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Affective Life and Cultural Economy: Payday Loans and the Everyday Space-Times of Credit-Debt in the UK

Anderson, B; Langley, P; Ash, J; Gordon, R

Affective Life and Cultural Economy: Payday Loans and the Everyday Space-Times of Credit-Debt in the UK Thumbnail


Authors

J Ash

R Gordon



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 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.

Citation

Anderson, B., Langley, P., Ash, J., & Gordon, R. (2020). Affective Life and Cultural Economy: Payday Loans and the Everyday Space-Times of Credit-Debt in the UK. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45(2), 420-433. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12355

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Oct 19, 2019
Online Publication Date Nov 29, 2019
Publication Date Jun 30, 2020
Deposit Date Oct 21, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
Print ISSN 0020-2754
Electronic ISSN 1475-5661
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 45
Issue 2
Pages 420-433
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12355

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Copyright Statement
This is the accepted version of the following article: Anderson, B, Langley, P, Ash, J & Gordon, R (2020). Affective Life and Cultural Economy: Payday Loans and the Everyday Space-Times of Credit-Debt in the UK. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45(2): 420-433 which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/TRAN.12355. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.





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