Join us in conversation with sociologist, writer, educator, and editor, Tamara K. Nopper to discuss her groundbreaking Data & Society report on the alarming risks of financial wellness.

Financial wellness is a particular rebranding of financial literacy that incorporates medicalized frameworks and practices appropriated from public health and medicine and couples it with a purported concern about institutional inequality and predatory lending. Today, financial wellness is promoted as a solution to people’s stress and money problems related to the debt crisis, inflation, credit scoring, and racism.

Our conversation will examine the risks of financial wellness, including how it conceptualizes disparities in power, capital, and status as individual or community health issues instead of as organized structural inequality, how it encourages more financialization and the maintaining of a debt economy, and how it normalizes organized abandonment––where the state plays a limited role in providing public goods and services. Participants are invited to ask the question: who ultimately benefits from framing financial status as a matter of health?