“Incapable, Uninterested, and Ineffective”? Locating Villainification Narratives in Financial Education (Poster 2)

• In Event: Teaching Villainification in Social Studies: Pedagogies to Deepen Understanding of Social Evils

Abstract

To “consider the messy space in between individual and group culpability, and thus develop our sense of responsibility to each other as humans in communities on this planet” (van Kessel & Edmondson, 2023, p. 3), I locate villainification narratives in financial education and public discourse, theorize its aims, and consider what an anti-villainification approach to financial education could look like. I argue that unlike villainification and heroification in history, in financial education, ordinary, everyday, nameless, and faceless individuals are the villains while individuals, like the Schwabs, play the role of heroes based on their financial “successes.” Curricular examples are taken from Georgia’s Personal Finance and Economics Course and the Council for Economic Education’s Test of Economic Literacy. Public discourse about financial education is taken from various policy statements and documents following the COVID-19 pandemic and from national and international organizations such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the introductions to the National Standards for Personal Finance Education (2013).

In analyzing these documents, I draw on the field of new economic criticism (Osteen & Woodmansee, 2005) to treat financial education literature as what it is-literature (Adams, 2021). This literature offers us, subjects, a certain kind of subjectivity (e.g. as producers or consumers, literate or illiterate) as does capitalism (Lazzarato, 2014). In other words, the subject positions we are narratively able to occupy are discursively produced. Therefore, I quite literally attend to sentence structures, to the subjects of sentences in order to understand not just the subject of finance but financial subjectivity.

Author

• Erin Adams, Kennesaw State University