Mark Thomas Fraser Kear

Interests

Research

Financial Inclusion/Exclusion, Alternative/Fringe Finance, Governmentality, Credit Scoring, Financial Education, Urban Finance, Financialization, Marketization, Consumer Credit

Teaching

Urban Development, Urban Change, Urban History, Tucson, Urban Sustainability, Economic Geography, Commodification, Financial Geography

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Chapters

• Kear, M. T., & Hartman, J. (2019). Critical Financial Geography. In Routledge Critical Finance Studies Handbook.

Journals/Publications

• Kear, M. T. (2017). The Moral Economy of the Serial Crowd: Affective topologies of the credit score. N/A.
• Kear, M. T., & Launius, S. (2019). Fixing Financialization in the Credit-Constrained City. Urban Geography.
• Kear, M. T. (2018). Innovating and improvising the social contract in the US financial borderscape. Journal of Cultural Economy, 11(5), 489-495. doi:doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2018.1448880
• Kear, M. (2017). Playing the credit score game: algorithms,‘positive’data and the personification of financial objects. Economy and Society. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2017.1412642
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  This paper is about how people are learning to ‘make themselves up’ in response to the market’s new algorithmic ways of seeing. More specifically, it explores how the self-datafication of informal financial relations is being used to affect the calculation of credit score. I argue that credit score functions as a legal technology of arbitration beset with contradictions that are giving rise to inchoate struggles over the distribution of calculative agency in consumer credit markets. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of credit building peer ‘lending circles’, the paper explores how financially marginalized groups and financial inclusion advocates are reacting to the blind spots and biases of credit-scoring algorithms through compensatory and transgressive data-generation practices.
• Kear, M. (2017). The Marketsite: A New Conceptualization of Market Spatiality. Economic Geography, 22. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/00130095.2017.1312337
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  Economic geographers have deployed a variety of spatial categories (e.g., scale, territory and border) to describe and theorize the spatiality of market making and marketization processes. This article supplements these accounts with insights from the work of post-structural geographers oriented toward the site. To this end, the article introduces the notion of the marketsite. Marketsites are points where heterogeneous elements are brought together and assembled in an effort to realize the conditions required for the performance of model markets and market subjectivities. Using the example of smart disclosure, the article argues that the use of disclosure labels to improve consumer decision making has transformed the point of sale and other transactional junctures into incipient marketsites—niches where various behavioral techniques are deployed to summon into being subjects who behave as if they were Homines economici. The behavioral turn in economics has focused the market-making efforts of a variety of actors on the market subject and strategic sites in people’s everyday lives where they can be guided and nudged into alignment with market models. Together such marketsites delineate a new, and largely uncharted, geography of encounter between (behavioral) economic theory and actually existing markets. Drawing on fieldwork developing and testing a fee disclosure box for a prepaid debit card, I show that the production of marketsites, where Homo economicus can survive, is a messy process that rarely succeeds. Regardless, such efforts reveal valuable insights into how the behavioral turn in economics is reshaping the spatiality of market-making processes.
• Kear, M. T. (2016). Peer lending and the subsumption of the informal. Journal of Cultural Economy, 9(3), 261-276. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2015.1135472
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  The informal financial practices of financially ‘excluded’ groups in theUnited States are being enrolled in a regulatory project to make newmarkets and produce financially self-sufficient subjects on the edges ofthe financial system. Drawing on mixed-methods qualitative researchworking with nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area, this paperexplores how informal rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs)are being repurposed and formalized to make the risks of financiallyexcluded groups legible, tractable and priceable for ‘mainstream’financial service providers. In so doing, the paper explores how thecredit score orders practices and relations that are ‘outside’ of the‘financial mainstream’. While others have documented how the efforts ofNGOs to marketize and commodify the social networks and culturalpractices of the poor result in forms of dispossession, this is not whatmy research finds. Instead, I show how formalized ROSCAs areredistributing calculative agency, and enabling financially underservedgroups to exert strategic control over the calculation of their credit scores.
• Kear, M. T. (2014). The scale effects of financialization: The Fair Credit Reporting Act and the production of financial space and subjects. Geoforum, 57.
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  This paper excavates recent legislative efforts to construct a national space for the purchase and sale of consumer credit risk in the United States. During the mid-1990s and early 2000s the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA 1970) was amended several times in an effort to produce a national space in which consumer credit risk could be priced in “place-free” terms. This effort to produce a national consumer credit space provides insight into several extant and emerging issues in financial geography. First, the recent history of FCRA shows how the (re)production of financial relations at a national level can reshape financial relations at other scalar levels, and vice versa. Second, it reveals that processes of financial subject formation are more closely tied to the production and reproduction of geographical scale than has been previously demonstrated. Finally, I argue that the rescaling(s) that have attended the amendment of FCRA have reworked the relationship between individuals and their virtual financial selves (i.e. credit reports and scores) in ways that have created new tensions, contradictions and sites of struggle in the nascent post-crisis politics of financialization.

Presentations

• Kear, M. T., & Wilder, M. O. (2019, Spring). Home on the Fringe. AAG AGM.
• Kear, M. T., & Wilder, M. O. (2019, Spring). Lives in a Trailer. AAG AGM.
• Kear, M. T. (2019, Spring / Summer). Three Community Presentations about Manufactured Housing. Community Outreach.
• Kear, M. T. (2019, Spring to Fall). Conference presentations about manufactured housing. Institute for New Economic Thinking AAG PreConference, AAG AGM, Cultures and Spaces of Debt and Finance Mini Conference, APCG.
• Kear, M. T. (2018, April). Collectivity Under “Über-Capitalism”: The moral economy of the serial crowd. Association of American Geographers AGM. New Orleans.
• Kear, M. T. (2018, October 2018). The ‘Manufactured Housing Gap’ in Tucson and Pima County. Equitable Development of Housing and Neighborhoods Forum. Tucson: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
• Kear, M. T. (2017, April). The Psychological State and the Assembly of Financial Subjects. AAG AGM. Boston, MA: AAG.
• Kear, M. T. (2017, November). Simple financialisation: From credit scores to urban development. Instersections of Finance and Society. London, England.
• Kear, M. T. (2018, April 2019). “Duty to Serve” and the Redemption of Chattel: GSEs, Manufactured housing and the lessons of the little subprime crisis. AAG. Washington DC.
• Kear, M. T., & Launius, S. (2017, April). Hybrid-Machines: Local Growth Coalitions and Global Financial Markets. AAG AGM. Boston, MA: AAG.
• Kear, M. (2016, Spring). The Realization of Value in Payment Space. AAG AGM.
• Kear, M. T. (2016, Summer). Moral Economies of Financial Self-Care: Credit Building Community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) 28th Annual Meeting. Berkeley: SASE.

Others

• Kear, M. T., Solis, P., Wilder, M. O., & Sullivan, E. (2019, April). Crisis Housing Assemblages (Sessions at AAG).
• Kear, M. T., Christopherson, G., Launius, S., Handschuh, T., Meyer, D., & Hartman, J. (2019, August). White paper -- Making Action Possible (MAP) Proposal: A Comprehensive Vulnerability Assessment of Tucson’s Mobile-Home Communities.
• Kear, M. T., Johnson, R., & Harker, C. (2019, April). Debt: Coping, Supporting, Overcoming, Resisting and Enduring (AAG Sessions).
• Kear, M. T. (2019, April 2019). Debt: Coping, Supporting, Overcoming, Resisting and Enduring. AAG.