{"693352":{"#nid":"693352","#data":{"type":"event","title":"HSOC Speaker Series: \u0022From Predatory Inclusion to Financial Estrangements\u0022 with Fred Wherry and Marie-Lou Lapris","body":[{"value":"\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003EJoin us in-person or online for our final installment of the HSOC Speaker Series for this semester: \u0022From Predatory Inclusion to Financial Estrangement: Debt Collection and the Stratification of Institutional Trust.\u0022\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EFred Wherry\u003C\/strong\u003E is the Townsend Marin, Class of 1917 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, where he is also the Vice Dean for Faculty Development and Inclusion, and founder of the Debt Collection Lab.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EMarie-Lou Laprise\u003C\/strong\u003E is a postgraduate research associate in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. A quantitative and computational sociologist, she studies collective intelligence and the social impact of AI.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EOver a quarter of Americans report that their household has been contacted by a debt collector in the past year, and for many, this is their primary encounter with the institutions that enforce private claims. Building on the concepts of predatory inclusion and legal estrangement, we argue that civil debt enforcement constitutes a distinct, stratified pathway to institutional distrust\u2014one that parallels and compounds the criminal justice pathway. We introduce the concept of financial estrangement to theorize how the terms of households\u0027 inclusion in credit markets shape their relations with the institutions that enforce private claims. Our concept of financial estrangement brings together concerns from economic sociology, law and society, criminal justice, and race and inequality, and applies them to the context of the marketplace for consumer debt. Drawing on an original probabilistic survey of 2,115 U.S. adults, we show that debt-collection contact is pervasive, racially unequal, and not reducible to differences in household income or financial hardship. Americans overwhelmingly find widespread debt-collection practices unfair, particularly those who have experienced them. Careful analysis reveals that debt-collection contact is associated with perceiving courts as rarely or never fair, even after accounting for hardship levels, income, race\/ethnicity, and arrest history. These findings suggest that civil legal processes tied to mass debt contribute to race- and class-stratified patterns of institutional trust.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E","summary":"","format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EJoin us in-person or online for our final installment of the HSOC Speaker Series for this semester, featuring Professor Fred Wherry and Marie-Lou Laprise from Princeton University\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"The HSOC Speaker Series welcomes Professor Levi Vonk, City University of New York, for a lecture on immigration documents and the notion of the \u0022corpus\u0022 on the migrant trail in Mexico."}],"uid":"36009","created_gmt":"2026-10-20 18:18:37","changed_gmt":"2026-10-20 18:23:03","author":"cwhittle9","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","field_event_time":{"event_time_start":"2026-11-16T15:30:00-05:00","event_time_end":"2026-11-16T16:50:00-05:00","event_time_end_last":"2026-11-16T16:50:00-05:00","gmt_time_start":"2026-11-16 20:30:00","gmt_time_end":"2026-11-16 21:50:00","gmt_time_end_last":"2026-11-16 21:50:00","rrule":null,"timezone":"America\/New_York"},"location":"Wilby Classroom, Crosland G120 and Online","extras":[],"related_links":[{"url":"https:\/\/teams.microsoft.com\/meet\/28870443022861?p=ABC9N4zrgtgnEh3at6","title":"Join Online"},{"url":"https:\/\/hsoc.gatech.edu\/events\/speaker-series","title":"HSOC Speaker Series"}],"groups":[{"id":"1281","name":"Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts"},{"id":"1288","name":"School of History and Sociology"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[{"id":"1795","name":"Seminar\/Lecture\/Colloquium"}],"invited_audience":[{"id":"78761","name":"Faculty\/Staff"},{"id":"174045","name":"Graduate students"},{"id":"78751","name":"Undergraduate students"}],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EAndrew Buskell\u003Cbr\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:abuskell@gatech.edu\u0022\u003Eabuskell@gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":[],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}