The making of financial subjects: A phenomenological study of student debt

Abstract

While public commentators herald the arrival of the Canadian “student debt crisis,” psychological research into postsecondary student debt proliferates. This study explored the ways in which indebted students themselves understand the meanings and implications of student debt in their own lives, by means of semistructured interviews with nine indebted university students. A hermeneutic phenomenological approach to analysis yielded six themes: indebted by necessity; haunted by distressing thoughts and feelings about debts; living under the pressure to repay debts; living a constrained life; feeling alienated from others; and uncertainty about the meaning of university education. Findings suggest that student debt is characterized by the experience of feeling unable to “live one’s life,” and of looking toward a fragile future after university. By grounding the psychological experience of debt in the socially embedded, historical realities of students’ everyday lives, this work suggests implications for critical psychological understandings of financial subjectivation.