also of course there is a broader structure that needs to contribute and be grounded and based on a politics of redistribution. That's great. Thank you so much Serena. Sada hand over to Aleph for the continuation of this conversation. Thank you. Thank you Sada and thank you Serena. It's just a really great question and great answers. Now on to the questions we have for Lucy and Veronica and I agree them both. It's great that we managed to have this conversation. So I'll focus my question on your book, The Feminist Reading of Debt and I'll just kick off with a general question of what are the main characteristics of a feminist reading of debt and why it is important to have this perspective. Thank you very much Alexandra and everyone here. We will speak in Spanish so thank you very much to Liz because she will translate us. So I will start in Spanish. So I'll start with a few important characteristics of this feminist framework of debt and the first that is important to emphasize is that it comes out of the feminist strike or this political practice of an exercise of the feminist strike. This is in a very concrete sense because it's a feminist strike that it practice allows us to reconstruct to map to map out what are feminist forms of work beyond wage to work. And to do so simultaneously in a framework of analysis and of like political organizing. So we could say that the majority of informal work that in Argentina have been talked about in terms of the popular economy are forms of work that are commanded or by finance or forms of finance. So what we're investigating is how popular subsidies are subsidies that come from the state as a form of command or control over labor and its multiplicity. So the landscape of labor that this feminist strike makes visible is this landscape of the domestic work precarious work and finance without any mediation through the wage. So it is in this sense that the question of finance as command over labor and control over labor appears as a political question. So what does it mean to go on strike against finance or the command of finance in everyday life? So the second question that we want to make has to do with the long term history in Argentina that has to do with the political cessation and resistance to debt in relation to the debt taking out and relationship to the dictatorship and relationship to that taken out by with the IMF. Since the beginning of the dictatorship which Ale mentioned just the anniversary today the taking out of debt has to do with directly has to do with repression of working class struggles. Is Veronica frozen or are we frozen? Veronica's frozen I just really really sort of really finding really productive lines of connections between the answers provided by Serena and that provided by Veronica actually in relation to how finance and processes of financialization of the everyday as in Serena's explorations actually provide new avenues for extraction from the labouring classes while in Veronica's answers we see how they also structure exploitation. So they cross multiple realms in which they actually appropriate resources and labour and paid labour from the labouring classes. What I suggest we do until we wait for Veronica to come back with us is moving to the second questions we have for Vero and Lucy and then perhaps Vero can actually chip in with the second questions which is around anyway key themes in their book as well and we can actually take it on from there. So the second question now for Lucy, Lucy is the concept of financial violence which you use in your book and which I think I thought it was a very very powerful concept so I would like you to sort of explore this for us what it means and what are the implications. Sorry I think the occasion to really thank Liz for the amazing translating work. Thank you so much for being with us. So I want to thank everyone and so like as Sandra said today is a very special day for us in Argentina and I'll start out by talking about how we've developed the concept of financial violence in the book of thumb rest reading of that. So Vero didn't get to finish her intervention but what she was going to talk about was the situate our research that we're doing and it's important to situate it within this context of Argentina taking out sort of the largest amount of debt in history with the IMF and in agreement in 2017 under the government of Mauricio Macri and we so with that we started to study within the sort of the context and the framework of the movement around the feminist strike the relationship between external debt taken out by governments and household debt and what we saw was that there is a very intimate link between this debt being taken out by governments and debt at the household level. So within this context it's important to point out that the feminist movement and it's sort of its actions and its way of organizing produced a new language for understanding both this debt and also for how to resist it. So this framework is that the concept of financial violence appears as a concept able to realize this exercise that we propose in the book that has to do with putting the body in a specific narrative of debt, that is to say to be able to understand and narrate in what way an economy of the currency is assembled in the daily life and what impact and what relationship is there with that debt in daily life and the impact of the macho violence. So as part of the measure of the feminist strike and in organizing the feminist strike one of the things we started to do was to map out the implication the relationship between sexist or patriarchal violence and forms of economic violence and it's that that's how this concept of financial violence came out emerged from doing that mapping and what we saw was what we wanted to do was to really give a body and a concrete narration or story to that process of that or to that concept of that and relate that to