Digital Inequalities in Financialised Late Capitalism: How can young people build a future?

Join us for this seminar joint-hosted with The Centre for Research on Families, Life Course and Generations. We are delighted to welcome Dr Steven Threadgold (University Newcastle, Australia), Dr Julia Coffey (University of Newcastle, Australia), and Professor Roger Burrows (University of Bristol).

This seminar will discuss aspects of inequality and digital practices as rentier capitalism and the asset economy further entrench class domination. Key to this are processes of digitalisation and financialisation that lubricate means to extract value out of more and more aspects of daily life, reinforcing traditional inequalities while creating new ones. Digital technology has changed the way young people go about their day-to-day practices, transforming relations to social structures, to each other, and to themselves. Financialisation processes have seen the emergence of fintech dovetail with rises in costs of living, educational expenses and increasingly insecure work.

Drawing on an array of research projects about young people’s financial practices, digital self-presentation practices, and big data and algorithmic power this seminar will interrogate aspects of these burgeoning concerns that impinge on young people’s capacities to create a liveable future. We will discuss aspects of the changing nature of subjectivity towards speculative and gambling orientations; the role that digital platforms and data driven predictive categorisations play automating inequality in domains such as housing and rental markets; and young people’s digital selfie editing practices and how that relates to gendered and racialised power dynamics.

The seminar will also touch on methodological approaches to critically explore this time of digital proliferation, widening inequalities, and increasingly hostile socio-political environments. We will discuss methodological challenges and possibilities for doing inventive feminist-oriented youth research to understand and intervene in emerging digital trends, including creative digital participatory workshop methods, affective and visual analysis of audio-visual data, which can be overwhelming in its volume and complexity.

Social science research needs to be at the forefront the intersection between the frontstage everyday digital practices and the backstage data-fied processes of evaluation, sorting and excluding to understand how inequality will be shaped in the future and who can access the means central for young people to create a future. In terms of who is defined as a subject of value, not all future financialised and digitalised subjectivities will be equal.