Sohini Kar
Biographic Data
| ID | 123414 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sohini Kar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sohini |
| FAMILY NAME | Kar |
| SIGNATURE | KAR S |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9029-5214 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 106 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Waivers and frauds
As microfinance has expanded in India, so have efforts to regulate the sector. The competing regulatory authority of the state governments and the central bank have produced unexpected refusals by borrowers to repay loans, claiming waivers. These waivers, however, are often found to be fakes. In the context of financial inclusion, this paper examines regulatory authority at the margins of the state. The growth of microfinance has raised concerns …
Financial Activist
With the increasing financialization of the global economy, social movements and activists increasingly target financial actors to enact social change through the framework of shareholder-led corporate governance. Where finance penetrates individual households, activists harness the widespread “collective ownership” of corporations through shareholding to push for social change. Drawing on three instances of shareholder mobilization in relation t…
Who benefits? On welfare and accumulation
Commentary: reconfiguring labour and welfare in the global southIn the summer of 2015, I was conducting research in Mumbai on the role of banks and financial institutions in India's financial inclusion programme.Speaking to a senior executive at a private insurance company, I asked about the expansion of insurance as a part of the government's welfare agenda (see Kar, 2017).Leaning back on his chair, the senior executive noted the need for 'robus…
Domestic values
While term life insurance has historically been sold to income-earning men to secure the financial futures of their families, in India there is a growing number of life insurance products targeting women, particularly unwaged housewives. In marketing these financial products to Indian women, I show how life insurance companies incorporate the feminist critique of devalued domestic labor. Drawing on analysis of insurance policies, marketing and pr…
Subprime Empire
In the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, much of the debate has been over whom to blame: reckless speculative finance or irresponsible (often low-income) borrowers. This essay takes up this set of moral arguments about what the poor can and should be able to afford by examining subprime logics at a global scale: subprime empire. Predatory lending in heartland America and development-oriented microcredit in places such as India and Pa…
Buddha and Nilima
This article explores the lives and careers of two people from left-leaning, political families in Kolkata. Their formative years and political horizons were shaped by the Left Front government in West Bengal (1977–2011), and they now negotiate the aftermath of the communists’ defeat in 2011 in their day-to-day lives. Buddha was born in Bangladesh, and is now a grassroots leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in suburban Kolkata. His s…
Securitizing Women
In 2013, the government of India announced the creation of the Bharatiya Mahila Bank (BMB), or the Indian Women's Bank, offering financial services largely to women. The bank was a financialized response to the 2012 New Delhi rape case that mobilized mass protests against sexual violence and harassment in public spaces. Curtailing economic instability in the wake of the protests, the BMB became a means of securitizing women's bodies through finan…
Relative indemnity
With the growth of commercial microfinance in India, the poor have been increasingly enfolded into circuits of global finance. In making these collateral-free loans, however, microfinance institutions (MFIs) engage in new forms of risk management. While loans are made to women with the goal of economic and social empowerment, MFIs require male kin to serve as guarantors. Drawing on fieldwork in the city of Kolkata, I argue that through the requir…
Austerity welfare
With the launch of the new financial inclusion programme in 2015, the government of India claimed that more than 90 per cent of households now have access to bank accounts. The programme sought not only to link the poor in India to financial services such as credit and savings, but also to insurance-based welfare payments. This article examines how the expansion of welfare programmes - a seeming alternative to austerity - in India has simultaneou…
Comparative projects and the limits of choice
In recent years, microfinance – the suite of financial products offered to the poor – has been widely adopted in international development policy. Organizations around the world have replicated this model successfully. This essay takes the comparative case more explicitly to read against the tendency to understand microfinance as the globally institutionalized and realized norm, and local unruly credit economies as the exception. We go beyond com…
Recovering debts
Microfinance loan officers play a critical, if underexamined, role in incorporating the poor into financial networks at the global peripheries. As “proxy‐creditors,” loan officers in Kolkata, India, must produce and alienate debt relationships to create loan products. I argue that the process of financialization is articulated through local idioms of moneylending, care, and respect. Moreover, at the heart of this labor is the unresolved tension b…
Recovering debts
Microfinance loan officers play a critical, if underexamined, role in incorporating the poor into financial networks at the global peripheries. As “proxy‐creditors,” loan officers in Kolkata, India, must produce and alienate debt relationships to create loan products. I argue that the process of financialization is articulated through local idioms of moneylending, care, and respect. Moreover, at the heart of this labor is the unresolved tension b…
Subprime Empire
In the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, much of the debate has been over whom to blame: reckless speculative finance or irresponsible (often low-income) borrowers. This essay takes up this set of moral arguments about what the poor can and should be able to afford by examining subprime logics at a global scale: subprime empire. Predatory lending in heartland America and development-oriented microcredit in places such as India and Pa…
Relative indemnity
With the growth of commercial microfinance in India, the poor have been increasingly enfolded into circuits of global finance. In making these collateral-free loans, however, microfinance institutions (MFIs) engage in new forms of risk management. While loans are made to women with the goal of economic and social empowerment, MFIs require male kin to serve as guarantors. Drawing on fieldwork in the city of Kolkata, I argue that through the requir…
Comparative projects and the limits of choice
In recent years, microfinance – the suite of financial products offered to the poor – has been widely adopted in international development policy. Organizations around the world have replicated this model successfully. This essay takes the comparative case more explicitly to read against the tendency to understand microfinance as the globally institutionalized and realized norm, and local unruly credit economies as the exception. We go beyond com…