an economy of obedience in everyday life and to tie that bring that together with a narration or stories of everyday life. So one of the first points of doing that was to show how the financial violence is related to situating and taking out debt is related to situations where women and other people get stuck in homes, when they have to wear a mask or a mask or a mask, or a mask or a mask or a mask or a mask, or a mask or a mask or a mask or a mask or a mask or a mask or and taking out debt is related to situations where women and other people get stuck in homes with sexist violence. So taking out debt becomes a way that forces you to get stuck in a dangerous home. But also thinking about this work that we did to think about transversality, the debt, so to speak, how debt operates and lands, as Vero says, in different territories. When we think about financial violence, it not only has to do with the relationship between debt and sexist violence, but also with forms of violence that transcend interpersonal relationships. When studying, for example, what it means to be indebted to the peasant women of Buenos Aires province, we notice that debt is linked to the acquisition of agrotoxic packages. That is, peasant women are compelled to get debt to acquire a technological package that has environmental impacts, but also impacts on women's health. So we also have to think that financial violence is more important than sexist violence, understood as interpersonal relationships. But also in relation to what production process is indicated. And not only that, as Vero said earlier, but when we talk about financial violence, we are also talking about finances as a dynamiser of labor precarization, in the case of women, and also as a way to complete income when money in daily life does not reach. And in that sense, we also talk about financial violence, for example, it has to do with the way that finances dynamise labor precarization. So that was one form of financial violence. So we also want to think about financial violence more broadly in terms of transversality and looking at how that lands or takes root in different territories. So in that sense, we want to talk about financial violence as forms of violence that goes beyond interpersonal violence or violence between individuals. So in one example in our research, we looked at the role of debt on campesino women in the province of Buenos Aires. And there what we saw was that debt and financial violence is linked to being forced to buy these packets or packages of agrochemicals and agrotoxins, which women are forced to buy in order to maintain their small holding, small scale farms, mostly family farms that campesino women have. And this has both effects in terms of the environment because of the agrotoxins, but also it has effects on women's livelihoods and being trapped in these relationships with these corporations. And so in that sense, this financial violence goes beyond or overflows interpersonal relationships. And so we want to ask what forms of production is this debt and the financial violence linked to. And there we could say more generally that finance fuels, precarization of labor more generally because it's a form of sort of making up for incomes that are never enough or subsidies that are never enough that comes in to fill that spot. May I? Thank you. Thank you. Thanks a lot. I'm seeing more and more elements of connections with some of the things we address in relation to financial exclusion and the ways in which indebtedness now permeates both re-arms of labor as well as how Danny trickles down to sort of shape patterns of violence against women. Then I have a third question where I also would like you to perhaps try to see if you can finish some of your previous thoughts around the first question. And it's around struggles. We're moving towards alternatives and politics which of course you already hinted at. So how does a feminist reading of debt inform struggles by women and other vulnerable groups? Thanks, today. It's not a lucky day with technology. I will continue. I was talking about the conditioning that the external debt process has had in the democratic transition processes of structural neo-liberal reforms in the region and forms of privatization of public resources as direct political dynamics of macroeconomic debt. So I was talking about how external debt conditions the transition to democracy enforcing neoliberal conditions and the privatization of different public services. And in that sense what has innovated the feminist reading and the feminist movement is to connect that macro-structural debt that has its origin in the dictatorship that has its continuity in democratic processes with its translation of domestic debt. That connection had never been so explicitly made. So the novelty of the contribution of this feminist reading of debt is that it connects this macro-structural, this analysis of the macro-structural debt at the level of external debt to that it households that everyday life. And this connection between these two levels of debt is something that had never before been made so explicit. And it also translated into like a political reading and a political slogan into how debt's been translated into everyday life and that slogan was we want ourselves alive, free and debt free. So it was a synthetic way of connecting what Lucie said about macho violence with economic violence, and particularly with financial violence as the most abstract form of exploitation on the informal, precarious, migrant-feminized garlic. So it was a very interesting way of connecting the two levels of economic violence and especially financial violence, which is generally the most abstract form of violence over these forms of informal, precarious, migrant, et cetera, labor. And another point that seems important to us is that it produces an analysis from the struggles, from the organizations of