Credit Where It's Due: Rethinking Financial Citizenship

The Centre for Responsible Business is proud to present Professor Frederick Wherry, an eminent Professor of Sociology from Princeton University, and Director of the Dignity and Debt Network, USA. He is attending the University of Birmingham in his capacity as a member of the Advisory Board for the Centre to deliver a talk based around his new book, Credit Where It’s Due: Rethinking Financial Citizenship, co-authored with Kristin S. Seefeldt and Anthony S. Alvarez. 

Credit Where It’s Due: Rethinking Financial Citizenship, due for release in April, uses the case of the Mission Asset Fund to explain how credit visibility, credit scoring, and consumer credit markets serve as arenas for struggle over dignity and belonging. Advance reviews for the book have been very favourable:

“Working hard and playing by the rules still casts aside millions. Credit Where It’s Due tells the inspiring story of the Mission Asset Fund’s pathway to belonging and financial citizenship. Inspired and well crafted, this book builds the case for making and illuminates how to make citizenship, immigrant integration, and democracy work for organizations, advocates, and anybody committed to building a better society.”

—THOMAS M. SHAPIRO, director and David R. Pokross Professor of Law and Social Policy, Institute on Assets and Social Policy, The Heller School, Brandeis University

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“Credit Where It’s Due is an original and masterful examination that goes well beyond the crowded scholarly field of finance and economic exploitation to document the ways in which systems of finance stratify society in areas as basic as human decency, belonging, and recognition. But, far from simply a doom and gloom story, the book presents financial alternatives grounded in the depth of contemporary personal narratives of how finance can be dignity affirming and structured to empower rather than socially degrading and exploitative. This book will advance the field in profound ways.”

—DARRICK HAMILTON, executive director, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, The Ohio State University

Refreshments will be served following the talk, and there'll be an opportunity to meet Fred and network with others, both from academia and practice, with an interest in this important field.

Professor Wherry, a thought leader in his field of social science, was 2018 president of the Social Science History Association, past-chair of the Economic Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and past-chair of the Consumers and Consumption Section. He has edited many academic books, such as Money Talks: How Money Really Works and The Sage Encyclopedia of Economics and Society: Volumes 1-4.

Frederick F. Wherry is a Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and Director of the Dignity and Debt Network, a partnership between the Social Science Research Council and Princeton.  He is the editor of several books, including the four-volume Sage Encyclopedia of Economics and Society and Money Talks: How Money Really Works (with Nina Bandelj and Viviana A. Zelizer), as well as the author or editor of five other books or volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Consumption (with Ian Woodward). He edits a book series at Stanford University Press: Culture and Economic Life, with Jennifer Lena and Greta Hsu. He participates in a working group on work and wealth at the Aspen Institute and serves in an advisory capacity to the Boston Federal Reserve and the Lloyds Banking Group Centre for Responsible Business. Before joining the Princeton Department he was a Professor of Sociology at Yale University and Co-Director of the Centre for Cultural Sociology.