Digital platforms, redistribution and mutual aid
309 Regent St.
London W1B 2HW
UK
Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with Dr Jonathan Paylor and Dr Rebecca Bramall (University of the Arts London), exploring crowdfunding’s possibilities and implications.
Details
Platform companies, policymakers and commentators claim that crowdfunding empowers citizens and makes finance more accessible and egalitarian. Critical scholars of crowdfunding such as Kenworthy (2024) cast doubt over such claims of democratisation, arguing that this platformized mode of voluntary transfer legitimates welfare state entrenchment, undermines tax-funded public services, entrenches inequalities and ultimately serves to maintain the neoliberal order. Such critical work offers a valuable corrective to celebratory accounts of crowdfunding, yet it tends to conceptualize crowdfunding and taxation as essentially rivalrous social mechanisms, overlooking the ‘heterogeneity and diversity of the economic modalities’ (Langley and Leyshon 2017) at play in fundraising settings. Drawing on an affordance analysis of the digital platform Open Collective and ethnographic fieldwork with a London-based mutual aid group, this presentation seeks to bring into focus practices that both trouble critical accounts of crowdfunding and its imbrication in the neoliberalisation of the state, and point to the limitations of existing ways of organising and financing collective welfare projects.
Biographies
Dr Rebecca Bramall is Reader in Cultural Politics at University of the Arts London, where she teaches and researches in the field of media, communications and cultural studies. Rebecca’s research focuses on the communicative dimensions of taxation, exploring the cultural frameworks that enable people to make sense of tax, public spending, and their taxpaying identities. From 2022-25, Rebecca is Project Leader and Principal Investigator for Redistributive Imaginaries: Digitalization, culture and prosocial contribution (ReDigIm), a research and knowledge exchange project investigating meanings and practices of redistribution in Europe. Rebecca is also deputy editor of the journal New Formations and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Cultural Economy.
Dr Jonathan Paylor is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of the Arts London. Jonathan’s background spans the fields of cultural studies and policy studies, and his research interests are centred around the intersection of media and collective life. He is working with Dr Rebecca Bramall on Redistributive Imaginaries: Digitalization, culture and prosocial contribution (ReDigIm).
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