how debt produces a way of gesturing the way that it is being done. So another important point is that it produces, it produces coming out of the struggles and the movements themselves, analysis of how that creates a certain form of management of the crisis. So what we show in the book is how this situation of massive impoverishment So what we show in the book is how this situation of massive impoverishment, of massive taking out of that precarious labor, doesn't necessarily like explode in terms of like protest or revolt, so what happens is that it implodes within territories and within domestic territories. And what the feminist movement does is it connects that implosion which seems to be something domestic, something private, something that happens within the home to the possibility of going out onto the streets to politicizing it and like attacking it more publicly. So what's important there is how the feminist movement is able to dispute this management of the crisis at the macro structural level as well in terms of the colonial management of the crisis. So that slogan we won ourselves alive free and debt free was increasingly taken up by different types of organizations movements by the labor movement by student movement by informal workers by domestic workers by different organizations in order to really debate and challenge the government's handling of that both at the macro social level and the domestic level. So final point I want to make is that we also use the term financial exploitation which we use to try to update how finance appropriates value and exploits workers and people but without the mediation of the wage. So this allows us to see is provides us with analytical keys understand how neoliberalism dispossesses and extracts value from both public resources and labor and its multiple forms. So I'll end by I want to raise a question which we can discuss more later which is how can we go beyond that binary between exclusion and inclusion because it's a binary that in many sense has been appropriated by these financial mechanisms. Thank you. Thank you. I think we did great. I really like even more how we're moving from a sort of a more macro understanding of how processes of financialization extract through different different levels of analysis through digitization through specific technologies through financial violence through financial exploitation and I think some of the questions you're posing are really crucial in relation both to alternatives and struggles as well as in relation to how we actually overcome these binaries. It is on these sort of final words that I now pass the conversation but on to Hannah. Thank you. Thank you and wonderful to have you all here and particularly wonderful to welcome Caroline Hussain. Thanks for being with us Caroline. Very excited to have you here in particular because we're moving the conversation towards thinking through what alternatives we might have what solutions we might have and I know in my own teaching and I know we've got a few of my current and former students here and we often focus on microfinance and we often are very critical of microfinance but I think what is we're kind of hoping to hear from you is perhaps to offer some alternatives to it as well and to make us think through that. So actually I think I'm going to put both questions to you and let you think about where you want to sort of put the weight of your reflections if that's all right. So two questions we thought we had for you were to tell us a little bit more about the concept that you use around politicized microfinance. So you could describe that a little bit and particularly how that manifests itself in the various countries and communities that you've conducted your work in and I know that your most recent work has been offering us to look towards these kind of new alternatives for financial inclusion particularly the ones that come from within Indigenous models, cooperative models, community-based models. So I thought it would be really interesting to hear some of your insights from those and in particular to think through how they differ to the microfinance-based solutions that are offered around the solutions to financial inclusion and to get particularly the gender but also the race perspective on this. Over to you Caroline. Yeah well thank you. I first like to thank everyone at SOAS because I know during a pandemic the kind of effort and focus it takes to just even be present. We've just come out of a stay-at-home order in Toronto since November so Hannah just even you trying to you know just to manage this question keeping in touch with me just really I'm most grateful and humbled by all of you Sarah, Ale, Tobias and the team behind you for making this possible so that we as feminists can find friends in this space to speak about our research particularly at a time when so much of our work is even more relevant than it's ever been and then we come from places where we are harmed for the kinds of work we do and so I think that this is a wonderful space for us to have and I welcome everyone to be in touch with me later if I don't do justice in responding to these amazing questions that that Hannah has posed. I've put my information in the box for folks because I sometimes feel a bit discombobulated and not at peace because of how I'm living right now and I'm sure many of us are feeling this kind of I don't know fatigue unsettling and depression you know what I mean like so I don't want it to get on like this but I just wanted to just acknowledge that and I also want to acknowledge that I live in Toronto these are territories by Aboriginal Indigenous people in Canada who allow me the space to work play and live and I think it's important for me to note that I also want to remember my own ancestors that were forced in bondage to come to these lands called the Americas and to also build it up and so as a scholar part