Affective life and cultural economy: Payday loans and the everyday space‐times of credit‐debt in the UK

Abstract

Analysing the affective geographies of digitally mediated payday loans in the UK, this paper advocates and exemplifies an approach to cultural economy that focuses on how economic worlds are Accepted ArticleThis article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved affectively animated and lived. Supplementing the two versions of 'culture' that cultural economy approaches have to date been organised around -culture as signifying system, or culture as assembled effect -we propose a cultural economy of everyday space-times which is attuned to the affective composition of forms of living. Drawing on empirical work with forty users of digitally mediated payday loans, we employ this approach to trace how their loans become part of three intersecting forms of living: relief, as a pressing concern is deferred to the immediate future; separation, as private spaces are created within ordinary life and obligations are felt as individual responsibilities; and pressure, as demands to pay intensify the sense that debt is spiralling out of control and already ongoing precarity cannot be sustained.In conclusion, we pose further questions for a cultural economy approach orientated to the analysis of forms of living.

Towards an economic geography of FinTech

“…While our paper has focused on financial inclusion in the Global South (noting complex relationships with Global North finance and technology firms and institutions), issues of inequality and indebtedness through FinTech are also important in the Global North. Indeed, research into the digital transformation of rental housing market as a new asset class in the USA (Fields, 2019) and the platform lending in the UK and the USA (Anderson et al, 2020;Clarke, 2019) demonstrate the importance of new and reconfigured geographies of FinTech-enabled financial inclusion/exclusion that is not limited to poorer countries.…”

Three Foodbanks in a Decade of Austerity: Foodbank Affective Atmospheres

“…Affective atmospheres link the individual and the collective (Hitchen 2019) because they engage with how affect is transmitted between bodies and yet an affective atmosphere is more than the total sum of bodies (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2016). Affective atmospheres are therefore a means of thinking through affective spaces to emphasise Three Foodbanks in a Decade of Austerity affect as lived rather than inert (Stewart 2011) and how affective life is continually forming (Anderson et al 2020).…”

Stress and the ecology of urban experience: Migrant mental lives in central Shanghai

“…While this kind of approach is evident in geographical writing on the lived experience of psychosis (Duff, 2012(Duff, , 2016Parr, 1997Parr, , 1999Söderström et al, 2016;Winz, 2018), here we ask if there is something about the lived city that prevents the states of mind of its most precarious subjects from being pushed to their limits, despite the acknowledged "pressures" of urban existence. Echoing recent geographical work on the emotional experiences of urban precarity in the West (Anderson et al, 2019;Wilkinson & Ortega-Alcázar, 2019a, 2019b and beyond (Fast & Moyer, 2018;Pettit, 2019), we draw on fieldwork conducted as part of a broader research project on migrant lives and mental health in Shanghai, to focus on how lived experience in distinct spaces mediates everyday pressures. We look at how embodied encounters within the urban environment intervene in the making of anxious thoughts and troubled feelings, but also their endurance, complicating depictions of the affective and psychological tonalities of modern city living as choices between "stress," "comfort," or "animosity" (Brighenti & Pavoni, 2019).…”

“…We suggest there is more at work than straightforward bodily reflexes of capitulation or adjustment to "cognitive overload in the urban everyday" (Berlant, 2011, p. 9), as urban subjects find themselves "being enveloped by, imbibing, internalizing and acting on the basis of local atmospheres of anxiety, uncertainty and unmoored-ness" (Philo et al, 2019, p. 10). We see this bodily grammar tilting towards gradations and oscillations of mental states and affects in confronting the stresses of urban living in the way of Anderson et al (2019) on the mixes of anxiety, relief, and hope experienced by people dependent on payday loans, and Pettit & Ruijtenberg (2019) on how the experiences of young migrant workers in global Cairo oscillate between hope and depression.…”