The Debt Cycle: How Cashless Technologies are Transforming Crime, Justice and Everyday Life

Samuel Kirwan

Sep 2027 · Policy Press

Ebook

224

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Tools

Eligible

This book will become available on September 1, 2027. You will not be charged until it is released.

About this ebook

This book exposes how, in our increasingly fintech-dominated societies, money quietly governs our everyday lives. Exploring digital payments, cashless systems and the growing reach of financial surveillance, it reveals a new form of power rooted in the risks, obligations and visibilities attached to money, arguing that financial systems are increasingly inseparable from regimes of punishment.

Through the lens of the ‘debt cycle’ - a movement between anxiety, hope, control and enforcement - the book shows how criminal justice institutions intensify these pressures through fines, seizures and coercive debt. It advances a new framework for understanding how financial systems entrench inequality and is grounded in extensive qualitative research with debt advice services and indebted households.

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About the author

Dr. Samuel Kirwan is a Research Associate working on the New Sites of Legal Consciousness Project at the University of Bristol. Dr Kirwan has strong links with Citizens Advice Bureaux across the United Kingdom, with other advice services in the Bristol area, and with Citizens Advice and Citizens Advice Scotland. He is a founding member of the Authority Research Network and regularly contributes to the blog at authorityresearch.net/blog. His publications include Space, Power and the Making of the Commons (Routledge, 2015) Advising in Austerity: Reflections on Challenging Times for Advice Agencies (Chapter: Advice on the law but not legal advice so much: weaving law and lief into debt service)

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