Rescaling and reframing poverty: Financial coaching and the pedagogical spaces of financial inclusion in Boston, Massachusetts

Based on over 180 hours of participant observation and 45 semi-structured interviews during 14 months of in-depth qualitative research, this article identifies and analyzes a recent change in financial education from group-based workshops to a model of one-on-one financial coaching. In documenting the “coaching turn”, this article offers a novel focus on the nonprofit spaces of financial inclusion and empowerment. As part of this, I examine how these programs shape personal financial habits and expand access to financial products and services for their LMI clients. By focusing on the spaces where the financial practices of populations at the margins of the financial economy are actively being shaped, this research reveals how the active growth of the financial sector is contingent upon making previously unfit market actors into viable debtors in the pedagogical spaces of financial inclusion. This research therefore shows how financial literacy and capability programs are expanding the reach of finance, especially into the lives of LMI populations. As such, this article offers insights into the evolving geographies of financial inclusion and exclusion and is an important complement to literature in geography on the social and scalar relations of financialization.