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CFP: AAG Annual Meeting New Orleans April 10-14, 2018
Financial Life Worlds: Variegated Understandings of Fringe Finance
Organizers: Lindsey Appleyard (Coventry University), Nick Henry (Coventry University), John Morris (Coventry University) & Hussan Aslam (Coventry University)
Recent work by the UK Financial Conduct Authority has revealed that there is £200bn in unsecured consumer credit amassed by households in Britain, with. 8.3 million people in ‘problem debt’ in the United Kingdom (Money Advice Service 2017). Such stark figures suggest that ‘fringe finance’, namely credit practices ‘specifically targeted to populations outside of mainstream financial space’, has increasingly reworked the boundaries between finance and everyday life (Aitken 2010).
Homogenizing analytical expressions and figures such as the ‘indebted man’or the ‘ascetic subject’have captured the imagination of authors writing about the expansion and deepening of the credit system (Lazzarato 2012; Stimilli 2017). However, this call is concerned with the geographical implications of this mainstreaming of fringe finance (Henry et al 2017). We take seriously the argument against the impulse to present ‘any ‘representative’ agent, place or scale that captures the dynamics of the extraordinary range and complexity of financial life worlds’ (Christophers et al 2017).
Joining emerging geographical research which attends to the complexity and uniqueness of individuals’ engagement with non-mainstream financial products and services and the financial system more generally, this session aims to push this agenda further in a number of promising directions (Appleyard et al 2016; Lai 2016). In doing so, the aim of the session is to contribute to variegated understandings of financial inclusion/exclusion, the marketization of everyday life, geographies of lending and borrowing, financial rights/citizenship and the generation and use of financial data. We welcome approaches to the study of fringe finance from a range of theoretical and methodological standpoints and would like to see both empirical papers as well as more theoretical contributions. We invite submissions that address the following topics (but not limited to):
• What are the implications of financialization for orthodox understandings of financial subjects and subjectivities?
• Can the case for financial citizenship and rights be salvaged in light of the discrimination inherent in the credit system (Kear 2013)?
• Does the mainstreaming of fringe finance mean that ‘all data is credit data’ (Aitken 2015) ?
• What are the practical and theoretical limits of the marketization of everyday life? How does the messiness of everyday life pose challenges for the ‘capitalization of everything’ (Leyshon and Thrift 2007) ?
• How useful are the categories of prime and subprime credit?
• What can we learn from empirical studies of inclusive credit scoring?
• How do we distinguish between these different concepts and processes within financial markets?
• How ought we to theorize the way that finance operates at both global and local scales?
• Why do consumers choose high cost credit over more affordable alternatives?
• Is regulatory change needed as a response to the expansion of fringe finance?
Please send titles and 250 word abstracts to [log in to unmask] , [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] by October 8. We will notify accepted papers by October 15.
References
Aitken, R. (2010).Regul(ariz)ation of fringe credit: payday lending and the borders of global financial practice. Competition & Change 14, no. 2 (2010): 80-99.
Aitken, R. (2015). Fringe finance: Crossing and contesting the borders of global capital. Routledge.
Appleyard, L., Rowlingson, K., & Gardner, J. (2016). The variegated financialization of sub-prime credit markets. Competition & Change, 20(5), 297-313.
Christophers, B., Leyshon, A., & Mann, G. (Eds.). (2017). Money and Finance After the Crisis: Critical Thinking for Uncertain Times. John Wiley & Sons.
Henry ND, Pollard JS, Sissons P, Ferreira J, Coombes M. (2017). ‘Banking on exclusion: Data disclosure and geographies of UK personal lending markets.’ Environment and Planning A 2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17713992
Kear, M. (2013) (2013). Governing homo subprimicus: Beyond financial citizenship, exclusion, and rights. Antipode, 45(4), 926-946.
Lai, K. P. (2016). Financial advisors, financial ecologies and the variegated financialisation of everyday investors. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 41(1), 27-40.
Lazzarato, M. (2012). The Making of the Indebted Man. Semiotext(e).
Leyshon, A., & Thrift, N. (2007). The capitalization of almost everything: The future of finance and capitalism. Theory, Culture & Society, 24(7-8), 97-115.
Money Advice Service. (2017). Are you One of the 8.3 Million adults with Problem Debt?
Stimilli, E. (2017). The Debt of the Living: Ascesis and Capitalism. SUNY Press.
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