of my work is trying to find those connections between Indigenous people of Canada and Black folk here in the Americas so thank you so as for the invitation I'm a part of besides being a part of York York University I'm also my fun time is hanging out with and creating a network called DICE diverse solidarity economies collective and so we're always thinking about how to decolonize politically economy because so much of the production and political economy tends to be very stale and male and white so I think that again echoing this forum really important but I'm going to get on why I'm here and it's my first book that keeps on giving um politicized microfinance um I had to look at it to be quite honest Hannah because it's been a while since I've actually looked at the book and I'm like wow who wrote these things um um some of you will know that sometimes your first book doesn't just disappear it tends to haunt you and you want to talk about other things but people keep asking you about it and I think feminist scholars and Black scholars are always asking me to come and talk about it and I think that's where I live and that's what my body of work is committed to so I'm going to answer your question on this concept of politicized often when people see my book they're like yes she's going to tear up microfinance and actually when you actually read it you start to realize it's much more nuanced than that because I am an anti-racist intersectional feminist who's black feminist who's concerned about really undoing sort of um these really polemic or really ideological ideas of what works and what doesn't um a lot of people do that in both camps both extreme conservatives or extreme left and I'm not interested in that I'm interested in contextual realities of how things play off and and like I think it was Serena that said you spend time in these locations you start to learn that things undo and many of you will know this occur and the outcomes are very different depending on the location of where you're doing your research so I like to tell a story first before I get into politicized microfinance 2000 I had a life before becoming an academic that's why I'm a bit chaotic in the way that I'm going to speak to you but um because that sort of interferes with my thought process but back in early 2000 I had a job as a development sort of manager of economic and development programs with an African-American led organization called OIC international it was founded by this man who was a reverend called Leon Sullivan who founded the global Sullivan principles and actually held account a lot of American companies doing crazy in South Africa during the apartheid and what I learned from his organization which is by the way staffed board all of it was African Americans what I learned from them and I'm a Canadian working there right and what I learned from them about economic development was that aid money could be co-opted aid money could be co-opted in a way to do good for black people okay that's one and the second thing is that to recognize that money's in general no matter what the allocation is or any kind of economic good is actually very a very biased process because of understanding sort of the colonial imperial legacy in which black folk find themselves so that's sort of that teaching that learning on the job actually stayed with me and it's still his I think it is oppressed upon me the things are actually very politicized in our world particularly when it comes to people of African descent and so I spend most days trying to understand exclusion when it comes to financial goods and how why certain identities are finding it harder to access certain goods right so this political process of how we determine how things are being allocated to certain groups and and why and we have good examples around the world of people trying to understand this idea of politicized right they may not call it that but they're looking at well how do we make money more equitably accessible and so you have these fantastic stories of sewa right um maybe LA working unity you know sewa is like this humongous institution very co cooperatively rooted you know it has um trade union background but they also have a lot of informal formal kind of cooperative ways of dealing with microfinance that I think had in some ways have been quite progressive and trying to be more inclusive particularly of low-cast women Jessica Gordon Nempart an economist out of the U.S. has written extensively about how African Americans have used cooperatives to co-op resources so again they've had to politicize their action to access economic goods and and most of the time they do that undercover meaning that it's not something that's formal they usually work in the informal to access those goods and services I like to speak about I don't know how many of you like reggae but I do and there's a Bob Marley has really popularized the man called Marcus Garvey so if anyone's probably heard of Garvey a lot of his things a lot of the key sayings in Bob's lyrics have come out of the speeches and philosophies of Garveyism and so you can google Garvey later but Marcus Garvey was quite the eccentric Jamaican that worked as a laborer in you know the Panama Canal and he worked in banana plantations and in Costa Rica he was a printmaker somewhere else in you know the Caribbean then he was on the dockyards in London so this Marcus Garvey traveled around ended up finding finding himself in Harlem and started to build one of the world's largest cooperative movements called the UNIA and created all kinds of sort of spin-off very black-centric cooperative institutions or businesses again understanding that racial capitalism the ways in which monies have have come about and the ways in which people get access to business has been very tiered and very racist and understood quite early on because of his worldly travels and living in the US