Julia Ballester is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the New School for Social Research. Her project focuses on the history of financialization in Argentina and she is interested in exploring how public policy, financial institutions, and people’s economic lives intertwined during the second half of the twentieth century. Identifying the rise of an investment culture in the late seventies, her work aims to understand how economic reform occurred, not only through an economic and political lens, but also from a social and cultural perspective. By examining the interplay between structural transformations and everyday life, her project problematizes the rise of neoliberalism in Argentina as a mere economic experiment imposed by the violent military dictatorships of the Southern Cone.
Julia holds an M.A. in sociology from The New School and a B.A. in sociology from the University of Buenos Aires.