Navigating addiction and agency in speculative economies

This paper explores gambling addiction as a critical site for examining how treatment technologies, speculative economies, and notions of agency intersect in times of economic precarity. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research in Turkey during the recent currency crisis, I trace how individuals often labelled as (addicts) navigate the contradictory terrains of biomedical, legal, and psychological interventions on the one hand, and digital speculative infrastructures, cryptocurrency trading, horse racing, sports betting, on the other.

While treatment programs frequently frame addiction as a pathological loss of control, speculative economies valorise precisely the same risk-taking impulses as entrepreneurial, agile, and future-oriented. Through ethnographic encounters with gamblers and traders who moved between therapy sessions, informal financial networks, and Telegram trading groups, I ask: How do people reconcile treatment regimes that cast them as powerless with economic domains that demand, even reward, risk? What forms of fragile yet meaningful agency emerge in these negotiations?

Central to this analysis are the affective grammars of speculation, from the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) to the Fear of Being an Idiot (FOBI), which shape both action and self-perception in precarious economic landscapes. By situating addiction within broader shifts in economic subjectivity, I argue that addiction is best understood not as a fixed biomedical category, but as a fluid and relational condition, entangled with economic precarity, structural violence, cultural imaginaries, and speculative aspiration. Such a perspective complicates static narratives of addiction as disorder, while also reframing agency as a practice of navigating contradictions rather than embodying autonomy.

Speaker biography

Dr Wesam Hassan is an anthropologist and trained medical doctor whose research lies at the intersection of medical and economic anthropology. Currently a Fellow in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and a postdoctoral affiliate at the University of Oxford. She researches uncertainty, temporality, speculation, and risk in contexts of economic and health crises and technological affordances. Dr. Hassan completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford, with long-term ethnographic work on gambling, cryptocurrency trading, and moral economies in Turkey’s urban centres amid economic collapse. Her earlier research at the American University in Cairo examined biomedical uncertainty and the governance of HIV-positive subjectivities in Egypt.

Her scholarship, published in peer-reviewed journals, investigates how speculative infrastructures mediate survival strategies in precarious futures shaped by ecological, political, and economic crises. Her work has critically examined the moral and material economies of gambling, cryptocurrency and gambling, digital speculation, and healthcare infrastructures, tracing how risk, uncertainty, and future imaginaries are negotiated in contexts of socio-economic crisis. Before academia, she worked for over a decade in public health, development consulting, and humanitarian aid with UN agencies.

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