This article is about debt and power within the contemporary political economy of austerity. It investigates how the power relations of debt manifest through scale: the body, the household, the community, the nation state, and the global financial system. This is accomplished by integrating the concepts of Debt Space (Harker 2017) and social reproduction (Tepe and Steans 2010) to analyse the empirical material collected from two parallel projects into the practices of debt auditing at the national and household level. In doing so we explore key sites of intersubjective meaning making, where moral norms of indebtedness connect to action and agency. From the analysis of the evidence this article makes two interrelated interventions. Firstly, we contend that debt is a transformative force. We observe the effects of debt's presence as it changes and reconfigures the social space around it. Secondly, bringing together the national and household analysis makes visible how debt audits are a progenitor of resistance. Debt audits invite people to care about their debt and consider debt to be a force causing harm in their households, communities and/or the nation state. With this recognition comes a call to seek freedom from debt and the harm that it is causing. A desire for freedom breeds action against the claims that debt makes. These actions include paying it down, diverting expenditures, defaulting, repudiating, cancelling, or paying it off altogether. Each of these are strategies of resistance to the moral authority of debt simultaneously delegitimizes public and private logics of austerity.

This article uses the United Kingdom as a case study to explore the limits of financialisation.

This paper draws on two empirical case studies to draw out the way in which the causes of poverty in austere times in the UK are inverted, from their socioeconomic causes to making the poor themselves responsible for their misery but also responsibilising them for fighting their way out of poverty. We particularly focus on how austerity policy in the UK has involved a return of moral language of the 'undeserving poor'. We highlight the way in which this 'moral political economy' has gendered effects, targeting single mothers and their children and families, through the lens of 'literacy'. The first case study show how promoting 'financial literacy' is seen to solve indebtedness of the poor and the second case study highlights how 'parental literacy' is employed to turn around 'troubled families'. Indeed, these two studies demonstrate how the morality of austerity is shaped through deeply gendered practices of the everyday in which women's morality is ultimately what needs reforming.

This article looks at the promise of the 'New Middle Class' (NMC)

No abstract