for some time that one had to politicize cooperation and and really force that kind of self-reliance within black black community whatever that look like in in the US at the time and so Garvey has been really instrumental for me because I work on a lot of people the people that I meet with are mostly black women of African descent across the Americas which means that they're out of Africa so that the experience is completely different and and many of the stories I think Ali did a great introduction about recognizing the kinds of violence that's perpetrated against people of African descent here in the Americas but also you find that happening across Europe which I'm sure Hannah is is familiar with as well so I spent 10 years in international development looking at microfinance programs right starting with this Leon Sullivan group in Philly and then when I decided to become an academic I thought you know I've traveled everywhere looking at microfinance and was really impressed that in some places you know that were complete you know sometimes politically not good and chaotic that their microfinance envelopes often seem very organized very well managed by the central bank some were not so there was this fissure between what was working in finance microfinance or targeted economic programs and those that work and then I realized that there was no one speaking about the African diaspora anywhere no literature really very little or scant Africa yes because like what Serena has spent some time looking at there there have been a little bit ahead of the game because there's been this force for digitizing money right and how do you access those those those communities and so I spent I think I well I carried out my work starting I think in 2008 I started working in Haiti first and then Jamaica and I spent years actually Chris crossing but spent most of my time in the island of Jamaica looking at microfinance targeted programs so that's sort of the the backdrop for the book politicized microfinance and so I worked mainly in a place called Jamaica Haiti and Guyana and then later on I added on the richest Caribbean country which is Trinidad that my mother has roots in and then Grenada one of the smallest islands in the Caribbean but one of the only countries in the English speaking to have a coup sort of but really violent kind of experience that's very different but relates to Haiti in some ways and and not in many other ways so I just wanted some regional comparison I'm a comparativist I want to see if my theory of politicized would make sense and what I found so I should define what politicized mean because I think that's what Hannah I think you're having me on the hook for trying to understand that so it's twofold politicized we should understand twofold often when people look at the front cover or read the description they're like immediately impressed that it's going to criticize and fight with microfinance and I don't I do some of that but not completely and so one the first definition of it is looking at microfinance politicized with a negative sort of backdrop right like it's it's it's it's microfinance being used to conform and to assist elites in containing any kind of dissent or social change right so use the subsidy called microfinance under the guise of inclusion but actually what you actually are doing is cherry picking of the poor people who want access to finance who will get it and so when you start looking at that you start unraveling it what you see is a really exclusionary kind of politics happening but what does that actually mean exclusion and so what I look at is our identities and I fall on race class and gender those are the three identities I look at there are probably more than others can look at in the future but generally I look at that those identities and I thought I'd be looking at them equally across these three different cases but they unfold very differently and so what do I mean by that so in Jamaica and Guyana these are Caribbean islands that have been impacted by you know colonization and slavery and what you see are these very tiered racially tiered societies that are actually quite complex one is black one is brown one is white all these kind of things um but there's an anti-black racism um that is happening towards those citizens in Guyana and Trinidad where people are being siphoned off from resources because of a political party that could have been in power that was very race based okay so and you found I found that the time I was working there Guyana and Trinidad had Indian or East Indian dominated racial parties and so the benefits or the goodies they say were being flaunted to people who were not black or mixed with black or lived with black people okay so what you see and so it's really it's infused with a class as it gets more complicated in that race in the Caribbean can be very infused and maybe similar to Latin American some extent by class or particularly Brazil actually has this experience but there was another kind of exclusion that was occurring when we think about politicize and it was this exclusion of people based on party politics and this is where the juicy thing is I did a paper on I think it's sort of made me a person on grata for a while in Jamaica because what I did was write a paper on big man politics that's what I called it and it basically critiqued sort of a gangster dawn slash you know corrupt politicians sort of interfering from the external right because micro finance likes to have this veneer that they're all inclusive and so having you know me say that gangsters are interrupting it that again to them seemed like that was an external entity that was making micro finance exclude exclusionary but actually what I found is that these these big men were actually implicating themselves and getting involved in the actual allocation of resources by micro finance subelites or the people who manage those