Doctoral Dissertation Research: Speculative Financial Asset Management and Urban Development

As urban contexts are changed by migration, redevelopment, and new technologies, residents are responding with complex forms of financial speculation that are oriented both to historically salient features of those neighborhoods, such as the religious and cultural traditions that have defined them, as well as layered aspirations about how revaluation may be shaped in the future. Much of this can be understood by exploring how residents manage financial assets in response to predictive governance technologies (speculative financial and other infrastructures, that manifest in housing appraisal, mortgage calculation, and crime prediction). The project trains a graduate researcher in qualitative methods of data collection and establishes research collaborations for future scientific capacity. The products of this research will be shared with community stakeholders, improving the public’s understanding of anthropological science and ethnographic scientific methods. This research examines the relationship between financial speculation, religious neighborhood organizations, and housing development. The project consists of twelve months of ethnographic and archival research including semi-structured interviews, audio-visual recording, and spatial analysis. The researcher asks how different anticipations for a neighborhood are formed and sustained by engagement with financial practices and infrastructures; how historical relationships interact with present day revaluation; and how new liquid assets are derived not only from housing, but also from public safety and design projects. The findings have intellectual merit for advancing anthropological theory related to the influence of religious tradition on socioeconomic behavior, particularly with respect to speculative technologies, as well as better understanding and confronting the convoluted processes of liquidity and assetization in contemporary markets. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.