Youth and the consumption of credit

Abstract

This article explores young people’s consumption of credit and the role of credit and debt in the distinction between youth and adulthood. The article engages with recent shifts in the nature of credit that have turned credit into an object of consumption in itself, as well as broader arguments about the financialisation of daily life, in order to understand the temporalities and moral distinctions enacted in different forms of credit and debt among youth. While it is well recognised that financialised capitalism operates and creates value from differences including gender, racialisation and class, the formation of youth subjectivities through credit and debt technologies remains unexplored in the literature despite an emerging crisis of consumer credit among young people. With this in mind, this article draws on a qualitative study of youth, credit and debt, to show that young people experience debt within contradictory temporalities and calculative logics, including the long-term ‘investments’ required to become an adult, and the logic of consumption attached to consumer credit which positions credit as a failure of self-responsible adulthood because it places future creditworthiness in jeopardy. In this way, the article suggests a future research agenda on the way that biographical distinctions are enacted through credit and debt, and how notions of youth and adulthood contribute to the qualification and consumption of credit.