Fintech Futures: On the emergence of investing and gambling subjectivities
9 June - 21 July 2025
Biography
Steven Threadgold is Associate Professor of Sociology 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, and fintech and financial practices. Steve is the Director of the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre, an Associate Editor of Journal of Youth Studies, and on the Editorial Boards of The Sociological Review, DIY, Alternative Culture & Society, and Journal of Applied Youth Studies. His latest book is Bourdieu and Affect: Towards a Theory of Affective Affinities (2020, Bristol University Press). Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles (2018, Routledge) won the 2020 Raewyn Connell Prize for best first book in Australian sociology. His latest edited collection with Jessica Gerrard is Class in Australia. Steve’s recent research projects are the Australian Research Council funded ‘Young Hospitality Workers and Value Creation in the Service Economy’; the CHSF funded ‘Entrepreneurial debt and young people’s investments in their future’, ‘Betting with mates: Gambling apps and young men’s social practices’ and ‘The rise of ‘Finfluencers’: young people’s engagement with digital financial advice’. Contact at steven.threadgold@newcastle.edu.au.
Research Summary
Threadgold’s current research investigates how young people’s financial practices are shaped by their engagement with new financial technologies (fintech) and algorithmic platforms. Young people form the primary consumer base of an array of fintech products including buy now pay later services, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, blockchain investment and mortgages, share trading and gambling apps. In the current economic context young people must individually strategize a trajectory towards a good life by stitching together the means to make a living and service the debts they have accrued on the way. They are doing so not just by relying on traditional sources of capital related to family, education and employment, but by engaging with the opportunities and risks offered by these new fintech products. The rapid emergence and uptake of these products by young people constitutes a largely uncharted research terrain that urgently needs to be understood, as it holds substantial consequences for young people’s future financial security. His work is looking at these issues across two domains:
1: Everyday financial practices: Young people are negotiating a growing array of digitalised financial options while strategising for their future, resulting in the emergence of investment and gambling orientations towards their own future.
2: Fintech, Software, Design and Algorithmic Profiling: The ‘background’ machinations of fintech companies’ data gathering, sorting and classifying techniques are not readily accessible or available to the general population. Precisely how these machinations function to sort, profile and target young people is not yet known. Fintech Futures will be the first research to bring together subjective knowledge of young people’s financial practices with data driven algorithmic platforms to understand and map the interface between everyday strategies and the platforms with which those strategies interact.
Associate Professor Threadgold is being hosted by Dr Samuel Kirwan of in the School of Policy Studies in June/July 2025.
Planned lectures and seminars include:
Research Seminar: Gamification and Gimmicks: ambivalent financialized subjectivities
This seminar analyses young people’s affective engagement with fintech, that is, how it feels and the many ambivalences this surfaces about the blurry lines between production and consumption, and the precarious economic positions of many young people. This perspective critically interrogates the everyday practices of young people’s indebted subjectivities within a public discourse that positions youth as financially irresponsible while debt is ubiquitous and unavoidable for all but the most privileged.
Research Seminar: Betting with Mates: The financialization of friendship
This seminar discusses the role that recently developed ‘bet with mates’ features on gambling apps play in the social lives of young men. ‘Problem gambling’ represents a critical health issue for young men, and the emergence of new digital technologies makes gambling more accessible than ever before.
Research Seminar: From entrepreneurial speculators to hopeful gamblers? Young people’s subjectivities and orientations towards the future
The literature on young people’s subjectivities has created a well-established and still very relevant understanding of how young people need to make choices in late capitalism, that is, as entrepreneurial subjects that need to make the right choices now as they speculate into their future. As the current generation of young people are experiencing their transition in an era of rising inequality, unprecedented new risks (expensive higher education, precarious labour markets and stagnant wages, rising housing and general cost of living, climate change, pandemics, terrorism, the normalisation of the far right, western supported genocide) and the ubiquitous saturation but ever-evolving role of digital technologies in their lives, we have noticed what may be a new, or at least a new layer, of subjectivity creeping in to how young people talk about their future, that of the gambling speculator. As young people find out many of the promises made to them in their journey from child to adult are just not true - that meritocracy exists, that gender and racial inequalities are getting better, that adults will do something about climate change, etc. – there is evidence in some of our research projects that they are feeling let down, ripped off, and sold out. This sees a different orientation towards the future, a more ironic and cynical dispositions, a feeling of ‘whatever’ that leads to choices feeling more as gambling than investing. Both gambling and investing are forms of speculation, but it may be that he privileged can invest, while the rest must gamble.
RHD/ECR Workshop: Building a Research Track Record
This workshop will discuss strategies for building a competitive CV in the everchanging and demanding academic labour market. Building a coherent research narrative and trajectory is paramount, as is building a network, where the emphasis is on the work, not the net. Will cover aspects of career building that resonate with the different sectors of academic work: Teaching, Research, Administration and Service. Steve will draw upon his experiences from balancing his own PhD and being a casual/contract academic; getting an ongoing position and performing roles such as Head of Sociology and Anthropology; research centre director; and being on job interview panels.
Details of these lectures and seminars will be listed on our Events page in due course.
You can contact Dr Threadgold's host Dr Samuel Kirwan for further information.
