Dr Matthew Sparkes

Neoliberalism; financialisation and debt; social class; cultural consumption; research methods.

Matthew’s main research interest is in social class. This has led him to explore literature on credit and debt, identity, stigma, consumer culture, cultural class analysis, media studies, and political economy. His research is conducted in an emergent discipline of class analysis that investigates classificatory struggles. The discipline seeks to demystify the classifications and discourses mobilised to contain social phenomena caused by specific socio-economic practices, along with the values and norms they establish, in an attempt to uncover the institutional, cultural and economic landscape governing people within contemporary Britain.

Matthew recently completed a study that examined these processes. The project examined the relationship between credit/debt, neoliberal social and economic policies and governance, social class and rising inequality in the UK, placing the rise of credit and the impact of this in an historical context. Matthew drew upon qualitative interviews with individuals using the services of a debt charity, to explore how inequality creates processes of insecurity triggered by classificatory struggles and whether credit is used to navigate and ameliorate its effects.

Matthew is now currently working on a project exploring how stigma surrounding problem debt and insolvency is crafted and circulated by political actors and debt collection organisations to induce compliance in debtors.

Overall, Matthew’s research strives to challenge readings of inequality as the result of moral and individual failure and instead seeks to illuminate how inequality and its effects are produced through contemporary modes of governmentality for specific purposes.