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X-WR-CALNAME:Anthropology Colloquium:  Hannah Appel
X-WR-TIMEZONE:Eastern Time (US & Canada)
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DTSTAMP:20260810T210823Z
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_46738523489341
DTSTART:20241115T200000Z
DTEND:20241115T213000Z
DESCRIPTION:Debtors' Unions: Counterpower and Abolitionist Presence in the 
 Age of Finance\n\nABSTRACT: Alone\, our debts are a burden. Together\, the
 y make us powerful. This is the provocation of debtors’ unions. Indeed\,
  the power of debt is something the wealthy have long wielded. To put it i
 n words often attributed to petroleum industrialist J. Paul Getty “If yo
 u owe the bank $100\,000 the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $100 milli
 on you own the bank.” With everything from student debt to medical debt\
 , credit card debt to housing debt surging (and drowning households in the
  process) debtors\, in theory\, own the bank. But in practice\, this is a 
 complex provocation that raises strategic and empirical research questions
  about political economy\, social movements\, and contemporary capitalism.
  This talk - drawn from a book project in progress - draws on a decade of 
 participatory action research co-founding and organizing with the Debt Col
 lective\, the nation’s first debtors’ union. Grown out of Occupy Wall 
 Street\, the Debt Collective has begun to organize debtors across the Unit
 ed States\, won nearly $200 billion dollars in debt abolition\, and transf
 ormed the national narrative around household debts in merely a decade of 
 work. But the full potential of debtors’ unions is far from realized and
  the underlying strategy and theoretical elaboration not yet developed. Th
 is talk (and the book project from which it is drawn) begin to do some of 
 that work.\n\nHannah Appel is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Glob
 al Studies at UCLA and Associate Faculty Director of the UCLA Luskin Insti
 tute on Inequality and Democracy.\n\nShe is an economic anthropologist int
 erested in transnational capitalism and finance\; finance\, debt and debto
 rs’ unions\; the African continent’s place in global capitalism\; the 
 economic imagination\; anti-capitalist and abolitionist social movements. 
 Her research and teaching interests are guided by the economic imagination
 . What does it mean to understand racial capitalism ethnographically\, and
  to work actively to undo it?\n\nHer first book\, The Licit Life of Capita
 lism\, is both an account of a specific capitalist project—U.S. oil comp
 anies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea—and a theorization of 
 more general forms and processes that facilitate diverse capitalist projec
 ts around the world. She is at work on a second ethnographic project—Pan
  African Capital: Finance\, Banking\, and Economic Self-Fashioning—conti
 nuing her inquiry into the licit life of capitalism\, and the displacement
  of how and from where we think about global capitalism and the imperial p
 ower of the U.S. dollar. Pan African Capital is a multi-sited project base
 d on ethnographic work with transnational\, African-owned banks and financ
 ial institutions on the continent.\n\nHannah is also a co-founder and orga
 nizer with the Debt Collective. The Debt Collective works to build debtors
  unions through an emancipatory activation of household debt under finance
  capitalism: What if mass indebtedness is not simply a liability\, but als
 o a potential collective asset or leverage point in the fight to enact the
  new and radical economic forms we need? Hannah brings her organizing and 
 scholarly work together under the auspices of the Future of Finance at the
  UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.\n\n \n\nCo-sponsored b
 y Government and Sociology. Thank you.
GEO:42.4494;-76.4854
LOCATION:McGraw Hall\, 165
SUMMARY:Anthropology Colloquium:  Hannah Appel
URL;VALUE=URI:https://events.cornell.edu/event/anthropology-colloquium-hann
 ah-appel
CATEGORIES:Lecture
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