Ferda Nur Demirci

Most of young miners in Soma, a former agricultural town in the West-Aegean region of Turkey which turned into a miner town in just two decades, are today highly indebted due to small bank loans called “credit for need,” which were introduced by the Turkish State in the wake of an IMF-designed reform program in the late 2000s. “Credit for need” was institutionalized with an unusual emphasis on familial values and the nuclear family as a node of economic self-sustenance, informed by the popular conservative definitions of the family in contemporary Turkey. My research project is situated at the intersection of mine-work, bank loans, and the ideal of the self-sustaining nuclear family in Soma. I explore how this specific debt economy rescales and reconfigures the boundaries of the family in the region; thus, redrawing the limits and potentials of intimacy and solidarity. In doing so, this research investigates the emergence of ambivalent economic and familial moralities in the shadow of the rapid financialization of the Turkish economy, and unpacks the ways in which familial values and intimate affective relationships like economic solidarity, care and responsibility become the primary bases of producing multiple forms of value in an era of financialization.