Jaime Palomera

Biography

Jaime Palomera Zaidel holds a PhD in Social Anthropology (University of Barcelona) and a Masters in Cultural Studies (Goldsmiths College, University of London). During his doctoral research, he was visiting fellow at the Graduate Center in New York (PhD Program in Anthropology, 2009-10) and at the Centre d’Analyse et d’Intervention Sociologiques in Paris (EHESS, 2010-11). His main research interest is the embeddedness of the market in the sphere of social reproduction, particularly through the field of real estate and finance. Advocating a grounded and historical approach, he has explored why and how a growing majority of people in industrialized societies are entering the logics of homeownership and financial debt, and the effects these processes have at the scale of the household and neighborhood/locality. This question has led him to deal with a variety of related topics, such as the regulation of mortgage and housing markets, class formation, urban fragmentation, and the commodification of everyday life. He is preparing a monographic book based on an in-depth ethnographic research in Ciutat Meridiana: a housing project in Barcelona’s ‘backyard’ that was engulfed in the recent financial boom-and-bust (1996-2007), becoming a hotspot for predatory lending.

Research Interest

 Ethnography Social Anthropology Participant Observation Anthropological Theory Urban Anthropology Economic Anthropology