Geographies of Finance with Undergraduate Students

Author: Dr. Araby Smyth, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at Mount Allison University; email: asmyth@mta.ca 

I originally didn’t think much of financialization and thought the subject would be boring. I couldn’t have been more wrong. - Anonymous response from a student experience survey, winter 2025.

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at Mount Allison University (MtA), a public, mostly undergraduate, liberal arts and sciences university in New Brunswick, Canada, where I teach a third-year undergraduate course: Geography of Finance. It never surprises me that many students, like the one I quoted above, think a course on finance sounds boring, so I tell them how I plan to make it interesting for them. This begins with the writing of feminist scholars Verónica Gago and Lucí Cavallero. I show students that while finance can seem abstract and separate from our everyday lives, it can be traced across its many material manifestations – from the influence of finance professionals in the halls of corporations or the stress of living with insurmountable debt. In this blog post, I first share details of where a course like Geography of Finance fits amongst other programs here at MtA. Then I discuss my approach to teaching Geography of Finance, so that (hopefully!) students find it interesting and applicable to their lives. I conclude with some reflections about effective teaching methods and popular topics amongst the students.

I created Geography of Finance in 2024-25 as a special topics course that is not currently covered at MtA and that may be considered for regular inclusion in the geography program. Currently, our other economic geography courses include The Developing World and Geography of Economic Activity, both second-year courses. The Department Head and I discussed Geography of Finance being an advanced economic geography course that would be of interest to our majors as well as to students in Economics; Philosophy, Politics, and Economics; and Politics and International Relations.

I taught Geography of Finance last winter semester (January-April 2025) and I will teach it again in winter 2026. I approach the course with the understanding that students will not all have a foundation in economic geography, and that is okay. The only pre-requisite is our first-year Human Environment course and/or permission of the instructor. When students connect with me, usually over email, to obtain permission to register for Geography of Finance, I share a copy of the syllabus with them and ask if they have taken any second or third-year courses in the social sciences. In these queries, I found that a lot of Environmental Studies students were keen to learn about the role of finance in climate change, and some were happy to hear that this is a course about economics that is more qualitative than quantitative.

Because I do not require students to have prior knowledge in economics or finance, in the first unit of the course, I build students’ understanding of key conceptual and theoretical foundations in the geographies of finance. I assign close readings of articles, interviews, lectures, and book chapters by scholars such as Iias Alami and Vincent Guermond, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Sarah Hall, David Harvey, Robin D. G. Kelley, Andy Pike and Jane Pollard, and Viviana Zelizer so that students comprehend the differences between money and finance, neoliberalism as a political project, processes of financialization, and racial capitalism. Then, in the second unit of the course, we investigate the history of financial institutions. We read Peter James Hudson and watch an episode of The 1619 Project created by Nikole Hannah-Jones. Students learn how demand for financial products such as insurance and credit is linked to plantation economies and how the Royal Bank of Canada and Scotiabank were founded here in Maritime Canada with money from the global shipping trade before their imperialist expansion into the Caribbean and Latin America.

The close reading assignments of the scholars listed above have students work on their own and together in class to identify scholarly arguments and differentiate between empirical and theoretical contributions. Undergraduate students struggle with reading peer-reviewed journal articles, and I design the close reading assignments to be simple and repetitive to reinforce how students can learn to identify the key components of an article and then deploy that knowledge during in-class discussion and writing assignments. Students reflected that they wished they “had a breakdown of how to approach academic readings earlier” in their education because it helped build their “comprehension for big, wordy articles,” which they “applied in other classes”.

I recently heard from a student, Chloé Duguay, who took Geography of Finance with me last year and is now in the Environmental Development MSc program at the London School of Economics. She said that she felt anxious at the beginning of her first semester. However, her anxiety lessened when she realized that “I am exactly where I need to be and maybe know more than I thought I did”, adding that “I have been doing a lot of reading and talking about race and finance and historical processes. As I work through my readings, I realize that many of these authors were who you assigned us to read in the winter! It is so nice to be familiar with their work so that I can be confident when participating in class.” Chloé’s description of her experience speaks to my pedagogical approach, which stems from a belief that education has the liberatory potential to shift how people think and behave, including feeling empowered through the knowledge they are gaining.