Securitizing Women
In 2013, the government of India announced the creation of the Bharatiya Mahila Bank (BMB), or the Indian Women's Bank, offering financial services largely to women. The bank was a financialized response to the 2012 New Delhi rape case that mobilized mass protests against sexual violence and harassment in public spaces. Curtailing economic instability in the wake of the protests, the BMB became a means of securitizing women's bodies through finan…
Austerity welfare
With the launch of the new financial inclusion programme in 2015, the government of India claimed that more than 90 per cent of households now have access to bank accounts. The programme sought not only to link the poor in India to financial services such as credit and savings, but also to insurance-based welfare payments. This article examines how the expansion of welfare programmes - a seeming alternative to austerity - in India has simultaneou…
Domestic values
While term life insurance has historically been sold to income-earning men to secure the financial futures of their families, in India there is a growing number of life insurance products targeting women, particularly unwaged housewives. In marketing these financial products to Indian women, I show how life insurance companies incorporate the feminist critique of devalued domestic labor. Drawing on analysis of insurance policies, marketing and pr…
Who benefits? On welfare and accumulation
Commentary: reconfiguring labour and welfare in the global southIn the summer of 2015, I was conducting research in Mumbai on the role of banks and financial institutions in India's financial inclusion programme.Speaking to a senior executive at a private insurance company, I asked about the expansion of insurance as a part of the government's welfare agenda (see Kar, 2017).Leaning back on his chair, the senior executive noted the need for 'robus…
Recovering debts
Microfinance loan officers play a critical, if underexamined, role in incorporating the poor into financial networks at the global peripheries. As “proxy‐creditors,” loan officers in Kolkata, India, must produce and alienate debt relationships to create loan products. I argue that the process of financialization is articulated through local idioms of moneylending, care, and respect. Moreover, at the heart of this labor is the unresolved tension b…
Comparative projects and the limits of choice
In recent years, microfinance – the suite of financial products offered to the poor – has been widely adopted in international development policy. Organizations around the world have replicated this model successfully. This essay takes the comparative case more explicitly to read against the tendency to understand microfinance as the globally institutionalized and realized norm, and local unruly credit economies as the exception. We go beyond com…
Relative indemnity
With the growth of commercial microfinance in India, the poor have been increasingly enfolded into circuits of global finance. In making these collateral-free loans, however, microfinance institutions (MFIs) engage in new forms of risk management. While loans are made to women with the goal of economic and social empowerment, MFIs require male kin to serve as guarantors. Drawing on fieldwork in the city of Kolkata, I argue that through the requir…
Austerity welfare
With the launch of the new financial inclusion programme in 2015, the government of India claimed that more than 90 per cent of households now have access to bank accounts. The programme sought not only to link the poor in India to financial services such as credit and savings, but also to insurance-based welfare payments. This article examines how the expansion of welfare programmes - a seeming alternative to austerity - in India has simultaneou…
Securitizing Women
In 2013, the government of India announced the creation of the Bharatiya Mahila Bank (BMB), or the Indian Women's Bank, offering financial services largely to women. The bank was a financialized response to the 2012 New Delhi rape case that mobilized mass protests against sexual violence and harassment in public spaces. Curtailing economic instability in the wake of the protests, the BMB became a means of securitizing women's bodies through finan…
Buddha and Nilima
This article explores the lives and careers of two people from left-leaning, political families in Kolkata. Their formative years and political horizons were shaped by the Left Front government in West Bengal (1977–2011), and they now negotiate the aftermath of the communists’ defeat in 2011 in their day-to-day lives. Buddha was born in Bangladesh, and is now a grassroots leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in suburban Kolkata. His s…
Subprime Empire
In the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, much of the debate has been over whom to blame: reckless speculative finance or irresponsible (often low-income) borrowers. This essay takes up this set of moral arguments about what the poor can and should be able to afford by examining subprime logics at a global scale: subprime empire. Predatory lending in heartland America and development-oriented microcredit in places such as India and Pa…
Who benefits? On welfare and accumulation
Commentary: reconfiguring labour and welfare in the global southIn the summer of 2015, I was conducting research in Mumbai on the role of banks and financial institutions in India's financial inclusion programme.Speaking to a senior executive at a private insurance company, I asked about the expansion of insurance as a part of the government's welfare agenda (see Kar, 2017).Leaning back on his chair, the senior executive noted the need for 'robus…
Domestic values
While term life insurance has historically been sold to income-earning men to secure the financial futures of their families, in India there is a growing number of life insurance products targeting women, particularly unwaged housewives. In marketing these financial products to Indian women, I show how life insurance companies incorporate the feminist critique of devalued domestic labor. Drawing on analysis of insurance policies, marketing and pr…
Financial Activist
With the increasing financialization of the global economy, social movements and activists increasingly target financial actors to enact social change through the framework of shareholder-led corporate governance. Where finance penetrates individual households, activists harness the widespread “collective ownership” of corporations through shareholding to push for social change. Drawing on three instances of shareholder mobilization in relation t…
Waivers and frauds
As microfinance has expanded in India, so have efforts to regulate the sector. The competing regulatory authority of the state governments and the central bank have produced unexpected refusals by borrowers to repay loans, claiming waivers. These waivers, however, are often found to be fakes. In the context of financial inclusion, this paper examines regulatory authority at the margins of the state. The growth of microfinance has raised concerns …
Economics (8 works) · Finance (7 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (7 works) · Microfinance and Financial Inclusion (6 works) · Business (5 works) · Financial system (5 works) · Microfinance (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Economic growth (4 works)