Eric Arnould: "Towards a Neo-Animist Consumption Paradigm"

Consumers seek environmentally friendly options, yet the dominant market exchange and consumption paradigm restricts a transition to a sustainable economy. Therefore, we propose a neo-animist inspired consumption paradigm offering more sustainable resource circulation and value cocreation practices between people, and between humanity and the rest of the biome.

Søren Askegaard: "Putting the anthropos back in consumer research"

The purpose of the presentation is to open for a missing dialogue between consumer culture theorization and biological anthropology and biology. In this sense, it is a kind of “manifesto” for a future interdisciplinary research program.

The point of departure is for consumer researchers to get beyond and avoid the lure of much of the standard evolutionary Neo-Darwinist theorizing with its focus on a sharp division between innate and acquired features and adaptationism as the driving logic. Instead, consumer culture theory can – and should – find inspiration in open systems approaches to human biology and culture, in biosemiotics, and in current movements toward a post-anthropocentric anthropology that reinserts the human as a “becoming” element in a dynamic natural unfolding.

Finally, it is argued that such a renewed dialogue is pivotal in the establishment of an ecological wisdom for addressing contemporary issues of climate change and sustainability.
 
Susanna Molander will act as moderator.

Welcome to a research seminar organized by the Consumer Culture Theory Research Group here at SBS.