Gambling and the Financialisation of Everyday Life
This seminar will discuss aspects of how gambling has risen to such prominence as a practice, the risks this entails and what this means for broader digital and financial development in recent years.
Why young men are the most at-risk for gambling harm: Alex Russell
Young adults, particularly young men, are the most likely to gamble and to experience harm from their own gambling. In this talk, Alex will discuss recent prevalence studies that show the extent of this issue, and then discuss factors that may contribute to young men experiencing the most harm. This includes how young men tend to be more impulsive, and how this relates to the most harmful gambling forms. In addition, Alex will discuss how gambling has changed over time to be more attractive to young people, including advertising tactics and social betting products.
Associate Professor Alex Russell as a Principal Research Fellow in the Experimental Gambling Research Laboratory at CQUniversity. He has worked in gambling research since 2011, and is a named author on more than 170 publications, mostly in gambling. He has worked on a wide range of gambling studies, including major gambling prevalence studies, and has developed innovative methods to approach research questions. Alex’s main interest is how technology is changing gambling, who is most at risk, and what can be done to reduce this risk.
From the love of the game: exploring young people’s pathway to online gambling: Aino Suomi
Growing evidence now shows that engagement in sports and video gaming are risk factors for later gambling participation and associated harms in young people. Little is known, however, of the specific pathways through which sports and videogames in early childhood lead to gambling participation in adulthood. Aino will present on a qualitative study in Australia with 40 young people aged 18-24yrs who currently participate in online gambling. She will discuss the pathways through which young people initiated gambling through video games or sports, with common structural, environmental and social factors that contributed to them progressing from: (1) a love of ‘the game’ without any desire to gamble; to (2) gambling becoming an inescapable part of the game; (3) gambling enhancing the game experience; and finally to (4) gambling becoming an exclusive focus of the game, potentially leading to gambling harms. Aino will propose an improved public health approach to protect children and young people from these harms associated with engagement in otherwise healthy and positive recreational activities.
A/Prof Aino Suomi is the Director of the ANU Centre for Gambling Research. She is a public health academic and clinically trained psychologist with a specific focus on child and family wellbeing in the context of gambling harm. Aino’s research uses a lifecourse approach and population health methodologies to understand key health and social determinants of gambling harm. Her research has made a significant contribution to policy and service provision around family impacts of gambling, online gambling, parental gambling and child wellbeing, family violence, PTSD and trauma, and help-seeking for gambling harm and co-morbid mental health conditions.
Mobile gambling and digital money in the era of the debt cycle: Sam Kirwan
What is money, when its function is to monitor and shape behaviours? What is communication, when its function is to calibrate financial risk? This paper takes an overview of developments in digital monies to consider different directions in the future of household finance. This talk focuses upon two emerging capacities of money in ‘cashless’ societies: to restrict payments based upon moral economies, and to incorporate financial data into determinations of risk. The talk focuses upon three case studies of financial activity to highlight these capacities: the regulation, development and use of mobile gambling platforms in the UK and Australia, BNPL lending in South-East Asia, and the use of financial data in policing and social security compliance across multiple jurisdictions. Using Keith Hart’s work on money as social memory, and Viviana Zelizer’s emphasis upon plural monies in the negotiation of social relationships, the paper shows how in each of these case studies what is at stake is the creation of specific registers of everyday life, each of which create overlapping bindings of financial subjects. The paper concludes by framing this in terms of variations on a debt cycle that defines financial subjectivity in cashless societies: a cycle between hope, speculation, anxiety and surveillance.
Samuel Kirwan is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Bristol. His research focuses upon how household finances are shaped by speculative practices of credit and the forms of surveillance attached to the digitalisation of everyday monies. Having carried out work with advice services for many years, since 2023 he has been studying the regulation of gambling platforms and practices in the United Kingdom. He is currently carrying out a comparative project on gambling regulation between the UK and Australia. This talk presents arguments from Dr Kirwan’s upcoming book The Debt Cycle, which presents how changes in money and debt are transforming the traditional subject matters of criminology: policing, punishment, crime, surveillance and behavioural control.
