Morgan Centre seminar on intergenerational support and housing in Poland

Dates:	20 November 2018
Times:	15:00 - 16:30
What is it:	Seminar
Organiser:	School of Social Sciences
How much:	Free
Who is it for:	University staff

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Mateusz Halawa, Marta Olco?-Kubicka

To help the daughter in her mortgage: Practices of intergenerational support among Warsaw’s young homebuyers

In Radom, a city 60 miles from Warsaw and a major source of its young labor force, a concerned mother describes the metropolitan life of her daughter and son-in-law. They own an apartment, but “the bank lives with them.” She means by that the historically novel practice of domesticating mortgages, which over the last decades have emerged as devices transforming the housing pathways of the first postsocialist generations and mediating their life course transitions. Part of a larger research on practices of householding among young middle-class Varsovians, this paper explores the lived experiences of homeownership—already realized or still imagined—through the lenses of generational divides, housing classes, trajectories of migration, and the tectonic restructuring of housing regime since the fall of socialism. Based on ethnographic research in 28 young family households in Warsaw and on interviews with 16 parents supporting their adult children’s pursuit of homeownership, the paper shows how the incapability of young couples to manage on their own the mortgage on their first apartment embeds the process of financialization not merely in one, but in several kin-related households, most often parental and grandparental. Our analysis focuses on moral discourses justifying and regulating the flow of family wealth into the mortgage household, on the continued presence of parents in the householding practices in the mortgaged apartments of their semi-autonomous adult children, and on the emergent intergenerational middle-class economic imaginary, which increasingly center on acquiring housing assets as a source of wealth, welfare, and social advancement.

Mateusz Halawa is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research in New York and a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His work focuses on the cultural analyses of economic life. He is currently writing on the rise of mortgage credit in Poland, looking at the relationship between social transformations and finance.

Marta Olcon?-Kubicka is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a researcher at the Max Planck Partner Group for the Sociology of Economic Life. Her work focuses on the culturally oriented sociology of money and the ethnography of money practices in households. She is currently working on a monograph on household financial arrangements among young middle-class couples in Warsaw.