This dissertation examines automobile title lending practices to interrogate debt as an embodied experience. Alternative financial services such as title lending provide a way to link socio-economic inequality to instruments of financial debt. The predominant research on inequality focuses on wage, income, and asset wealth; rarely is a direct connection made between socio-economic inequality and the object of debt. My interest lies beyond aggregate amounts of debt to also consider the ways in which different bodies have access to different forms of debt. This project examines how particular subprime instruments work to reinforce structural inequalities associated with race, class, and gender and how specific populations are increasingly coming to rely on debt to subsist. Using in-depth interviews, geospatial mapping, and descriptive statistical analysis I show the importance of recognizing debt not only as a conditional object but also as a lived condition of being. I conclude with discussions on dispossession and financial precarity to consider how the normative discourse of debt needs to change.

Despite a wealth of academic literature critiquing current tensions within the Fair Trade (FT) movement, very little work has focused on examining the birth and evolution of the FT movement within the broader context of the international political economy (IPE), specifically in reference to the ideological and policy changes that ushered in an era of free trade and deregulated markets for both trade and finance. From such an optic, it is no longer enough to merely question the extent to which the market should be engaged. Rather, one must question whether the engagement of the market strips the movement of its power to affect long term development in local economies. Drawing upon the historical record, this thesis focuses attention on the complexity of the linkages that exist between political ideology, trade policy, and development. While Fair Trade is commonly understood to be a responsive effort to create more equitable trade relations with producers in the least developed countries, less emphasis is placed on understanding the state-centered political structures that contributed to a capitalist push-back and the implementation of today's liberalized trade policy, and yet to do so is absolutely critical if we are to gain a deeper understanding of the limits and constraints of Fair Trade. Full engagement with mainstream markets has led to robust growth in the FT market per annum, yet countries that are heavily engaged with the FT market show little evidence of development or poverty reduction at a macro-level. Thus, Fair Trade must define itself as more than principled opposition to labor exploitation if it is to present itself as a credible instrument of economic development.