Debt space: Topologies, ecologies and Ramallah, Palestine

Abstract

When theorised, dDebt is widely conceived as inherently temporal -present consumption bought with future labour. This paper advances conceptualisations of debt by incorporating the active role space plays in creating, maintaining, and undermining debt relations. Debts are topological binds -a particular kind of spatial and temporal connection, which are entangled with topographic spaces, to produce debt ecologies. This argument is developed by tracing the creation, maintenance and/or destruction of spatial connections between different people, communities, institutions and sites in the Palestinian conurbation of RamallahAl Bireh. Attending to the spatiality of debt offers not simply a better understanding of debt itself, but also directs our attention to a more extensive range of time-spaces that co-constitute specific debt ecologies. These entanglements of power require a methodological approach that moves beyond statistical representations of debt. Thinking debt topologically also responds to postcolonial concerns about the locatedness of theory, while envisioning an extensive geography that is more than a mosaic of contexts or variegated capitalism.[Situate argument within literatures].

Asinamali: Aspiration, debt and citizenship in South Africa's #FeesMustFall protests

“…Following Horton (), these narratives around debt and aspiration transcend formulations of “student debt” as consumption and call attention to the more intimate and everyday experiences of debt. It is important, as Harker () has noted, to understand debt spatially and relationally. Here his concept of “debt ecologies,” in which “banks and individuals and families are entangled with other kinds of debt, non‐financialised forms of obligation and sharing,” is helpful in thinking through young people's experiences and narratives of debt.…”

“…Here his concept of “debt ecologies,” in which “banks and individuals and families are entangled with other kinds of debt, non‐financialised forms of obligation and sharing,” is helpful in thinking through young people's experiences and narratives of debt. (Harker, , p. 608). Considering the relationship between debt and the everyday spaces of families, communities, households, life courses and aspirations reveals the multiple and diverse roles that young people play in contemporary economic geographies (Horton, ).…”

“…First, experiences and narratives of debt are deeply shaped by race, class and space. This calls for an approach that situates youth in what Harker () calls “debt ecologies,” or the ways in which debt relations are constituted temporally and spatially. Second, if the decolonial turn in geography, as Radcliffe (, p. 330) suggests, involves “bringing knowledges from different settings into juxtaposition with each other,” then geographical research on youth and indebtedness in the Global South should be central to the study of this increasingly globalised phenomenon and its political consequences.…”

Mise en scène: The make-believe space of over-indebted optimism

“…This article adds to current understandings of the relation between debt and space (Harker, 2017;Peebles, 2012) the observation that spatial techniques, such as these, may be part of a struggle over what is possible or impossible. On the one hand, when I interviewed debt advice clients, they tended to retrospectively describe their now-abandoned hope of avoiding legal action for non-payment as having always been wholly impossible -thus following the above orthodoxy.…”

“…As I will show, debtors produced their defensive optimism as a function of crafting a scenea sensory environment, a make-believe spacefrom which they physically expelled warnings of legal enforcement, and within which they focused their attention on things that they valued, such as their family, home and possessions. In spatial terms, this optimism involved re-asserting conventional Euclidean, or topographic, space in the face of creditors' topological power-plays (Harker, 2017;Allen, 2011) that sought to collapse spatial distance. As Harker argues, the bind that connects debtors to creditors is not a direct, physical one, but more like "an invisible bit of string" (2017, 607).…”