TCELT research seminar - 28 August

Steven Threadgold is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Newcastle, Australia. His research focuses on youth and class, with particular interests in unequal and alternative work and career trajectories; underground and independent creative scenes; cultural formations of taste, and financial practices. Steve is the Director of the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre. His latest book is Bourdieu and Affect: Towards a Theory of Affective Affinities (2020, Bristol University Press). Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles won the 2020 Raewyn Connell Prize for best first book in Australian sociology.

Young people are experiencing their transition to adulthood in an era of rising inequality, unprecedented new risks and the ubiquitous saturation but ever-evolving role of digital technologies in their lives. Fintech – BNPL, crypto, gambling and share trading apps - are a key example of the shift to credit itself as a consumer good and the financialisation of everyday life. Forms of debt and fintech have become a normalised feature of young people’s lives that they need to reflexively navigate. The intersection between the frontstage consumption of credit and the backstage data-fied processes of algorithmic evaluation and sorting of access to financial instruments is where inequalities will be shaped in the future, that is, who can access the means to financial and credit services that are central to creating a future. 

As young people find out many of the promises made to them in their journey from child to adult are just not true - that meritocracy exists, that gender and racial inequalities are getting better, that adults will do something about climate change, etc. – there is evidence in some of our research projects that they are feeling let down, ripped off, and sold out that evokes speculating subjectivities. This sees a different orientation towards the future, a more ironic and cynical dispositions, a feeling of ‘whatever’ that leads to choices feeling more like gambling on their future than investing in it. Both gambling and investing are forms of speculation, but it may be that the privileged can invest, while the rest must gamble.

This a Hybrid event available on Microsoft Teams in person at University of Dundee, Old Medical School, Room 1.20