THE ISSUE OF STUDENT DEBT GETS TO THE HEART of questions about inequality, democracy, and the future of the economy in the United States. It also poses a challenge to the way higher education is currently organized in the country. Please join HANNAH APPEL and BRAXTON BREWINGTON, organizers from the Debt Collective, the nation’s first debtors’ union, as they make the case for cancelling all student debt. They will discuss what they have experienced in the course of their organizing and their evolving strategies in the face of the federal government's shifting positions on student debt cancellation. Moderated by Mitchell Center Graduate Fellow INDIVAR JONNALAGADDA.

THE DEBT COLLECTIVE organizes debtors’ unions using an emancipatory activation of household debt under finance capitalism. Alone, our debts are a burden, but together they make us powerful. Household debt leveraged collectively in the threat of a debt strike creates the power to remake contemporary financial relationships. The Debt Collective's first debtors’ union has won over $2 billion in debt abolition for people holding debt from for profit colleges. They have published a book entitled Can’t Pay Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition (2020). The Debt Collective is organizing a major day of action in Washington DC on April 4th (RSVP here), and there is a free bus departing from Philadelphia.

HANNAH APPEL is an economic anthropologist interested in transnational capitalism and finance; finance, debt and debtors’ unions; the African continent’s place in global capitalism; the economic imagination; anti-capitalist and abolitionist social movements. Her research and teaching interests are guided by the economic imagination. What does it mean to understand racial capitalism ethnographically, and to work actively to undo it? Her first book, The Licit Life of Capitalism, is both an account of a specific capitalist project—U.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea—and a theorization of more general forms and processes that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. She is also a co-founder and organizer with the Debt Collective and co-author of Can't Pay Won't Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition.

BRAXTON BREWINGTON is communications professional and electoral organizer, focused on racial, economic and democratic justice. Braxton currently works with The Debt Collective, a national debtors union fighting to cancel debts and defend millions of households. Recently, Braxton worked as a Communications Lead for the Democratic Parties of Georgia and North Carolina, and served as a Field Organizer for U.S. Senator Cory Booker’s presidential campaign. Braxton was a Democracy Fellow with Common Cause, where he worked to galvanize students to become civically engaged by registering them to vote on campus, organized marches to the polls, and lobbied Congress. Braxton was a state spokesperson in North Carolina for the Rucho case, and cites his speech at the steps of the US Supreme Court as the event that propelled him into fighting for a powerful multi-racial democracy.