About

Hannah Appel is an Associate Professor and Associate Director at the UCLA Department of Anthropology, specializing in sociocultural anthropology with a focus on transnational capitalism and finance. Her research interests include the economic imagination, debt and debtors’ unions, Africa's role in global capitalism, and anti-capitalist and abolitionist social movements. She is committed to ethnographic research as a method for exploring and understanding the world, particularly in understanding racial capitalism ethnographically and working actively to undo it. Her first book, The Licit Life of Capitalism, examines a specific capitalist project involving U.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea and theorizes broader processes facilitating diverse capitalist projects worldwide. Currently, she is engaged in a long-term ethnographic project titled Pan African Capital, which investigates transnational African-owned banks and financial institutions on the continent. Additionally, she is a co-founder and organizer of the Debt Collective, where she works to organize debtors’ unions to leverage household debt collectively, aiming to create power to remake financial relationships. Her work emphasizes the power of collective action in challenging financial systems and advocating for debt abolition.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Economics
• Sociology
• Business
• Monetary economics
• Philosophy
• Geography
• Epistemology
• Economic geography
• Market economy
• Financial system
• Industrial organization
• Economy

Selected publications

• Tenants of the World, Unite! From Atomisation to Structural Power in Financialised Tenancy

  Antipode · 2024 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Business
  • Economic geography

  Abstract Recent transformations in the political economy of housing—particularly the corporatisation, concentration, and financialisation of landlording—paradoxically intensify both the atomisation of the tenant experience and the potential for organised tenants to exercise structural power. This potential collective power, however, is not self‐actualising. Building on two years of participatory action research and one year of operational data from the California‐based Tenant Power Toolkit (TPT), we attempt to address this conjunctural possibility. We conceptualise tenants as debtors and identify new solidarities emerging from a pandemic era landscape which has left many tenants, particularly Black tenants, deeply indebted to national corporate landlords. We discuss the TPT as a piece of legal mutual aid which both responds to the immediate imperatives of combatting eviction within the existing landscape, and we argue, helps provide the basis for advancing the work of tenant organising across scales and geographies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Developments at the National and EU Level

  2023-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Conclusion

  2023-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Pan African capital? Banks, currencies, and imperial power

  Journal of Cultural Economy · 2023 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Economics

  U.S. and Europe-based banks and international financial institutions including the IMF have been central to critical accounts of Africa’s place in global capitalism. And yet since 2008 these institutions have been in retreat on the continent, partially replaced by Pan African Banks. Putting ethnographic work with Africa-based finance professionals into dialogue with heterodox economic thinking on banks and currency sovereignty, I argue that we must not only analyze the geographic shift in where banks are headquartered and who owns them, but also generate empirical and theoretical shifts in what a bank is, what it does, and to what effect, especially in terms of the relationship between currencies, social violence, and imperial and racial power.

  PublisherDOI

• Quick Guide Crypto Assets

  2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The book is dedicated to the topic of crypto securities in a compact form. Regulatory developments are considered at national and European level.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ECONOMIC NATIONALISMS*

  Sociologia & Antropologia · 2022-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract As rising numbers of national governments promote economic nationalist policies and the withdrawal from (or renegotiation of) global political and economic relationships, the impossibility of disconnecting from global circulations is illustrated by the traveling discourse of economic nationalism itself, although conceptualized and implemented quite differently as refracted through specific historical and political contexts. Drawing on the possibilities of world anthropologies, the authors build connected analyses of the lived effects and contradictions of economic nationalist policies through their ethnographic examples from Brazil, India, Uganda, and the US. In comparatively analyzing these contexts, the authors emphasize the plural, transhistorical, transnational, gendered, and contested nature of economic nationalist policies and discourses worldwide, pointing to the need for further empirical investigations into diverse understandings and political deployments of economic nationalist projects.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Let’s Get Free

  South Atlantic Quarterly · 2022-08-05

  articleSenior author

  The majority of people incarcerated in the United States have not been convicted of any crime. Rather, they are there because they are too poor to pay their way out of jail. The financialization of the criminal legal system means that wealthy people go free while poor people suffer through indefinite detention or face an interest-bearing price of freedom: commercial bail bonds contracts, an industry worth more than $2 billion annually. Bail debt is held disproportionately by poor women of color who act as cosigners, bailing out the men in their family who are caged pretrial. The Debt Collective—the nation’s first debtors’ union—is piloting work to abolish $500 million in bail debt held by cosigners across California as a new form of collective action around carceral debt. We explore the concept of a carceral debtors’ union as part of broader debtors’ union and abolition movements.

  PublisherDOI

• Fazit

  Quick Guide · 2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Towards justice: A communiqué from Los Angeles

  Radical Housing Journal · 2020-05-04

  articleOpen access

  In this communiqué the Institute on Inequality and Democracy foregrounds the work of some of their movement partners — more appropriately understood as movement teachers — organizations that are on the frontline of the struggle against disposability and death in Los Angeles and beyond. They demonstrate the necessity of building a new common sense about relations of property and personhood, debt and wealth, reparation and redistribution.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction: Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 70 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Epistemology
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nikhil Anand

  KIIT University

  30 shared

• Rania Kassab Sweis

  27 shared

• Robert Samet

  27 shared

• Elif M. Babül

  Mount Holyoke College

  27 shared

• Rodrigo Véliz

  Stanford University

  25 shared

• Oded Korczyn

  Harvard University

  25 shared

• Avendaño Arenales

  Stanford University

  25 shared

• Aaron Shaw

  Harvard University

  25 shared

Education

• PhD, Anthropology

  Stanford University

  2011