| Inhalt |
"Financial Subjectivities in the Digital Age" explores how digital technologies—from mobile banking apps to social media to cryptocurrency networks—reshape the ways individuals experience, enact, and make sense of their own financial lives. Combining sociological theories of subjectivity, identity, and governance with case studies from fintech, social media, platform labor, and data-driven credit systems, this course examines how code, interfaces, and algorithms co-author our beliefs about risk, value, and self-worth. No technical background is required—just curiosity about how everyday financial practices become sites of self-formation in an increasingly digitized world.
This course is aimed at students of sociology, economics, media studies, and related disciplines and invites students to explore the often invisible social scripts inscribed in digital monetary instruments. We will analyze how personal finance dashboards create a culture of constant self-monitoring, how "finfluencers" on TikTok and Instagram stage aspirational wealth, and how algorithmic lending platforms process strangers' social data into lifelong credit scores. You will learn to read user interfaces not as neutral intermediaries, but as contested spaces where power, norms, and subjectivity collide.
Based on classic texts (e.g., Foucault on governmentality, Bourdieu on habitus) and current research on robo-advisors, NFTs, impact investing platforms, and remuneration structures in the gig economy, you will acquire analytical tools to critique and redesign digital financial systems. Seminar discussions, short reflection papers, and a practice-oriented mini-ethnography will sharpen your ability to translate theoretical insights into concrete proposals. |