programs okay and so what you see is now this partisan politics that's no longer this thing on the outside that is making it difficult for micro finance to operate neutrally but actually it's been corrupted from within and I can speak to stuff like that later but that's what I mean by politicized we're replicating gender race and class biases through a subsidy called micro finance which is tagged to be inclusive so you know that's a bit of a joke there and then what they do is they have this micro finance then copies exactly the model that they import from Bangladesh and if anyone's been to Bangladesh knows that it's completely different from the reality of say Kingston Jamaica and so I'm going to interrupt you because I'm aware we're running short of time and I want it I want to get it okay second piece which is about the alternatives and the cooperative models because I think that's something that a lot of us know very little about and I think it's um it would be okay so let me just wrap up for you then Hannah and for other people um then so then there's this politicized one that is exclusionary and then the and this will speak to what you want me to get to um the other politicizes this activist form of micro finance one that is homegrown then one that is locally driven and I take instruction from Haiti and Haiti is a country maybe others might want to look at because what they're doing is actually impressing on the world that cooperative or cash popular these membered owned institutions actually matter in the delivery of financial services so the term politicized has two faces is basically what what what I'm talking about when I speak nuance and that kind of leads into what Hannah wants me to talk about and I'm happy to take more questions about it it's the work that I'm working on now is this idea that well I'm going to move away from professionalized informal giving of financial services to actual people who share the same class origins who are now curating and designing financial services for themselves and they have been doing that before any of these new kids on the block showed up like micro finance or credit unions all of those came after what I'm going to talk about and that's rotating savings and credit associations I call them roscos for short the women who manage them call themselves the banker ladies it's not a term that I derived of it's a term that these women call themselves and they're all across the Americas and it's actually very shameful that we pretend in parts of Canada and I'm hearing from the US we don't see them and these women have been doing them for at least a hundred years trying to build equity and inclusion on their own terms with their own aftertaxed incomes to to gift and also to lend to each other and so roscos often are ignored because of the informality of what they do in in banking and so I think that those kinds of I think it was Ali that talked about these grassroots innovations that are happening in financial services are often undermined because there's a political project for us to commercialize people and so when you think about these women who are deliberately saying my kind of freedom in the capitalist model means to also care about others as well as to tend to my livelihood needs and then it kind of brings up this question about well what is economics good for if we're not even recognizing these kinds of women who are pushing forward what Carl Pilani would say is a double movement right like this kind of this real true grassroots movement of cooperation but more importantly equitable finance that has been around on this planet for actual centuries and that is the very very sustainable I'm going to stop there because I know that we have um no time but I'm happy I'm happy to take questions if I didn't do justice for what you wanted Hannah thank you um really well oh I can and I need to unmute yourself having problems with my headphones can you hear me now yes yes okay sorry about that and so I think we have a little bit of time just a few minutes if there's questions or comments or people want to come in then raise your hand and I'll try and get the participants list up or I can't see anything in the chat at the moment but if you have something you'd like to post in the chat then do I'm aware of the time so it would be great if you can keep any comments or questions brief if you have anyone that wants to come in has everyone been silenced much information to take in are we allowed to ask questions yes absolutely okay I have question for Serena but if no one wants to ask questions is that okay absolutely please do kind of I'm just taken by your work so we probably have to have a sideline conversation and I'm happy for this opportunity to have met you um this idea of digital um financing and um democratizing or under the guise of democratizing is quite interesting to me I'm interested interested to learn because of the countries you worked in I want to know the kinds of theory that help guide you to do the work on African women that would be helpful to me and I'm curious to know just in my little research so that I'm working on a very small project I'm wondering about if you looked at Nigeria and Haiti or what can you glean from those country contexts in in context of the work that you've done Serena over to you and then I think Emma just has a question for you Caroline after that on what was the African American microfinance institution you mentioned in the US and there's a question on the binaries of inclusion and exclusion it's been interesting because I think these these idea binaries have come up a few times including Caroline you've sort of meant getting away from the the binaries of um you know what's good and what's bad around microfinance and then we'll come back another question for you Caroline from Vincent and was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the rosters and and if you found