18th September 2024
New class formations and the financialisation of young people’s lives
Steven Threadgold (University of Newcastle, Australia)
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. Financial technology (fintech) – Buy-Now-Pay-Later, crypto, gambling and share trading apps – are key examples of the shift to credit itself as a consumer good and the financialisation of everyday life. 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. Drawing upon projects conducted by the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre using an array of methods including interviews, workshops, and participatory methods such as body mapping and sandboxing, walking ethnographies and policy analysis, the seminar will discuss new formations of class that emerge as forms of debt and fintech have become a normalised feature of young people’s lives that they need to reflexively navigate.
Steven Threadgold is Associate Professor of Sociology the Director of the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre 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 an Associate Editor of Journal of Youth Studies, and on the Editorial Boards of The Sociological Review, DIY, Alternative Culture & Society, and Journal of Applied Youth Studies. His latest book is Bourdieu and Affect: Towards a Theory of Affective Affinities (Bristol University Press). Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles (Routledge) won the 2020 Raewyn Connell Prize for best first book in Australian sociology. His latest edited collection with Jessica Gerrard is Class in Australia. Contact at steven.threadgold@newcastle.edu.au