Speculative Subjectivities

There has been considerable theorising about the rise of digitalisation and financialisation of everyday life, where credit itself is something that is consumed and not just a gateway to consumption, and people are impelled to live their lives with a financialised disposition.  The notion of speculation has become an important way of understanding this orientation towards life, where individuals must treat everyday decisions and relations through the future-oriented lens of transactions, investments, risk and value. We consider how these current economic and social conditions are being managed by the current generation of youth in Australia. Our findings show how young people are building a life in conditions of financial stress, and we explore how this connects with self-perceived financial confidence, their imagined financial futures and attitudes towards risk. We use these findings to sketch eight financial practice dispositions to account for class, gender and risk distinctions in financial practices. We use these dispositions to argue that the current conditions of economic and social life require young people to adopt an array of speculative forms of subjectivity in response to rising economic stress and generalised conditions of uncertainty.  The contribution of the paper is not simply to demonstrate differentiation among young adults, which is already well established, but to operationalise this differentiation across three analytically distinct dimensions: financial stress, perceived financial confidence and expectations about the future. These dimensions are selected because they capture, respectively, material constraint, subjective capacity and temporal orientation, and together provide a structured account of how financial circumstances are experienced and interpreted. 

Steven Threadgold is Associate Professor of Sociology and 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, financial practices and algorithmic culture. Steve an Associate Editor of Journal of Youth Studies, and on the Editorial Boards of DIY, Alternative Culture & Society, Journal of Sociology, 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. He is currently leading the ARC funded Discovery Project ‘Young People, Fintech Use and Future Financial Security’.

steven.threadgold@newcastle.edu.au.
Steven Threadgold's Linktree.