CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Ürmössy, Anna |
|---|---|
| Title | The Moral Economy of the Uruguayan Mortgage Payment Strikes: From Commoning to Debt Resistance |
| Summary | The thesis explores the cases of the collective mortgage payment strikes used by the Federation of Uruguayan Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives (FUCVAM). The research addresses the puzzle of how these strikes achieved repeated success on a significant scale and duration, in an environment where housing provision is increasingly dominated by the market. The findings are based on 2 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Uruguay using qualitative methods, including interviews and participant observation. The thesis argues that while legal and institutional factors enabled the strikes, their success also stemmed from a set of shared convictions among cooperative members, about housing rights,state-responsibility and the role debt - that fosters a moral economy contradicting the prevailing logic of capital accumulation and the mainstream social perception of debt. The research fund that these convictions are reinforced by the 'cooperativista values' developed through everyday practices of commoning inside the cooperatives (mutual aid, solidarity, collective ownership, horizontal decision-making). The study contributes to scholarly debates on the commons, moral economies, social movements, and debt resistance, by linking microlevel commoning practices to macro-level political economic struggles over moral economies. The findings suggest that collective action rooted in alternative value-practices developed in commons can effectively challenge dominant economic narratives and power structures, offering a bottom-up model for debt resistance. |
| Supervisor | Bodnár, Judt; Rajaram, Prem Kumar |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/urmossy_anna.pdf |
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