Short Abstract

In a world shaped by finance, digital platforms, and fiscal governance, this panel explores anthropological approaches to how financialisation and digitalisation generate new subjectivities and inequalities, reproducing or challenging polarisation across class, gender, and generation.

Long Abstract

In a world increasingly shaped by financial logics, digital platforms, and state fiscal infrastructures, anthropological inquiry must ask: how do financialisation, digital communities, and governance entangle to produce new subjectivities, dependencies, and capabilities, and are there possibilities for challenging polarisation? Drawing on the anthropology of financialisation (Hann & Kalb, 2020, Mikuš 2021), this panel investigates the intersections of digital technologies, fiscal governance, and financial communities as sites where polarising processes are both reproduced and contested.

We conceive of digital financial and investment communities – online forums, fintech platforms, peer-to-peer networks – as ethnographic entry points into how financial subjectivities are shaped. Citizens become data-mapped fiscal subjects, embedded in state tax and credit infrastructures, while also navigating transnational financial flows that connect households, markets, and states across borders. Through digital platforms, people invest, borrow, remit, and organise, linking the intimate sphere of family finance to the global circuits of debt, speculation, and state revenue.

These processes are inseparable from gendered, classed, and generational inequalities. How do young “investor” subjects on social trading apps differ from older debt-affected cohorts? How do migrant women entrepreneurs or working-class digital savers navigate state and corporate fiscal regimes? How do digital technologies and governance apparatuses co-produce subjectivities of savvy investor, disciplined debtor, or excluded actor?

Linking to the conference theme of polarisation, the panel asks: in what ways does digital financialisation reproduce binary divides, and how can ethnographic research reveal multiplicities, solidarities, and governance innovations emerging within and across these transnational financial networks?

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