The Debt Cycle

The Debt Cycle

Samuel Kirwan, University of Bristol.

Online and in person at NuSpece (Room TBC)

This talk presents arguments from The Debt Cycle, my book being released later in 2026. The book builds on work done between 2013 and 2018 with advice services, and more recently on gambling in the UK and Australia. The theme of the book, and this talk, are how transformations in money are changing what it means to be in debt.

By the ‘debt cycle’, I mean a movement between debt, despair, hope and surveillance that captures both the disciplining force of indebted life, the speculative desire for hope and escape, and the ‘control’ oriented binding to modulating measures of financial self-worth. This approach recognises the refusal of subjects to accept a life defined entirely by debt repayments. Instead, it is attentive to a cycle in which fears over meeting multiple outgoings and attempts to fend off priority enforcement are articulated alongside hope for better futures and moments of togetherness and pleasure. My argument is that there is a pressing need to be attentive to this cycle given that the credit and gambling industries are already finely attuned to this desire to escape the deadening rhythms of debt repayment.

I discuss this cycle, and its relationship with changing financial technologies, through three key examples: changing uses of data to determine lending risk; use of financial technologies to restrict welfare payments and investigate welfare fraud; and the relationship between gambling, shame, and financial subjectivity.

Samuel Kirwan is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Bristol. His research focuses upon how household finances are shaped by speculative practices of credit and the forms of surveillance attached to the digitalisation of everyday monies. Having carried out work with advice services for many years, since 2023 he has been studying the regulation of gambling platforms and practices in the United Kingdom. He is currently carrying out a comparative project on gambling regulation between the UK and Australia. This talk presents arguments from Dr Kirwan’s upcoming book The Debt Cycle, which presents how changes in money and debt are transforming the traditional subject matters of criminology: policing, punishment, crime, surveillance and behavioural control.