Here we have the second video abstract introducing a paper forthcoming in Antipode 45:2 – Kate Maclean talking about her ‘Gender, Risk and Micro-financial Subjectivities‘. Kate is a lecturer in the Department of Geography at King’s College London, a feminist geographer working on rural microfinance in Bolivia (among other things)…

She puts a feminist critique of political economy and globalisation to work examining how women in the global South negotiate their livelihoods and what this can tell us about hegemonic understandings of the economy and development. Here she discusses her forthcoming Antipode paper which analyses the contradictions of microfinance’s celebrated ‘double bottom line’ of social and financial impact, exploring gendered and colonial constructions of ‘risk’ and ‘responsibility’.

Kate draws on how indigenous women participating in a microfinance institution in Bolivia describe their experience to suggest how gendered ideas of risk and responsibility are framing their negotiation of, and resistance to, the market. In doing so she speaks to a number of radical geographic concerns, contributing to conversations on neoliberalism, governmentality, subjectivity and beyond.

You can find more of Kate’s work on Bolivia, microfinance and gender here. And for even more on microfinance, see Antipode‘s review symposium on Ananya Roy’s award-winning book Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development and Stephen Young’s excellent paper ‘The “Moral Hazards” of Microfinance: Restructuring Rural Credit in India‘.