Introduction to the Special Issue on “The Political and Economic Contexts of Families’ Financial Lives”

Abstract

The articles in this special issue begin to explore the political and economic contexts of families’ financial lives and their undergirding oppressive systems. Scholarly literature tends to explain families’ experiences with money and finances from individual-level perspectives, such as studying the downstream consequences of borrowing too much money. In our introduction to this special issue, we describe how the enclosed articles encourage different vantage points—ones that provide more systems- or structural-level explanations such as White supremacy and racial violence, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. Overall, the articles in this special issue expand the aperture for investigations into families’ financial lives and offer generative directions for future scholarship.