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*We're looking for a few more papers--do get in touch if interested by Friday, October 25* Best, Jessa and Desiree Call for Papers for the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers, March 24-28, 2025 Platform(ed) Financial Subjectivity: Researching platform logic and financial subject formation in the digital finance ecosystem Organizers: Desiree Fields (UC Berkeley) and Jessa Loomis (Newcastle University, UK) Geographical perspectives on financial subjectivity provide important insights into the changing relations, behaviors and practices of financial actors (e.g., Lai, 2017; Langley, 2007; Coppock, 2013) especially in scholarship on financialisation and neoliberal political economic restructuring. This work emphasizes how emotional and relational dimensions of everyday life condition the financial practices of ordinary investors and highlights how financial subjects do not always behave as the expected or desired self-interested and calculative entrepreneurial subject. Instead, financial subjectivity is variegated, dynamic, and sometimes contradictory (Agunsoye, 2021; Lai, 2017; Taylor and Davies, 2021). In recent years, an extensive and rapidly evolving ecosystem of fintech and social media platforms has led to incredible growth in financial participation, especially amongst Gen Z and Millennial users. While viewed by many as evidence of ‘democratising’ access to a previously exclusionary world of finance, the growth of ‘retail investing’ and the coincident proliferation of financial apps and neo-bank products suggest that the nature and practice of financial information-sharing and investing are changing, and financial subjectivity along with it. This development requires new ways of thinking about and researching financial subjectivity, including how platform logic (Fields and Rogers, 2021) may be implicated in lived experiences of investment. For example, how do the affordances and constraints of digital platforms inform the financial knowledge, investment behavior, and common sense of retail investors? What role do online communities play in creating and contesting financial ‘knowledge’ (Kim, 2020; Bourne, 2017; Duterme, 2023), and how might mechanisms of crowd discipline influence notions of ‘proper’ financial subjectivity (Faxon and Wittekind, 2023)? As the spatial and scalar dimensions of finance are being reconfigured through digital technology, we seek papers that explore how this digital-financial nexus is shaping subjectivity. Potential themes include: * The role of “finfluencers” in everyday investment decisions and the fintech industry more broadly * How retail investors experience the affordances and constraints of investment platforms * How platforms engender a new financial “common sense” * Methodological approaches to studying platform-mediated subject formation * Variations in platform logic and subject formation between different kinds of assets, e..g real estate vs. financial assets vs. cryptocurrency * How retail investors make sense of digital hype and scams * Online communities, crowd wisdom, and financial advice for and from the masses Details: Please send abstracts (250 words maximum) to Jessa Loomis ([email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>) and Desiree Fields ([email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>) by Friday, October 25, 2024. Please include a title and author names and affiliations in your abstract. We will respond by October 28 in advance of the AAG deadline. This session is sponsored by the Economic Geography Speciality Group of the AAG. We are also seeking sponsorship from the Digital Geography Specialty Group. References Agunsoye A (2021). ‘Locked in the Rat Race’: Variegated financial subjectivities in the United Kingdom. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 53(7): 1828–1848. Bourne CD (2017). Sensemaking in an online community after financial loss: Enterprising Jamaican investors and the fall of a financial messiah. New Media & Society 19(6): 843–860. Coppock S (2013). The everyday geographies of financialisation: impacts, subjects and alternatives. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 6(3): 479–500. Duterme T (2023). Bloomberg and the GameStop saga: The fear of stock market democracy. Economy and Society 52(3): 373–398. Faxon HO and Wittekind CT (2024). Livestreamed Land: Scams and Certainty in Myanmar’s Digital Land Market. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 42(4): 512-533. Fields D and Rogers D (2021). Towards a Critical Housing Studies Research Agenda on Platform Real Estate. Housing, Theory and Society 38(1). Routledge: 72–94. Kim B (2020). The ecosystem of a ‘wealth-tech’ culture: the birth of networked financial subjects in South Korea. Media, Culture & Society 42(2): 207–224. Lai KP (2017). Unpacking financial subjectivities: Intimacies, governance and socioeconomic practices in financialisation. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35(5): 913–932. Langley P (2007). Uncertain Subjects of Anglo-American Financialization. Cultural Critique (65): 67–91. Taylor N and Davies W (2021). The financialization of anti-capitalism? The case of the ‘Financial Independence Retire Early’ community. Journal of Cultural Economy 14(6): 694–710.
