Inés Escobar González

Bio:

I’m a historically-minded economic anthropologist studying the origins and effects of financialization in our daily lives, social relations, and political practices. My current research focuses on the history and transformation of low-income households and communities in Mexico as they have been incorporated into flows of global finance by way of policy reform, or how and why financial neoliberalism remade poverty on the global periphery. My work was showcased in the 2026 American Ethnologist Forum, Property and Other Fictions (it’s open-access). I’ve also written for public-facing magazines like Aeon. My first book, After Inclusion: Poverty, Property, and Politics on Mexico’s Financial Frontier, is under contract with University of California Press. I have two second projects, one on water, finance, nearshoring, and climate change between the U.S. and Mexico, and another on genealogies of capital, property, and labor in the wine-producing regions of California and Mexico.

I am currently writing my first book, After Inclusion: Poverty, Property, and Politics on Mexico's Financial Frontier (under contract with University of California Press). Ultimately, my book answers two questions: why has consumer credit become the cornerstone of development policy, and how does society change when poverty becomes productive for high finance?

I was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. I have a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, where my dissertation won the award for the Best Dissertation in Anthropology (Lichtstern Distinguished Dissertation Prize). At Chicago, I won two teaching awards. One for the Best Course and Syllabus in Ethnographic Methods, and another for the same things in Latin American Studies (Starr Lectureship Prize and Martín Baró Lectureship Prize).

Before Chicago, I studied an M.Res. at University College London and a B.A. at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Along the way, I have consulted for the Inter-American Conference on Social Security and the World Bank. My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and Mexico’s Council for Science and Technology, amongst others.

Recent Courses