University of Cambridge
The Right to Access: credit, concrete hope and a new politics of worth in Brazilian community banks
Abstract
dc:description.abstractThis thesis examines how community-based finance reshapes everyday life, political subjectivity, and social relations in Brazil's urban peripheries, through a study of the Bem Community Bank in the community of São Benedito (Vitória, Espírito Santo). Drawing on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork and 33 in-depth interviews, the research follows the lives of eleven residents whose stories reveal the layers of complexity embedded in themes of consumption, spatial transformation, and entrepreneurship. Through its three microcredit lines – consumption, habitational and production credit – Bem enables residents to access not only material goods but symbolic resources that bear directly on self-worth, visibility and belonging in a deeply unequal society. Guided by the theories of everyday life developed by Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, and by a feminist strand of affect theory drawn from Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, and Kathleen Stewart, the thesis argues that these financial tools become embedded in broader social practices that reshape daily life and enable new forms of agency. Specifically, it shows how consumption operates as an act of self-assertion and political resistance; how community initiatives such as murals, tourist routes, and housing improvements reconfigure spatial and social imaginaries in what the thesis describes as "concrete hope"; and how entrepreneurship in the periphery expands narratives of success or failure, through experimentation – seen as a form of self-discovery and horizon-expansion. The thesis also critically engages with the paradoxes of these dynamics. Through the concept of "imaginary demand", it interrogates how practices framed as empowerment (e.g. workshops and entrepreneurial training programmes) can simultaneously reproduce the structural limitations they claim to overcome, conditioning aspiration, even if it seeks to expand it. Drawing on Berlant's concept of "cruel optimism", the thesis holds these contradictions together (rather than resolving them), treating them as critically constitutive of everyday life in the territory. Ultimately, this thesis argues that community banks are an efficient poverty-alleviation strategy, by both the technical intervention they promote, as well as the political and imaginative project they represent. The worth they produce is built slowly, in the everyday – through the reconfiguration of dignity, desire, and in what people understand themselves to be capable of and entitled to. It is through these affective shifts, as much as any material change, that a new politics of worth takes shape – and that true social, political, and economic transformation becomes possible.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2025
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Gaudêncio Ribeiro Cabral, Lila
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Denyer Willis, Graham
Subjects
dc:subject × 10Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.131833
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/405691