Ananya Roy, TEDx Talk, (Un)knowing Poverty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKASroLDF0M

Week 9: Poverty Capital

In preparation for the panel discussion, what are some of the challenges that microfinance initiatives present in the arena of international development? How is microfinance supposed to help and where does it fall short of its promisses?

Week 8 Prompt: The Queue, State Socialism and Economies of Redistribution

Now that you've all played the board game "Queue," what are some of the specific institutional advantages, constraints, or simply other forms of economic life that this economic system of redistributions generates? What is valuable in this system? How are social relations entangled/embedded in this system of exchange?

Modern Day Debtors' Prisons

This ACLU report documents the rise of modern-day debtors prisons in the US. One of the featured states is Ohio. https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/InForAPenny_web.pdf#page=6

Week 7: Credit, Debt, and Humanity

In "Debt", David Graeber challenges traditional histories of money (the evolution from barter to money to credit). What are some of the contradictions in our thinking about debt/credit that Graeber makes visible in chapters 1 and 11? What is the morality around credit/debt (chapter 1)? What are the alternative histories of credit  arrangements at the time of the rise of capitalism as a dominant economic structure (chapter 11)?

Week 6: Money, Intimacy, and Personal Relations

In Maurer's chapters or Zelizer's article, how are personal relations (whether it is kinship relations, romantic relations, social relations) imbricated with money? How does money structure such relations?

Week 5: Inalienable Possessions and the Density of Objects

What does Annette Weiner define as "inalienable possessions"? What makes different kinds of objects of value more or less "inalienable" or "dense"? How is the value of such objects tied to different social rank, for women and/or men?