Financializing Infrastructures

This working group explores intersections between emerging literatures in infrastructure studies and finance and financialization.

The ‘infrastructure turn’ in the social sciences and humanities has called attention to the material substrata through which goods, knowledge, people, and capital circulate, exploring the complex assemblage between a multitude of agents. Adopting a new materialist perspective, the literature investigates how infrastructures embody congealed social interests, as political agendas become buried in the built environment.  

The turn towards infrastructure has been paralleled by a shift towards studies of finance and financial instruments. Since the 2008 crisis, a growing literature has highlighted the importance of finance at the national and international levels. Literature often touches upon the financialization of everyday life, as financial technologies have facilitated new forms of speculation in areas that were previously considered outside the scope of the market.  

Drawing these two literatures together, this reading groups explores what it means for the material substrata of modern life to be increasingly financialized.

We are interested in the following questions:

• How do infrastructures and finance intersect in the contemporary period?   

• What kinds of technologies and professional expertise are taken up in transforming things into objects of financial speculation?

• What actors have come to play key roles in the financialization process and how are they coordinated?

• How can processes of financialization be resisted?

• How might infrastructures be differently imagined?

Debt, Precarity and the Pandemic

This blog looks at the ongoing public health crisis from a political economic perspective. It was inspired by a graduate class that commenced in January 2020 on the topic of debt, precarity, and financialization. The aim of the class was to explore the dynamics of the current economic regime and its tendency to foster inequality and social and economic insecurity. 

The chief marker of this regime was the 2008 global economic crisis, when the extreme inequality in our society became more evident than ever. While the world’s richest 1% have come to own nearly half of the world’s wealth, the wages of most working people have stagnated over the past forty years. There has been a shift away from standard full-time jobs; a growing number of Canadians have non-standard work arrangements without steady pay or stable hours. At the same time as the cost of living has increased, people have increasingly come to rely on credit to make ends meet. 

The COVID crisis has gone further to demonstrate the extreme precarity of these economic arrangements as unemployment has sky-rocketed to levels not seen since the Great Depression. Under record high debt levels, they cannot afford rent and are unable to pay for basic necessities. While there has been some degree of social assistance, many countries around the world have been hampered through legacies of austerity and privatization that have left them without adequate infrastructure for care and support. 

This blog documents how these arrangements have impacted the capacity of people to live in the context of crisis. Drawing from a range of case studies, we expose the different ways in which the precarity of the current economic system is being confronted–from access to medical insurance and housing, to the financialization of international aid and the push for universal basic income. In the process, we show how the current crisis is not just a public health problem, but also a social and economic one.