Keynote talk by Dr. Noelle Stout
Associate Professor, New York University
4:30 p.m. in Hale 230
Public Reception to follow
More than 14 million U.S. homeowners have lost their homes to foreclosure since the 2008 mortgage crash. In this talk, Stout reveals an enduring yet undetectable form of violence endemic during the decade following the crisis: homeowners’ confrontations with the bureaucracies of corporate lenders. Lenders executed mass bank seizures through seemingly benign administrative mishaps—lost paperwork, campaigns of misinformation, and hours spent on hold. Drawing on research in California’s hard-hit Sacramento Valley, Stout ventures into the homes of families on the brink of eviction and the byzantine call centers of corporate lenders processing their appeals. Here, Stout uncovers the rise of predatory bureaucracies—publicly funded but privately administered Kafkaesque mortgage assistance programs, through which corporate lenders pilfered billions of taxpayers’ dollars while denying assistance to over 70 percent of homeowner applicants. But just as predatory bureaucracies dispossessed Americans, they also gave rise to discourses of financial reciprocity, as foreclosed-upon Americans and low-level lending employees debated the social contracts implicit in financial ties. Trapped in an endless maze of mortgage modifications, borrowers began to view debt refusal as a moral response to lenders, in ways that advance longstanding anthropological claims regarding credit-debt ties and redefine the meaning of dispossession after the crash.
Many thanks to our co-sponsors: The Departments of Anthropology, Sociology, Geography, Philosophy, and the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Photo by Arielle Milkman, taken in Denver, CO.
Associate Professor, New York University
4:30 p.m. in Hale 230
Public Reception to follow
More than 14 million U.S. homeowners have lost their homes to foreclosure since the 2008 mortgage crash. In this talk, Stout reveals an enduring yet undetectable form of violence endemic during the decade following the crisis: homeowners’ confrontations with the bureaucracies of corporate lenders. Lenders executed mass bank seizures through seemingly benign administrative mishaps—lost paperwork, campaigns of misinformation, and hours spent on hold. Drawing on research in California’s hard-hit Sacramento Valley, Stout ventures into the homes of families on the brink of eviction and the byzantine call centers of corporate lenders processing their appeals. Here, Stout uncovers the rise of predatory bureaucracies—publicly funded but privately administered Kafkaesque mortgage assistance programs, through which corporate lenders pilfered billions of taxpayers’ dollars while denying assistance to over 70 percent of homeowner applicants. But just as predatory bureaucracies dispossessed Americans, they also gave rise to discourses of financial reciprocity, as foreclosed-upon Americans and low-level lending employees debated the social contracts implicit in financial ties. Trapped in an endless maze of mortgage modifications, borrowers began to view debt refusal as a moral response to lenders, in ways that advance longstanding anthropological claims regarding credit-debt ties and redefine the meaning of dispossession after the crash.
Many thanks to our co-sponsors: The Departments of Anthropology, Sociology, Geography, Philosophy, and the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Photo by Arielle Milkman, taken in Denver, CO.