I’m currently working as a research fellow as part of the GAMSOC project
funded by the European Research Council (ERC) to explore questions about
gambling and the commercialisation of risk in Europe. Within this
collaborative project, my specific research is focusing on the
misunderstood relationship between trading and gambling. For this reason,
I’m both interested in the everyday lives of investors/traders
(professionals and non-professionals), the retail financial industry, the
products they offer (especially trading online platforms), financial
regulation and the history of financial services in the UK and Europe. In
relation to this particular environment, I will explore questions about
money, time, technology, morality, uncertainty/risk, luck, work and
consumption. Three other researchers are also part of the GAMSOC project
and are currently exploring the same topic through different questions and
contexts: Rebecca Cassidy is working on the UK online gambling industry,
Julie Scott on domestic and commercial gambling in Cyprus and Andrea Pisac
on casino gamblers and their families in Slovenia. Through these four
distinctive case studies, the GAMSOC project is intending to demonstrate
the advantage of studying gambling and the commercialisation of risk in
its cultural, geographical, historical and regulatory diversity.

My previous research which I carried out for my doctorate thesis between
2006 and 2010 was about Chinese casino players in London. It was jointly
funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the
Responsible Gambling Fund (RGF). I explored then how the practice of
casino gambling was specific to the wider perspective and unequal
conditions of Chinese individuals’ lives in the UK and also how it was
defined by their experiences of other risk-taking activities such as
migration, doing business, working in the informal economy or trading.
Through this particular context, I also developed questions relating to
temporality, money, greed, luck, agency, individualism, exchange,
uncertainty/risk, migration and entrepreneurship.