April is recognized as National Financial Literacy Month, an opportunity to raise awareness of topics in financial inclusion and wellness. UCI social sciences faculty Rocío Rosales, sociology associate professor and social sciences vice associate dean of faculty development and diversity, and Ian Straughn, anthropology associate teaching professor, discuss their efforts to expand research, pedagogy, and programming around themes of financial inclusion that embrace a more holistic and interdisciplinary approach to how we navigate our financial lives.

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Ian Straughn
Associate Professor of Teaching, Department of Anthropology, UCI

“When we excavate to the bottom of the economic pyramid, what we find is the “Indebted Woman.” This was the framework for a recent event hosted by the School of Social Science’s Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI), that featured a new study authored by several former IMTFI fellows.  While such a conclusion may not come as a surprise to many, what the study also highlights as a key argument, is that the management of debt has become an increasingly onerous form of work, labor that is shouldered primarily by low income women of color. Financial literacy, which often suffers from a limited focus on how to be a savvy operator within the existing financial system, needs to expand towards a more holistic interrogation of that system, its structural inequalities, and its possibilities for reform.

As the university looks to expand the ways in which students engage with their future financial lives, such efforts to rethink financial literacy are essential for our curriculum. As I prepare to teach the next iteration of my course on “The Anthropology of Debt,” my pedagogy attempts to balance the ways debt is experienced as deeply personal and highly charged, emotionally and morally, while it is discursively constructed as impersonal, inevitable, and, simply, how the world works.  As an archaeologist by training, I take the long view, one spearheaded by the late anthropologist David Graeber’s foundational study “Debt: The First 5000 Years.” The goal is to help students denaturalize the seeming necessity of indebtedness as foundational to 21st century economic practice and social life. What does it mean to be “creditworthy” in various cultural contexts? How is debt experienced as inextricable from important socio-cultural milestones: an education, marriage, securing housing, whether to start a family, what career to pursue, and, ultimately, the ability to age and die well? As part of the course students engage in an ethnographic research project, a “debt narrative,” in which they each interview and analyze another person’s encounters with debt. It is a model of ethnographic practice borrowed from my medical anthropology colleagues who employ “illness narratives” as a key data collection strategy for understanding the social impacts of health systems. These debt narratives allow students to put into practice what they learn about how debt structures one’s engagement with the state, impacts their mental and physical wellbeing, and shapes access to social mobility. Many of the reports that these undergraduates produce for this assignment offer a window into the immigrant experience and the cultural resonance of the proverbial “American Dream.” The conversations they record and analyze highlight forms of exclusion, certainly, in terms of individual access to credit, but, more importantly, with respect to the hypocrisy of moral discourses of who can, and cannot, default.

Those are deeply held concerns for our students who are just starting on their own journeys with financial debt - student loan debt in the U.S. is edging ever closer to $2 trillion - and the fearful prospect of managing it across their lifetimes. My role is not to teach them the practicalities of financial planning, or to declare: “Debt is evil! Don’t do it!” The genie is out of the bottle on that one. Rather, the aim is to educate students about the kinds of debts they face, how they emerge in different cultural settings, and the ways various communities embrace, reject, and adapt it as a part of their economic and social lives. One of the most effective ways to present this in the classroom has been to make the connection between the rise of consumer society, neoliberalism, the precarity of the social safety net, and the debt products that target students specifically, as a key demographic. In short, the ability to be a consumer of debt, predicates what kind of consumer they can be, particularly as it replaces forms of mutual aid and governmental assistance for many impoverished and marginalized communities.

