Policy Press

The Personal Life of Debt

Coercion, Subjectivity and Inequality in Britain

By Ryan Davey

The first full-length ethnography of debt problems in Britain, this book uses long-term fieldwork on a southern English housing estate to challenge stigmatising portrayals of debt and bring new insights to the emerging field of debt studies.

Ryan Davey is Lecturer in Sociology at Cardiff University.

Introduction

Part I. Expressions of Indebtedness

1. “You can’t argue with them”: debt and the struggle for value

2. Making debt into an object: the work of debt advisers

Part II. Prospects of expropriation

3. Unsettled homes: the interruptible futures and violable spaces of rented housing

Chapter 4. “But I do wish better for my kids”: parental attachment and forced child removal

Chapter 5. The arts of indebted optimism: between fiction and reality

Conclusion