Politics of Debt in Brazil

• Grant number: 25/02703-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: August 01, 2025
• End date: February 28, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Anna Catarina Morawska Vianna
• Grantee: Anna Catarina Morawska Vianna
• Host Investigator: Jessica Sklair
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Queen Mary University of London, England

Abstract

The aim of the research project as a Visiting Scholar at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) is to investigate the politics of debt in Brazil from a feminist and ethnographic perspective. Based on research in the neighborhood of Peixinhos, in the metropolitan area of Recife, in Pernambuco, the research proposes an account of how the expansion of the credit market produced a financialized landscape that impacted local dynamics of circulation and redistribution, exploring how new forms of financialized debt enter local circuits of nonfinancialized credit. Such approach enables an analysis of indebtedness that looks at how new forms of financialized debt enter the specific historical and ecological formations of Peixinhos, associated with the history of urbanization of the territory, family trajectories and seasonal climate events, such as flooding of the Beberibe River. This research proposal thus adds to debates on feminist approaches to financialization, which in Brazil have especially focused on the role of the state in expanding indebtedness through consigned credit, as well as the increase in financial products in the care economy. An ethnography that focuses on the historical and ecological dimensions of indebtedness as a bodily experience lived by families in a specific territory has the potential to contribute to reflections on women's indebtedness and the feminisation of finance that are becoming ever more present in the public debate. (AU)