Goldsmiths - University of London

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Joe Deville

BA/ MA/ PhD

tel: +44 (0)20 7919 7707

Email:j.deville@gold.ac.uk

I am a post-doctoral researcher at CSISP, working on the ERC funded 'Organising Disaster' project with Michael Guggenheim, Zuzana Hrdlickova and Luke Evans. I completed my ESRC funded PhD in 2011 at Goldsmiths, titled 'The Landscape of Consumer Credit Default: Tracing Technologies of Market Attachment'. This follows the changing calculative landscapes that heavily indebted and defaulting consumer credit borrowers in the UK move through, from periods of borrowing, to managing debts, to being confronted by debt collectors. It also focuses on the problematic of debt default from the point of view of the collector, exploring the increasingly sophisticated technologies and techniques being used to attempt to convince debtors to repay. I was also a visiting scholar at the Centre on Organizational Innovation at Columbia University from January to March 2009. Further, at Goldsmiths, I have worked as a researcher at the Centre for Urban and Community Research and have taught in both the sociology department and the department of Professional and Community Education (PACE).

Research interests

My research interests cluster around the sociology of expertise, economic sociology, science and technology studies, and non-representational theory. In my PhD research, I brought this to the task of expanding the scope of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) influenced approaches to the study of social life, exploring the opportunities and elisions within the ANT inflected ‘economization’ programme within economic sociology. By focusing on the interactions between defaulting debtors and the debt collections industry, the thesis draws attention not only to the socio-material composition of markets and calculative practices, but also to how, in certain domains of socio-economic life, forms of action that are emergent and ‘non-representational’, that may not have a clear-cut relationship to human perception, understanding, or consciousness, can nonetheless become central to processes of market-making.

Selected publications

(2011), 'The Landscape of Consumer Credit Default: Tracing Technologies of Market Attachment', Unpublished PhD Thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London.

(2009), “Debt Collection Devices: Tracing Technologies of Affect”, Re-Public [Online], Available at http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=1462.

(2008), ‘Shopping With Each Other: Liminal Exchanges on the Northcote Road’, Goldsmiths Sociology Research Papers [Online], London: Goldsmiths College. Available at http://www.gold.ac.uk/media/deville-booklet.pdf.