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Disobedient objects: Escraches and the pah’s fight for the right to housing

Abstract:

This article describes the material culture of street politics of the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) during its escrache campaign, a specific type of performative activism used to pressure politicians to change Spain’s mortgage law. By focusing on giant cardboard circles used during these protests, I explore how particular objects have the ability to reframe where and how politics takes place. Based on ethnographic material, the article shows the making and use of these giant circles in order to theorize the notion of “disobedient objects”. It focuses on three aspects: how these giant circles produced a specific type of political assembly, how they became political tools for subverting the dominant narrative in Spain’s financial crisis, and how they turned into key elements for questioning the morality of mortgage debt and indebtedness.