CULTURAL STUDIES
Special Issue: Everyday Debt and Credit
Co-edited by Gregory J. Seigworth (Millersville University) and Joe Deville (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Call for Papers
How do ordinary matters of credit and debt circulate through the
space-times of the everyday and the intimate? How has their manner of
circulation and the nature of their saturation into the lives of
borrowers changed in the age of the app, of the mobile interface, of
social media? What are the new technologically enabled effects of debt
and credit? Where and how is everyday indebtedness felt by its users and
inflected in and through the architectures and atmospheres surrounding
them? And, further, what are these postures and practices of our
emerging economy of debt and credit pointing toward? From the advent of
digitally mediated peer to peer lending to credit scores consulted on
first dates (calculating risk before date #2), from cloud-connected
loyalty cards to mobile payment and wallet technologies, from the
multi-pronged and carefully designed affective tactics of debt
collectors to the strategies of gamification for savings and personal
finance and more – the material and immaterial articulations of debt and
credit have woven themselves ever more ubiquitously into the ecologies
of the everyday. If the sheer pervasiveness of credit and debt has
become a defining feature of our era, we argue that their omnipresence
cannot be confronted as merely one more topic for consciousness-raising
and ideology critique. From the data-defined subjectivities of
instantaneous algorithmic calculations to those age-old debates over the
moralities and immoralities of debt to the emergence of redrawn bodily
capacities (extended? shrunken?) and institutional/networked accesses
(granted? denied?) that arise with evermore technologically-mediated
credit/debt relationships, our contributors will reveal how matters of
credit and debt must be met in their myriad relational entanglements
with both the fine-grained and roughhewn practices of daily life.
Thus, we welcome essays that provide an empirics of indebtedness as
it traverses this varied social and material terrain of the everyday.
This includes a contextual focus on the specific apparatuses, devices,
encounters, dispositions and affects of routine indebtedness and how
different forms of credit reach into and attach themselves to domains
often coded, as private, domestic, mundane, and non-economic. In
attending to the particularities of daily intersections with credit
and/or debt contributions might also consider how these mundane
mediations of the economic connect to and shape apparent contextual
commonalities, how the politics of ubiquitous credit is distributed, and
where and in what form resistances, hacks and new debtor publics might
be found. The issue aims to be disciplinarily diverse, to potentially
include sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, political
economists, cultural theorists, critical analysts of finance, and those
working in science and technology studies, while also inviting
contributions from designers, architects, managers and activists. We
welcome diverse and innovative takes on everyday indebtedness, ranging
from (but not limited to) auto-ethnographic accounts to those
investigating through a mix of sensory and/or digital approaches to
credit & debt practices.
Please contact the editors with a proposal of 500 words presenting
an orientation/overview of your angle of approach to this topic by
February 15, 2014. Finished articles are also welcome at anytime but of
course slight revisions to better address our issue’s themes should be
expected.
Final full paper submissions are due no later than July 15, 2014.
Articles are generally between 5000-8000 words (double spaced, size 12
font), including abstract and references. An abstract of 300 words
(including 6 keywords) must be included for purposes of journal review.
Please supply an email address and other relevant contact information
with your submission. Multi-author works should clearly designate a
corresponding author. Manuscripts must conform to the Harvard reference
style. Consult the journal’s Taylor and Francis website for further
specifics on formatting and author guidelines.
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