Anthropology of Play and Games
~ A seminar series organised by Hazel Andrews (Liverpool John Moores),
Kellynn Wee (UCL) and the RAI~
Tuesday 12 May 2026, 3.00 – 5.00pm BST
This is an online event. Please register here.
Prediction markets: how a gambling mechanism meets a political moment
Dr Anthony Pickles (Associate Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Birmingham)
chaired by: Dr Wesam Hassan (London School of Economics and Political Science)
When I started investigating political gambling in 2022 it was primarily a UK-centred subculture of gambling, positioned by industry PR men as sitting astride gentlemanly wagering, internet savvy and mathematical sophistication (and sophistry). In 2026, as ‘prediction markets’, political gambling is a US-led saviour for (or replacement to) the crypto sector, a NYSE-endorsed mechanism for price discovery, a market for derivatives that threatens to swallow its competitors, a gateway to federally sanctioned sports gambling, and the source of regular stories or reporter and athlete intimidation, insider trading, market manipulation, wash trading and politicised investment in the platforms themselves. This working paper comes as health economist Samiratu Wahab and I currently prepare our UKRI Rapid Evidence Review addressing whether political gambling represents a unique harm to people in the UK. I blend literature review and ethnographic example to address this academic challenge while also trying to tease out a truly anthropological story: how a 26 year-old technology representing a tiny fraction of UK gambling could, without any fundamental changes, be reimagined as the hottest thing in 21st Century finance.
Anthony Pickles is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Birmingham where he teaches on economy, sport, and the future. His book Money Games, based on his first fieldwork in a town in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, considers how introduced currency and gambling reshaped economic logics on the ground. His current book project explores political gambling as (suddenly) a cutting edge tool for gamifying capitalism.
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 returning to academia, she worked for over a decade in public health and humanitarian aid with UN agencies and the third sector.