Lena Gempke

Lena Gempke is a PhD Student in Development Economics at SOAS, University of London.

Her research is situated within wider debates on growing household indebtedness and its implications for material precarity, particularly in the Global South. Drawing on social reproduction frameworks, she investigates who ultimately cares for household debt and how such acts of care function as essential means of stabilisation within financialised capitalism. Using South Africa's debt counselling industry as a case study, her research asks how and why people increasingly rely on credit to finance everyday acts of social reproduction, and how we must understand the social reproduction of finance itself: where it is located, who carries it out and what complications arise if this work is commodified. Her work draws on anthropology, feminist political economy, and economics, combining qualitative fieldwork with quantitative analysis.

Lena holds an MSc in Political Economy from SOAS and a BA in Economics and Anthropology from the University of Göttingen, Germany. Before starting her PhD she was a consultant for the World Bank, working on client and policy engagements for the South Asia Vice Presidency and conducting research into the Political Economy of climate change for the Global Practice on Governance and Public Institutions. Currently, she works as a Graduate Research Assistant at SOAS and co-coordinates the IIPPE Working Group on Social Reproduction . 

• Social reproduction theory
• Feminist political economy
• Household debt and indebtedness
• Subordinate financialisation
• Mixed methods
• South African political economy