Investigação

This project intends to study the relationships that subjects outside or on the margins of the mainstream financial and banking system maintain with money and finance. Given the social pervasiveness of this system, such margins are not easy to find. The cases to be explored are intentionally diverse, including recently arrived refugees, homeless people, incarcerated people and unbanked persons who have voluntarily exited (or tried to exit) the financial system. The objectives are the following:

• To question the taken-for-granted nature of banking relationships by qualitatively analysing and comparing how excluded, persecuted and deviant subjects relate to the universe of banking and finance (including fintech), characterising the formal and informal supply at their disposal and paying attention to how savings and currency flows are managed under such circumstances.
• To reconstruct and analyse the social networks sustaining these marginal and unstable financial pathways and properly appreciate the role that household, kinship, ethnic community, cooperative and other collective dimensions have therein.
• To understand the socio-legal framework underpinning these alternative trajectories through an identification of the different layers of regulation at play and the agency of the intermediate actors (e.g. lawyers, social workers, smugglers, or loan sharks) who actively mobilise those layers and explore extralegal possibilities.
• To expand the understanding of monetary systems, banking and finance as complex mixtures of law and technology and critically assess their role in the making and unmaking of individual subjects and the reproduction of long-lasting socioeconomic inequalities.

PROPONENT INSTITUTION: SOCIUS - Research Centre for Economic and Organisational Sociology at CSG/ISEG-ULisboa

INSTITUTIONAL COLLABORATION: ISCTE - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa - Centro de Estudos sobre a Mudança Socioeconómica e o Território

TEAM: Daniel Seabra Lopes (Head)

FUNDING: FCT Ref. 2022.09141.PTDC