Feeling finance: teaching financial geography through reflecting on lived experience

This paper presents a pedagogical approach to teaching financial geography that centers on reflective writing and the emotional dimensions of students’ lived financial experiences. It argues that integrating affect and reflection into teaching can bridge disciplinary divides, enabling students to see themselves not merely as observers of the financial world but as active participants within it. Drawing on a case study of a course for engineering students, the paper reframes finance from a purely technical domain to a socio-spatial and affect-laden phenomenon. Through structured reflective writing, students critically examined how financial systems shape – and are shaped by – their everyday lives. Their reflections surfaced powerful emotional narratives, which in turn deepened engagement with theoretical concepts and strengthened critical thinking. By creating space for students to explore their financial subjectivities, the course demystified abstract financial systems, made geography more relevant and accessible to non-majors, and demonstrated the transformative potential of a lived experience approach to teaching geography in higher education.