Investment platforms have proliferated, spreading narratives, expectations, and practices of financial freedom and security. Platforms that facilitate real estate investment by ordinary people are a key site where financial subjectivities and individual capital become algorithmically networked to wider capitalist dynamics, within and beyond housing markets. Yet little is known about the geographically dispersed, atomized users who seek to secure financial futures through platform real estate investment. We address this challenge with an innovative methodology to examine how platforms mediate financial subjectivities and real estate. Our approach combines computational and textual analysis with in-depth qualitative study of a large corpus of conversations from a Reddit community dedicated to Fundrise, a major US investment platform. We find retail investors navigate both platforms to co-create networked financial subjectivity. Weaving polarized feelings with financial knowledge, they define financial goals and collective values through dynamics of in- and out-grouping and attempt to make sense of and frame real estate as an asset class. Countering wealth-tech’s narrative of democratization, we argue ordinary investors are unevenly captive to platform logic, attempting to negotiate a space for financial agency in a context of automation, stratification of users, and shifting digital and financial architectures. Seeking financial freedom, users construct their sense of proper financial subjectivity, struggling with and constrained by the platform’s own terms.

Desiree Fields is Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. She is an economic geographer and critical urban scholar. Her research program addresses how Wall Street and Silicon Valley are jointly transforming property relations, urbanization, and economic subjectivity. She has published widely in leading human geography and urban studies journals, including Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Progress in Human Geography, Environment and Planning A, and Urban Studies. Dr. Fields was a fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in 2023-24. She is a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation and an editor at Environment and Planning A and Housing, Theory, and Society.

An agrarian geography lens helps clarify the ecological, social, experiential, cosmological, and even political-economic dimensions of what is framed as geopolitical. Overturning the nation-state as dominant scale of reference as well as the neoliberal hierarchy of ‘global’ over ‘local,’ agrarian geography grounds analysis in place-based knowledge, land-based life, social reproductive realms, embedded economics, and sovereignty. As such, it opens space for engaged agricultural policy co-analysis. Drawing on my research since graduating UK Geography, this presentation surveys key examples of how agrarian geography comprises geopolitics—from the seedkeeping tensions that led to and now fracture both the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food & Agriculture and the World Trade Organization Agreement on Agriculture to the grassroots coalitions that drafted and achieved the UN Declarations on the Rights of Peasants & Others Working in Rural Areas. The US Farm Bill began from farm justice movement demands for agricultural parity, just as the Indian farmers uprisings to protect minimum support prices cracked India’s BJP hegemony. An agrarian geography lens elucidates the land-based resistance at the heart of Cold War geopolitics, as well as of course the Haitian, Mexican, and anticolonial revolutions. It unmasks the current genocidal war on Palestine for the land grab it is. The rise of authoritarian ethnonationalism requires critical agrarian geographic analysis. Across Turtle Island, to counter colonialist, white supremacist connotations of ‘agrarian,’ abolitionist orientation is needed—from bell hooks' work to tracing the Kentucky River's Afro-Caribbean legacies. Accordingly, abolitionist agrarian geographies help cultivate emancipatory inter-agricultural relations, diálogo de saberes, and thus agricultural policy co-analysis.

Born and raised in an agricultural community in Kentucky only beginning to reckon with its history of settler colonialism and slavery, Garrett Graddy-Lovelace now researches and teaches agricultural policy and agrarian geography as Provost Associate Professor of Environment, Development & Health Department at American University School of International Service (DC/Piscataway lands), where she co-founded the Ethnographies of Empire Research Cluster. Drawing on community-based scholarship, she also co-founded UK's Political Ecology Working Group, the Disparity to Parity project, the Agroecology Research-Action Collective, and the Pointing the Farm Bill toward Racial Justice initiative. She has a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and is a proud 2011 alum of University of Kentucky’s Geography PhD Program.

 

Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana (UNC Press) is the first book to track the multiscalar formation and contestation of the Louisiana carceral state. Through extensive research, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana’s carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power. Understanding Louisiana’s carceral crisis extends our understanding of the interplay between the crises of mass criminalization and racial capitalism while highlighting the conditions of possibility for dismantling carceral power in all its forms.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is an Assistant Professor of Geography and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky where she teaches and researches on the carceral state, racial capitalism, and grassroots social movements. She is the author of Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana (UNC Press) and co-editor of The Jail Is Everywhere: Organizing Against the New Geography of Mass Incarceration (Verso Books).

The Changing Forms of Social Phenomena Today

In this talk, Ted Schatzki first describes the stream of social thought with which he is associated—theories of practices—before presenting a recently developed general framework for grasping contemporary sociodigital phenomena.

Dr. Theodore Schatzki

Theodore Schatzki is professor of philosophy at the University of Kentucky. Additionally, he is a professor in the Department of Geography and, until September 2024, he is also professor of sociology at Lancaster University in the UK.  Schatzki earned a BA in applied mathematics from Harvard University (1977) and graduate degrees in philosophy from Oxford University (1979) and UC Berkeley (1986).  He joined the philosophy faculty at UK in 1986.

Schatzki’s research interests lie in theorizing social life.  He is widely recognized for his contributions to the contemporary stream of social analysis called practice theory, which is active today in multiple disciplines including sociology, geography, organizational studies, education, anthropology, international relations, and history.  Schatzki is the author of five single-authored monographs, the co-editor of six collected volumes, and responsible for almost ninety articles—and a slew of other pieces—on a wide range of topics in philosophy and social theory.  He has received research support from the Fulbright Commission, the Humboldt Foundation, the ESRC (UK), and the Leverhulme Trust.  Recent work concerns the digital shaping of associations, the notions of space needed to analyze digitalized social phenomena, and (with R. Friedland) a practice institutional analysis of blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and platforms. 

Schatzki has taught a wide variety of courses at UK and other universities in philosophy, geography, sociology, social theory, and environmental studies.  He has chaired nineteen PhD committees.  Administratively, he has served as cofounder and codirector of the Committee on Social Theory (1989-2000), chair of the philosophy department (2002-2007), and senior associate dean in the College (2008-17).  Currently, he is cofounder and co-organizer of a lively international practice theory community boasting over 500 members.  In this capacity, he is coresponsible for reading room series, an online graduate course in practice theory, an annual conference, and occasional topical workshops, among other activities.

Schatzki has been a guest professor or researcher at numerous universities oversees including the University of Exeter, The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Aalborg University Copenhagen, the Karl-Franzens University in Graz, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna, Lancaster University, the University of Bristol, the University of Zurich, the University of Bielefeld, the Free University in Berlin, The Charles Sturt University in Australia, the Catholic University Eichstaett-Ingolstadt in Germany, and the University of Bergen.  In the spring of 2018 he received an honorary doctorate from Aalborg University in Denmark.

A November 29, 2021 article in the Daily Nous based on the Scopus index listed Schatzki as the 13th most cited philosopher in the world in 2020.