Thesis Defence

Tanushree Kaushal (second from the left) defended her PhD thesis in International Relations/Political Science, titled “Social Finance in India: Coloniality, Gender and Labour Transformations of Values into Value”, on 16 May 2025. Assistant Professor Anna-Riikka Kauppinen (right) presided over the committee, which included Professor Elisabeth Prügl (second from the right), Thesis Supervisor, and Associate Professor Kate Maclean, University College London.

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS 

What happens when finance claims to solve poverty and gender inequality?

To answer the question, Tanushree Kaushal delves into the world of social finance, a growing field where investors seek both financial returns and social impact. Based on a year of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork spanning Geneva’s financial hubs to microfinance institutions and loan recipients in West Bengal, her PhD thesis explores how financial value is generated not from a distinct “economic” sphere, but through the transformation of social, moral, and political values into profit.

Tanushree Kaushal examines the often-invisible forms of labour, including affective, bureaucratic, and representational labour, that financial intermediaries perform to convert non-financial values into financial capital. Moving between sites as diverse as networking events, loan collection sites, and homes, her research reveals how finance is coproduced across global-local scales. Drawing on feminist political economy and postcolonial theory, Tanushree Kaushal invites us to think critically about the contradictions within social finance and to consider how studying both elite and everyday practices might open up possibilities for more just and accountable financial futures.

*   *   *

Banner image: Farmland in North Bengal, where some of the borrowers and their families tilled the land. Photo by Tanushree Kaushal, 2023.