New SNSF Project: The Home-Debt Nexus
People often go into debt to pay for a home, taking on a mortgage to spread payments over the course of multiple decades. Yet since the pandemic, difficult economic conditions in Latin America resulting from low wages and increases in cost of living, the financialization of housing, and austerity measures have meant that people are also using debt to pay for back rental payments and even to support everyday basics.
A new SNSF project will allow researchers to study these changing relationships to home and debt for women in three Latin American Cities: Mexico City, Bogotá, and Buenos Aires.
Led by University of Zurich researcher Dr Hanna Hilbrandt, the research team is composed by Dr Erandi Barroso (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Dr Luci Cavallero (Universidad de Buenos Aires), Professor Veronica Gago (Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina), Professor Adriana Hurtado (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia), Dr Jess Linz (University of Zurich), Dr Sandra Pulido (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia) and Professor Luis Salinas (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México).
This month the team held a workshop in Mexico City to launch the project, and visited with project collaborators in Zumpango, located in the State of Mexico outside Mexico City, where fieldwork will be conducted.
Drawing on feminist scholarship on debt and home, financialization, and everyday politics of resistance, the research aims 1) to elucidate the political economic and legal regulations that shape the landscape of home and debt, 2) the relationship between labor and debt, 3) relations of dependency that debt produces, 4) everyday responses to debt, and 5) the way that the material infrastructure of housing in the city conditions these relationships.
Home-Debt Nexus on SNSF Website
Photo by Jess Linz, UZH