Debt

Debt

Volume 42, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2014
Amy Herzog, Joe Rollins
Excerpted from the Editor’s Note

To admit to one’s own poverty and debt, as an academic, is to step into a minefield of shame and self-doubt, even within feminist circles. To be sure, many feminist scholars have labored intensely to document structural economic injustice around the globe, and a large number of academics productively extend their research into practices of advocacy and activism. Most of us have been trained to recognize that the personal is the political. That does not necessarily make it easier to disclose that one is in debt or struggling to pay one’s bills, particularly to colleagues or advisors. Poverty is something that happens to someone else, or that one can proudly claim to have overcome in the historical past (neoliberal-bootstrap stories abound, but they can also function as a moral reproach to those currently in debt, a status that still smacks of a personal failure). Poverty is something we research, not something we experience or are complicit in, certainly not within our own departments.