there's also a risk reproducing various hierarchies and asymmetries are wrong along the lines that you investigate so class, gender, race because that has been the case found in other instances but should we go to Serena first and then Caroline you can come back on those couple of questions is that okay so Serena over to you first yeah I will try to to be brief so um of course um the research was so my research questions were actually grounded in my field work so I didn't know what to expect I came across this digital financial project in Kenya by doing research on migration actually self self migration and and how people used to this kind of mobile phone based system which is in PESA in Kenya to send money to the rural areas so that was the starting point for me and then I um I kind of you know developed these questions by saying it's so much promoted as a successful system by why this does not improve the status of women what should I ask what should I do and then I try to contextualize this in the colonial legacy and the broader kind of gender and ethnic relations as well in countries like Kenya which is extremely important and so I know because then I started working with also colleagues and trying to do which something I'm doing at the moment more comparative work so kind of comparing this new digital platforms in different countries because in some countries they have been also linked to social welfare programs so this is something that Arla mentioned before they are used to transfer money for social welfare but then something that is interesting to mention is I try to use as much as possible um African feminism because the work was grounded in Kenya so okay you and other feminists that wrote about critics of development and they wrote these very powerful critics that we read quite often now but they wrote this like in the 70s and and you know there's so so much power in and clarity in actually describing these dynamics that you know colonialism affected everyone however was gendered exactly for these reasons and there are some interesting work I mean Oyebumi was a Nigerian woman in the U.S. of course they wrote the the the kind of critique of the idea of gender a woman from an African feminist perspective and they try to rely a lot on this kind of you know critics and learn a lot from the kind of grassroots activists in the process because of course there was um the kind of aim I feel I want to say something Caroline which also links to Vincent's question on um on something that I noticed when I was doing my work in terms of rotating credit and savings associations and rosca so in in my discussions with the women emerged these these were kind of very common forms of you know finance that originated even in the pre-colonial time but then particularly in the post-colonial time when there was the migration of men for working reasons right so they had to support themselves and they kind of you know became extremely organized in in managing money and in different forms in different communities and and actually I did all my focus groups with already created rosca's groups in in Nairobi and Matare and other communities so um what I found with digital finance was that actually these groups helped a lot the rapid development of Mpesa in Kenya so basically they were targeted so to use these mobile phone systems because it was a safer way to keep money stored in their mobile phones for instance right instead of keeping the money in the pot or to transfer money because they need to make the small payments every week and then you know transfer the money to one of them each week and and they would do this using these Mpesa this mobile money system so basically the rapid development of the system was very much also because of these forms of informal finance and and of course they pay a fee for every transaction but they so on my point was that they didn't really benefit from the income produced by the rapid growth and development of this system so they helped to spread and develop this system very quickly but there was not a distribution there in terms let's provide so this is something that I know in terms of self finance in terms of the uh of the dynamics of that of course you know we can have a conversation later on and that can give you a little bit more details but which links a little bit to Vincent's question about how sometimes you know these kind of mechanisms are used to take advantage of these forms of social finance uh as well and so how to actually disrupt this process and challenge it that would be like a probably a follow-up question. Thank you Serena so we'll go to Caroline and then yes sorry I should have pointed out so Asanda's question is also for Lucy and Veronica this question of the inclusion exclusion binary whether you wanted to discuss that a little bit more so should we go to Caroline first and then back to Lucy and Veronica okay Caroline over to you. Yeah so I'll just answer the question on the roscos by Vincent and Lucy and um and Veronica can answer the one on informal formal binary um so just quickly Vincent I'm familiar with the Indian context of how chits and those kinds of roscos uh kitties operate there because I work with someone in Kerala so the context is very different in the Americas I'm dealing with black women who their actual risk or danger is is by police so authorities who will confiscate their resources people who are calling Somali women terrorists they are seen as smugglers a lot of Jamaican women are being attacked because they think they're mulling basically carrying drugs and what have you so the confiscation of resources is probably one of the greatest risks and the stigmatization of women at least in the Canadian context to a lesser extent a very different experiences well different experiences going on in the Caribbean but in the Americas that's the kind of experience that's happening so that it's a different