In another course I teach, “Consumption & Culture,” students examine how their role as consumers is fundamentally political and may even provide them with their most powerful voice in calls for change. Yet, that ability to vote with one’s wallet becomes constrained when that wallet only contains debt instruments. This is not to argue that they lack any agency in what kind of consumer to become, rather, the course encourages them to pay attention to the impact of their own consumption practices. One avenue into that conversation which ties into the broader concerns about financial inclusion/exclusion has been to have students work in groups to develop a list of assets (which can range from a university degree to a commercial kitchen or robust stock portfolio) that would allow them to achieve their life goals. Do their consumption practices, whether debt financed or not, facilitate or hinder their efforts to acquire those assets? How does their consumer self make possible or hinder their pursuit of certain intangible assets, such as social capital and reputation, that are often inextricably linked to structures of inequality and gatekeeping forces? The point is not necessarily to answer these questions. What is often most rewarding, both for me as an educator, and, anecdotally from the perspective of the students themselves, is that they now feel empowered to ask them in the first place.”

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Rocío Rosales
Associate Professor of Sociology and Vice Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Diversity in Social Sciences, UCI

“Yet, these issues of money matters are not only of concern to students. Newly hired faculty, especially first-generation college graduates and those from working-class backgrounds, have their own concerns rooted in institutional and structural inequity. In an effort to address them, the School of Social Sciences Office of Faculty Development and Diversity focused this year’s Faculty Learning Community around issues of financial inclusion and money cultures, or the “patterned set of values and beliefs about money that revealed through symbols, cognitions, belief systems, and storytelling” (Delaney 2012: p. 13). Faculty members meet once a month to discuss a main text (Beth Kobliner’s Get a Financial Life) and other financial issues that are relevant to their occupation and life course trajectory. The general aim is to facilitate conversations about money cultures and to expand our understanding of financial resources available within the UC system.

More broadly, the focus for this year’s Faculty Learning Community is rooted in my research related to inequities in access to financial systems. We know that people who operate outside of traditional banking institutions, the underbanked and unbanked, are often exposed to predatory practices which arose due to deregulation (Baradaran 2015). In 2017, 6.5 percent of U.S. households (8.4 million) were “unbanked,” meaning that no one in the household had a checking or savings account; an additional 18.7 percent of households (24.2 million) were “underbanked,” meaning the household had an account at an insured institution but also obtained financial products such as short-term payday loans and check cashing services from outside the banking system (FDIC 2018).

Between 2013 and 2017, Black and Hispanic households consistently had the highest unbanked rates of any race and ethnicity. These rates are reflective of lower incomes, mistrust of banking institutions, and high banking fees (FDIC 2018). These high unbanked and underbanked rates have wide ranging implications for Black and Hispanic households: from the inability to establish credit histories to falling victim to predatory practices. Importantly, the high percent of Black and Hispanic households that are unbanked and underbanked has meant that inequality rooted in unequal credit has racial and ethnic undertones.

In addition to their low rates of participation as customers, Black and Hispanic workers are also underrepresented as employees within financial institutions. According to American Community Survey PUMS data, 82.3 percent of credit counselors and loan officers are white. The second most common race/ethnicity is Black, yet those employees represent only 8.88 percent of credit counselors and loan officers. Despite their low numbers, Black and Hispanic bank employees represent an important contingent within these financial institutions. Their presence within financial organizations might result in increasing rates of participation within their broader communities. In our work, in collaboration with Professor Anthony S. Alvarez (CSU-Fullerton), we focus on Black and Hispanic bank employees to assess whether the organizational cultures around money impact daily monetary and financial decisions in both their personal lives and social networks.

Taken together, the School of Social Sciences continues to lead the way forward in identifying financial inclusion as a key area of research, pedagogy, and programming. This work is an ongoing, interdisciplinary effort to foster conversations, gather data, and shape policies and practices that expand opportunities for our communities to thrive in an ever changing financial landscape, regardless of where they started in the economic pyramid.”

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Ian Straughn is an associate professor of teaching in the Department of Anthropology at UCI. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on archaeology, cultural heritage, Middle East and Islamic studies, space and landscape, and material culture.

Rocío Rosales is the vice associate dean of faculty development and diversity in social sciences and an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at UCI. She earned her Ph.D. at UCLA. Her research expertise is in international migration, immigrant and ethnic economies, urban sociology, qualitative methods, ethnography, Latino/a studies, race and ethnicity, and immigrant detention.

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