I’m an economic and political anthropologist studying the origins and effects of financialization in our daily lives, social relations, and political practices. My current research focuses on the history and transformation of low-income households and communities in Mexico as they have been incorporated into flows of global finance by way of policy reform, or how financial neoliberalism remade poverty on the global periphery. My work has been funded by the United States’ National Science Foundation (NSF) and Mexico’s National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT), amongst others.

I’m currently a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. At Harvard, I’m writing an ethnography on poverty, political economy, and global finance. It’s titled After Inclusion: Poverty, Property, and Politics on Mexico’s Financial Frontier. Before Harvard, I was a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, where I taught four courses a year and honed my skills as a university teacher.

I have a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago (2020), where my dissertation won the award for the Best Dissertation in Anthropology (Lichtstern Distinguished Dissertation Prize; 2021). I taught plenty as a Ph.D. student and won two teaching awards. One for the Best Course and Syllabus in Ethnographic Methods, and another for the same things in Latin American Studies (Starr Lectureship Prize and Martín Baró Lectureship Prize; both 2018).

Before Chicago, I studied an M.Res. at University College London (2011) and a B.A. at Trinity College, University of Cambridge (2010). Along the way, I have consulted for the Inter-American Conference on Social Security and the World Bank.

You can email me at ines_escobargonzalez@fas.harvard.edu.