23 June 2020
Research project will shed light on contemporary inequality
Dr Mareike Beck has joined the Department of European and International Studies to work on a new project.
Dr Beck has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and will work on a project entitled Asset-based Inequality in the Age of Asset Management.
Since the 2000s, individual asset ownership (like housing and stocks) has become key to everyday life and social stratification in the US and UK. However, political economists have made little progress in theorising how this trend corresponds to new forms of asset-based inequality.
Focusing on housing, the project will investigate how financial assets affect households differently, depending on their place within the income distribution. The work will theorise how everyday asset management interacts with global asset management to produce new forms of asset-based inequality.
Dr Beck hopes the project will make a major empirical and theoretical contribution to understanding contemporary inequality.
Dr Beck completed her PhD, entitled German Banking and the Rise of Financial Capitalism, A Case of Extraverted Financialisation, at the University of Sussex. Her areas of research focus on feminist political economy, financialisation and banking. She combines these areas to develop a social history of finance that zooms in on the role of households and banks as drivers for financial innovation and new forms of inequality.
She currently works with Dr Johnna Montgomerie, head of the department, on the project Opening the Black-Box of the Household: qualitative investigation into ideas and practices of cultures of expertise, which is being funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.