Sporting Mateships, Gambling Subjectivity and the Financialisation of Young People’s Lives

Presented by ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences

This seminar discusses the role that recently developed ‘bet with mates’ features on gambling apps play in the social lives of young men, considering it as an aspect of the broader financialization of young people’s lives. We will begin with a brief introduction of Newcastle Youth Studies Centre research and methods on financialization and young people. We will then explore the social role gambling plays in young men’s social lives, especially in relation to sport, masculinity, friendship and the broader affective environments and socialities at play in their gambling practices. More broadly, 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 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, that fascism is an historical anomaly 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 their choices feeling more like 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.

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