Making of Morally Immunizing Debts: Underground Minework, Gendered Credit Access and Intimacy in the Soma Coal Basin

Ferda Demirci is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral project, "Rescaling Family and Intimacy via Indebtedness in the Soma Coal Basin," explores the simultaneous intensification of two distinct forms of extractivism in Soma: lignite coal and financial value extracted from the household frontier. A lignite-coal basin located in the Aegean region of Turkey, Soma has undergone a transformation from an agriculturalist community to a predominantly miner town in only two decades. The "stable" wages earned by mineworkers provide access to easy consumer loans that one can take out immediately, with regular salary serving as the sole required collateral for bank credits due to easy regulations devised as a part of ongoing national financial inclusion policies. Her research introduces "indebtedness" as a novel analytical lens, emphasizing moral-transactional dimensions of monetary indebtedness within gender and kinship obligations. This intertwining of debt with familial obligations has reshaped gender and kinship norms among the agriculturalist-turned-miner community of Soma, creating what she terms a debt-laden intimacy regime. Exploring the moral economy of monetary debt ethnographically, her research demonstrates how easy credit access fosters a new approach to reciprocity and care among working-class communities and prescribes new mutual ethical and emphatic moral imperatives through collective cyclical indebtedness.

Her broader research interests lie at the intersections of economic anthropology and political economy, labour studies, gender, and kinship, with a focus on Turkey and the Middle East. Her work has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation (2020) and the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program at Northwestern University

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