The second half of the course explores various ways that finance appears in everyday life and how financialization is frequently contested by pairing academic texts with content from social movements. For example, students read Martine August et al.’s article “Reimagining geographies of public finance” and listened to an episode of the This is Hell podcast with guest Clark Randall, who discussed how municipal bonds fuel racial inequality, like when they are used to pay legal settlements related to police violence. Students said of this half of the course that “the relevant case studies helped situate [them] in concepts” such as neoliberalism and racial capitalism, helping them to relate academic theories to “the real world”.

It is no surprise that students were most animated over topics that they regularly observe in their own lives. For example, we read Jessa Loomis and Daniel Cockayne’s article “A feminist approach to fintech: Exploring ‘buy now, pay later’ technologies and consumer fintech”, and students drew on their own experiences with apps such as Afterpay and Klarna. Women-identifying students explained that paying for clothing and school supplies with small instalments over several months can seem more manageable than paying full price upfront. However, their instalments increases after several purchases, and students said they found themselves overwhelmed by owing hundreds of dollars each month. Further, they were unable to arrange automatic payments on these apps like they can with their other bills, which led them to miss payments and accrue fees. Combining their own experiences with the article by Loomis and Cockayne, students saw how “buy now, pay later” apps market primarily to young, female shoppers in online retail settings with messaging that makes debt seem easy to manage, when in reality, students said they felt tricked by these apps.

Whether the topic was public finance or fintech, the pressures on homeowners and insurers resulting from climate disasters, social movements to abolish student debt, or the financialization of housing and tenant unions, students regularly demonstrated their knowledge of neoliberalism, financialization, and racial capitalism by connecting the readings to their own lives. Through the lens of these examples, students also squashed their assumptions that finance is boring, abstract, quantitative, neutral, objective, and intimidating – all words that they used to describe their impressions at the beginning of the semester. Instead, they began to recognize the neoliberal political project with its practices of deregulation, privatization, austerity, and emphasis on individual responsibility within processes of financialization. And they were able to situate the financialization of their everyday lives within the broader context of racial capitalism historically and in the present, understanding that finance does and has always required inequalities to create profit.

Lastly, I go back to Chloe’s words and how they connect with my overall teaching philosophy. I want students to feel empowered to study even the most seemingly boring or difficult topics, like finance, and be assured that they possess the ability to understand it, and how it is impacting their lives and the lives of the people around them. The deeper implication of this is that when students feel confident in how to study the systems of power around them and how these systems shape oppression and privilege, they are less likely to accept the world as it is and more likely to see the potential for radical change.

Reference list

Alami, I., & Guermond, V. (2023). The color of money at the financial frontier. Review of International Political Economy, 30(3), 1073–1097. https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2022.2078857

August, M., Cohen, D., Danyluk, M., Kass, A., Ponder, C. S., & Rosenman, E. (2022). Reimagining geographies of public finance. Progress in Human Geography, 46(2), 527–548. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325211054963

Card, K. (Director). (2020). Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore – An Antipode Foundation film [Video recording]. The Antipode Foundation and BFD Productions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CS627aKrJI&feature=emb_logo

Cavallero, L., & Gago, V. (2021). A Feminist Reading of Debt (L. Mason-Deese, Trans.). Pluto Press.

Desmond, M. (2019, August 14). American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html

Hall, S. (2017). Global Finance: Places, Spaces, and People. SAGE.

Harvey, D. (2016, July 23). Neoliberalism Is a Political Project (B. S. Risager, Interviewer) [Interview]. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/david-harvey-neoliberalism-capitalism-labor-crisis-resistance/

Hudson, P. J. (2017). Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226459257.001.0001

Loomis, J., & Cockayne, D. (2025). A feminist approach to fintech: Exploring ‘buy now, pay later’ technologies and consumer fintech. Journal of Cultural Economy, 18(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2024.2323692

Pike, A., & Pollard, J. (2010). Economic Geographies of Financialization. Economic Geography, 86(1), 29–51. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2009.01057.x

Simpson Center (Producer). (2017, November 16). Robin D. G. Kelley: What Is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter? [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REo_gHIpvJc

Randall, C. (Guest). (n.d.). Bond Villians (No. 1633) [Broadcast]. Retrieved December 27, 2024, from https://thisishell.com/episodes/1633

Zelizer, V. A. (1994). The Social Meaning of Money. Basic Books.