Research seminar on Consumer Culture and Sustainability

Seminar

Date: Friday 22 September 2023

Time: 10.00 – 12.00

Location: Lärosal 4, Building 2, Campus Albano

We have the pleasure of hosting Eric Arnould (Aalto University) and Søren Askegaard (University of Southern Denmark), two scholars who have been instrumental in shaping the field of Consumer Culture Theory over several decades.

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.