Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
Returning the book’s inquiry into coercion, subjectivity and inequality to the topic of debt, Chapter 5 observes that many Woldham residents acted as if ignoring their debts could enable them to get away with not paying. Against a common-sense interpretation, Chapter 5 argues they were often right. It does so by comparing residents’ practice of debt with the techniques of imagination by which they engaged with home entertainment media. Setting a scene free from distractions helped a suspension of disbelief when watching television or playing video games. So too, putting the materializations of debt ‘off-stage’ nurtured an optimism that emboldened debtors to defy lenders’ threats of enforcement. Through the fiction of acting as if it were possible to avoid enforcement and repayment simply by ignoring their debts, residents could, under certain conditions, bring that possibility into being. The ethnography shows that these practices, while often misrepresented as wrong-headed, constitute a vital struggle against coercion.
Chapter 4 shows how struggles to define value in Woldham arose not only through debt but also through parental duties of care. It thus makes a comparison between household debt and parenthood in Woldham. The two are analogous in the way residents formed their subjectivities in response to the prospect of expropriation. Following a recent punitive shift in child protection social work, state-enforced child removal was a common preoccupation among many female residents, who, as primary childcare-givers, felt social workers were predisposed to find them at fault. This arose amid politicians claiming that aspirational parenting could cure socio-economic inequality and a diffuse, gendered and classed stigmatization of working-class women. While seeking better lives for their children, the women often aimed their parenting practices towards preventing coercive interventions – a defensive kind of optimism, where their expressed ideas about being good parents and their aspirations for their children became secondary to defending against their children being removed.
The book concludes by reflecting on the significance of debt for understanding the inequalities of power in which marginalized housing estate residents are embroiled. Debt sparks a polarization of future possibilities among people living on low and precarious incomes: on the one hand, bright futures, and on the other, coercive sanctions for non-payment. The enforceable obligations pertaining to renting and parenthood have similar effects. In the processes by which those exposed to potential expropriation form their subjectivities, aspirational and defensive forms of optimism interact with and influence one another. With expropriability now a driving principle across multiple areas of policy-making in Britain, it has aided a discursive attempt to conjure an abjected ‘underclass’ into existence. And yet careful attention to personal life shows that the use of expropriation to enforce legal obligations and to assist capital accumulation also incites optimistic defences. In their daily insistence that expropriations are avoidable, many housing estate residents continually impede the imposition of that ‘underclass’ discourse onto those to whom it supposedly applies and thus subvert a new, tentatively imposed fault-line of class.
As a backdrop to the later chapters’ focus on more personal realms of experience, the first Interlude outlines the social distinctions that organized life on the estate and sketches its residents’ livelihoods, from credit and welfare to the estate’s informal economy and networks of reciprocity. Residents’ exposure to potential expropriation arose from broadly shared political and economic conditions characteristic of post-industrial Britain, where wage work was unreliable as a sole source of subsistence.
The second Interlude presents debt advice clients’ accounts of intense emotions they felt around their homes, to show how the home is targeted by debt collectors while also occupying a central place in the imaginations and subjectivities of over-indebted people.
The Introduction lays the groundwork for exploring debt, coercion, subjectivity and inequality in Britain through the lives of the residents of the Woldham housing estate. With many Woldham residents in arrears, the risks of default and dispossession were widespread. The chapter proposes an approach to debt that centres the potential for enforcement, departing from anthropology’s conventional focus on reciprocity. It situates debt alongside home-making and parenthood in Woldham, using a novel technique of ‘internal comparison’. As unpaid debts could lead to enforcement, so breaching obligations around housing and parenthood could result in eviction and forcible child removal. The concept of ‘expropriability’ describes this vulnerability to dispossessive legal force. Expropriability is both a mode of power, at work across disparate policy areas, and a mode of subjectivity, where hopes interact with the prospect of force. Linking the cultural and material dimensions of class, the inequality between those vulnerable to coercion and those more able to trigger it underpins class-like patterns of stigma. Hence the effects of finance on class extend beyond the extraction of wealth to encompass struggles over moral worth in which the coercion of the law plays an important role. People’s wariness around discussing debt guided the design of the research, which combined living on the Woldham estate and working with local debt advice organizations for a total of eighteen months’ ethnographic fieldwork.
While debt is often skirted round in conversation, within debt advice services everything revolves around the explicit practice of debt. Chapter 2 homes in on the working practices of a debt advice centre in Woldham, named Beacon Advice. The advice service’s clients usually arrived bewildered about how much money they owed and to whom. In the process of enumerating debts, the advisers found it useful to ‘shock’ their more disaffected clients by reminding them of the legal consequences of non-payment. Clients were required to stop using all unsecured credit instruments, such as credit cards and overdrafts, and to seek to purge themselves of such debts through repayment or insolvency, even though this was often unrealistic. In contrast, mortgages were not counted as debts at all. Chapter 2 argues that the seemingly neutral or technical process of producing stable knowledge about debts as quantities of owed money is a contingent political act. Advancing on research showing the many benefits of debt advice, the chapter argues that Beacon Advice also inadvertently fed into stigma towards non-upwardly mobile, indebted people by the way it both defined what counted as a ‘debt’ and affirmed the legitimacy of enforcement.
As the cost of living rises, British households face unprecedented levels of debt. But many commentators characterise those who stash away envelopes, leave telephones ringing, or hide from debt collectors as irresponsible.
The first full-length ethnography of debt problems in Britain, this book uses long-term fieldwork on a southern English housing estate to give a sensitive retelling of the everyday lives of indebted people.
It argues that the inequalities of debt go beyond economic questions to include the way state coercion hinders people’s efforts to define what they truly value. Indeed, from finance to housing and even parenthood, the potential for dispossession has become a pervasive method of power that strikes at the heart of personal life.
