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Abstract
Social finance promises financial returns alongside addressing social challenges of poverty and gender inequality. How is financial value produced by investing into social issues? What is the social finance being produced and what are its effects? Centralising these questions, this thesis ethnographically follows finance capital from Geneva’s social finance investors to West Bengal’s microfinance institutions and finally to women borrowers who take small loans across rural and urban locales. Drawing upon one year of multi-sited fieldwork, I argue that financial value is not derived from a separate ‘economic’ realm but is in fact generated by the conversion of social, moral and political values into financial returns. Countering both dominant economic thinking which locates the economic as separate from other domains, as well as political economy and critical finance studies contributions that locate the sociality of finance in either the ‘effects’ or in the objects and market devices that constitute financial practices, I show that financial value is produced by the conversion labour of financial intermediaries. At multiple levels of the financial chain—across investors, state actors, microfinance institutions, and borrowers—diverse forms of labour, including affective, social reproductive, and representational labour, facilitate this transformation of non-financial values into financial value. Financial value is produced across sites as diverse as women’s homes, branch officers’ residences, industry networking events and bureaucrats’ state programs. These spaces simultaneously co-produce other values and can act as sites of rupture and critique. By combining methods that ‘study up’ and ‘study down’ with an interdisciplinary feminist methodology, this thesis calls for deeper engagement with the contradictions and resistances inherent to contemporary financial systems to imagine alternative political and economic possibilities.