kind of harm and a different kind of exclusion that's happening race class and gender with those groups is not happening because they tend to self-select disease are growing from the community so a group of Somali or a group of Jamaicans or women that work in a hospital or if they're a bunch of cleaners or bus drivers they will come together so the class location is there often ethnicity is there that's all I want to say on that thank you Caroline and just to say there's an additional question for Veronica and Lucia so maybe they can take both of these the other part was from Nadine that questions you to expand a little bit more on the relationship between household debt and external debt and in particular what the mechanisms are in that relationship so is it international investors for example so shall I pass over Liz I don't know whether you want to translate or whether that's whether it's straight to Lucy and Veronica but over to you yes we we have already read the question so maybe Lucy can start with the first one la manera en que las condiciones en que el endeudamiento externo se toma por parte de los estados produce en principio un empobrecimiento generalizado por el por la dolarización de los alimentos por la privatización de servicios públicos que hace que se vuelva necesario endeudarse para vivir y para acceder a servicios básicos sí entonces hay que pensarlo con una relación que tiene que ver con la la los modos en que el endeudamiento del estado hace que justamente se produzca una serie de condicionalidades que empobrecen los hogares y que vuelven necesario la toma de deuda privada completando como el circuito de endeudamiento y por otro lado sí okay so when we talk about the connection between the external debt and domestic debt we can think about it in terms of two processes and the first is how the conditions on states when they take out these debts lead to a generalized impoverishment so both in terms of valorization of prices in many cases which often correlates with inflation as well as the privatization of public services that basically creates a situation in which it becomes necessary to go into that in order to access the basic public services the public and goods that are needed in order to stay alive pero al mismo tiempo nos referimos a como dice la pregunta también los modos en que los por ejemplo en el espacio doméstico hay una relación directa una conexión con los circuitos financieros internacionales por ejemplo eso lo vemos en el caso de los procesos de financiarización de la vivienda so in the second process we see how there's a direct relationship with it between households and international financial circuits and we see this most clearly and for example the question of housing but Veronica did you want to come back in too? Yes, mi pregunta para la conversación sobre la cuestión de inclusión, exclusión tiene como perspectiva pensar cómo ir un poco más allá de la forma en que damos cuenta de cómo las finanzas excluyen y al mismo tiempo se proponen como propuesta de inclusión so my sort of like provocation or question about how to go beyond this binary between inclusion and exclusion has to do with this perspective of like how we can go beyond how finance proposes to deal with exclusion by including people in finance because on the first hand finance has a like productive role in creating situations of dispossession and looting which like forces people to go into that so how can we go beyond and push how financial mechanisms themselves present themselves and understand themselves in terms of exclusion and inclusion and so the second point has to do with when we do this historicization of recent waves of financialization financial inclusion is to look at how they're responding to an increase in struggles and how they're trying to like capture the energy of those struggles through financial inclusion so we can take up a little bit what Caroline was talking about because in Argentina there's a discussion about what feminist finance like feminist finances foreign inclusion would look like or what find feminist financial forms or feminist finances for self-management yeah sorry thank you feminist finances for self-management and how these forms of feminist finance for self-management have to also be at the same time forms of appropriation of that like collective social wealth so in that sense we're doing a good double movement because it's both sort of exposing and showing forms of financial exploitation or financial capture but also a form of reappropriating or appropriating that social wealth and so my question is if we should that maybe that double movement needs another name we can't talk about it in terms of financial inclusion thank you very much and wonderful thank you and I can see the chat has been very active although not necessarily with questions but with comments or questions for sharing of papers and of thanks and it was a really wonderful opportunity to really I felt there was definitely a conversation happening between all the contributions so that was really fantastic to see and thank you very much for that I'm aware that we've already gone over the time and so with that in mind and with everyone thanking the contributors I think at this point I know everyone has shared their emails and I'm sure we can continue that perhaps if there's more conversations that people have if you have questions for particular people then please do so and continue that over email but with that I think I should end this session by thanking everybody thanking the speakers and the contributions from all of you Alessara Tobias and particularly Liz for translating so fantastically a really impressive job I have to say and thank you very much everybody wishing you a nice evening and and I hope to see you again soon in real life fingers crossed thank you it's been wonderful to see you thank you bye thank you thank you bye everyone thanks Hannah