Domesticizing Financial Economies:Studying Finance In-between Market Devices, Everyday Calculation and Government

In the wake of the financial crisis, there has been an explosion of interest in the place finance occupies in our societies and economies. This paper suggests a different angle from which to study of finance, interested in how finance is domesticized. Domesticizing finance, as a theoretical and methodological orientation, is about simultaneously studying the use and practice of finance in domestic settings and the ways in which domestic life is enacted as target of varied financial providers and governed in terms of its financial capabilities. We aim to achieve three things in this article. First, in order to illustrate what we mean by “domesticizing finance”, we seek to bring together diverse and often disconnected recent literature from research conducted across a wide range of national settings and from different disciplinary environments. One goal of this paper, therefore, is to help create a lively academic atmosphere for this emerging multidisciplinary and international academic conversation around the place of finance in contemporary life. Second, we expect to demonstrate that what we term domesticizing finance adds a particular modification to the study of finance more generally. The angle suggested here is not only open to the mundane, practices and materialities of finance, but also to learning from and connecting more or less distinct layers of finance that tend to remain analytically separated. Third, we suggest that the type of approach proposed here makes it possible to pose new questions about existing social and economic concepts and problems. We illustrate this point with the example of three such problems, the household, subjectivity, and inequality.