A Financialized Electorate? Exploring How Popular Investment Culture Shapes Political Subjectivities

This research will investigate how young, male-identifying American investors' experiences of contemporary popular financial investment culture shape their political subjectivities.

Earlier work examining the specific relationship between financial practices and political subjectivities shows how investment culture extends neoliberal ideals of personal responsibility, entrepreneurship and calculative risk-taking.

But the rise of digital financial and social media platforms, from Robinhood to TikTok, has made the contemporary culture of investment unique in its pervasiveness and intensity; almost any American can now instantly get financial advice from "finfluencers" and immediately trade everything from stocks to cryptocurrencies.

Blurring the lines between people's financial / ESRC NINE DTP Postgraduate Studentship Nomination Form / Page 3 of 19 and political lives, many of these same online platforms are also the sites of political news, misinformation, and movements.

This has fostered the creation of paradoxical masculinised political alignments between popular investment practices and populist political ideas that seemingly contradicts existing empirical investigations.

The proposed research will leverage semi-structured interviews, content analyses, and a survey to investigate how male-identifying individuals' experiences of investment culture are shaped by digital platforms, and how these experiences interact with and shape their political subjectivities.

In doing so, this research aims to provide a novel perspective on rapidly evolving American financial and political life, contributing to debates in economic geography and allied fields about the financialization and digitalization of economy and society.