Alexandra Ciocanel

I am a doctoral student in the Anthropology Department at the University of Manchester, currently doing fieldwork on mortgages in Bucharest, Romania. In my research project, I interrogate mortgages as market and temporal devices looking at the construction of a mortgage and real estate markets in Romania with the beginning of 2000s in which mortgages are part of an assemblage that exposes late financial capitalism's temporal regime. Through my focus on temporal issues, I enquire into how mortgages impose a temporal discipline, how borrowers perceive temporal representations like mortgage contracts and timelines, and how a mortgage's calculative grammar expresses social, moral, and temporal relations. I also look at how temporal affects such as uncertainty, optimist and hope, and acceleration are related to mortgages and the process of buying a house. These are usually related to a sense of "crisis" (the 2008-2010 debt crisis, the anticipations of a real estate crisis, or more generally of the economic crisis since its cyclical nature has become a common-sense understanding, and currently the COVID-19 crisis) and I enquire into how such moments make mortgagors feel personally connected to broader market forces and governmental decisions. 

I would like to collaborate with others working on topics such as finance, money, market devices, time, temporal affects, numbers.