Today we begin a three-month visiting researcher stay at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Marta will be working on the project Intergenerational Transactions: Cultural Dimensions of Money and Wealth Transfers from Parents to Their Adult Children and Mateusz on Householding under Financialization: Theorizing from Ethnography.

This summer, we workshopped our work in progress at the SASE Annual Meeting at the New School for Social Research in New York (27-29 June) and at the ESA Conference in Manchester (20-23 August). Here is the working abstract and a rough draft (do not cite, do comment!) is available here:

As the first postsocialist generations was going on their own in Warsaw, Poland, since 2000s, and among the middle-classes, the focus on lifestyle, consumption, and educational achievement gave way to a new passion—real estate. The global trends of rising wealth inequalities and the financialization of housing, combined with the local housing crunch, has made homeownership a challenging and fraught project for those starting new households. This paper uses ethnographic research to investigate practices of householding among first-time mortgagors against the background of emerging postsocialist housing imaginaries, which tie housing assets to visions of current and future good life. The mortgaged apartment becomes overdetermined as not only shelter, but status object, passive-income investment, source of asset-based welfare, and future gift or inheritance. Despite the purported individualization built into mortgage contracts, we show how mortgage debt in the name of young household members is attached to, embedded in, and cared for in broader kinship networks. This way intergenerational family moralities and practices of relational accounting are revealed as a central and overlooked aspect of mortgage finance. Focusing on the relationship between mortgages, families, and financialization, we analyse how the classed experience of unequal housing trajectories in the past and the present shapes expectations of and decisions about the future. The paper is based on ethnographic research in 28 young family households in Warsaw and on interviews with 18 parents supporting their adult children’s pursuit of homeownership.

Today Marta was awarded habilitation (habilitacja), a degree in Polish academia granting access to professorship. According to Wikipedia, „the term habilitation is derived from the Medieval Latin habilitare, meaning to make suitable, to fit, from Classical Latin habilis fit, proper, skillful.„

Małgorzata Łukianow and Marta Olcoń-Kubicka presented a paper co-authored with Mateusz Halawa at the Memories of the Future conference at the University of London this week. Our presentation was titled Temporalities of the good life: long term indebteness and household investments as emerging horizons of middle-class expectations after socialism. 

National Science Centre, Poland has funded our research on Intergenerational transactions: Relational work and moral frames in transfers of wealth from parents to their adult children to begin in 2019 and last through 2021. Marta Olcoń-Kubicka is the PI, with Mateusz Halawa as co-researcher, and a 2-year PhD position to be filled by January 2020. More here.

Our new piece on practices of making ends meet with Excel spreadsheets is out in the wonderful Journal of Cultural Economy. Read it and comment here.

Today we begin a two-month visiting researcher stay at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Marta will be working on the project Money and family practices among young middle-class households in Poland and Mateusz on The rise of mortgage credit in Poland.

Our presentation on the social life of money and finance in young households was awarded the audience choice award at the XV Congress of Market and Opinion Researchers in Warsaw.

Mateusz Halawa’s essay on spatiotemporal dimensions of mortgaged livelihood in Warsaw was published in Cultural Studies. Read it here.

Today we have officially began work under the NCN OPUS grant on Practices of Handling Money in Close Relationships in Young Family Households, hosted by the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. The project was funded for three years.