School of Policy Studies Event: New Perspectives on Fintech and Financialisation

Chair: Roger Burrows

Young People’s Financialised Futures in a Life Under the Data Gaze:  Steven Threadgold (University of Newcastle, Australia)

There is growing academic and public concern about multinational digital corporations’ use of personal data and the insidious implications for increased tracking, surveillance, and monetization of young people’s daily lives. This seminar will present data from a range of Newcastle Youth Studies Centre projects on how young people’s practices on various digital platforms engage with or are engaged by the data gaze, especially in relation to fintech. There are distinctions in how the data gaze works in various contexts, but importantly, differences in how young people ‘gaze back’. There are different dimensions of the data gaze where the classificatory logics of algorithmic and machinic gazes intersect with (and sometimes cross over) with young people’s own capacities to see and know themselves. The ubiquity of data and its financialising consequences means that young people’s need to strategize how to engage with what I call ‘rentier machines’ while aspects of their transitions are unequally automated. This fast-changing landscape has implications for young people’s wellbeing and orientations towards the future, and for what the objects of youth studies need to be if we are to understand their lives and the challenges they face.

Steven Threadgold is Associate Professor of Sociology the Director of the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre at University of Newcastle, Australia. 

Fintech ‘frontiers’ and the platformed motorcycle: Emergent infrastructures of value creation in African cities: Liza Cirolia and Andrea Pollio (African Centre for Cities, Cape Town)

Concerned with financialized extraction, the exploitation of precarious workers and racialized violence, critical scholars call for greater attention to the coloniality of financial technology (fintech) expansion in Africa. In this article, we echo the utility in foregrounding coloniality, but argue that it should be read as one among multiple, specific, and entangled ways in which fintech is creating new forms of value in the context of Africa’s urbanization. To make this case, we focus on the nexus between platforms, motorcycle taxis and fintech. In three different African cities, we observe how fintech maps onto the impulses and desires of the private sector and the state alike to use fintech to enact various forms of value creation. In Nairobi, the motorcycle has become the testbed of assetization experiments that seek to create data-rich and less fuel-dependent economies; in Kigali, the state-led and platform-enabled standardization of motorcycle services intends to create fiscal, planning, and regulatory values; and in Cape Town, legacy supermarket chains enroll motorcycles and fintech offerings to algorithmically integrate urban economies of labor and retail. Tracing these processes illuminates the different rationalities, ingenuities, and technological entanglements that, beyond the endurance of coloniality, shape Africa’s fintech moment.

Liza Rose Cirolia—Sr Researcher, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. Liza Cirolia’s work engages with questions of infrastructure, finance, and statecraft, with a focus on African cities.

Andrea Pollio—Research Associate, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, and Assistant Professor Department of Urban and Regional Studies (DIST), Polytechnic of Turin. Andrea Pollio’s work explores the making of innovation economies and platform

capitalism in urban Africa.