Apparently I am a “macro-structural” determinist now. I wasn’t aware of that , but according Reijonen 2011 (in an article titled ‘Environmentally friendly consumer: from determinism to emergence” in the section on “macro-structuralism”) my article on “Ethical selving in cultural contexts” makes me just that: Several scholars advocate a particular type of dominant social paradigm (Kilbourne ...
In his ground-breaking analysis of the emergence of the Nurcu movement in Turkey, Şerif Mardin operates with the concept of an “Islamic idiom” in order to explain how the receptiveness for Islamic legitimation has survived the secularist onslaught of Kemalism in the first decades after the demise of the Ottoman Empire. ‘Every author who has ...
Whenever I come across any work on consumerism and religion – and particularly consumerism and Islam – I check whether it confirms or otherwise my own more theoretical piece on religion and consumerism. I am currently putting together a research proposal under the working title “Shopping for Turkish/Muslim Spiritualities, Identities and Ethics in the UK”, ...
In my article “After Heroism: Religion Versus Consumerism” I argued that one effect of the adaptation religions undergo in order to survive under the hegemony of consumer culture is a move from radical commitment to “occasionalism” in which religiosity appears as an individual choice – a choice which is, crucially, reversible. This, in turn, would ...
(this is a follow-up to my last post on Kierkegaard and romantic consumption which ends on a reference to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner) Yesterday I listened in to the “Vox Project” on Radio 4, a programme on voice over artists, one of whom mentioned Don La Fontaine as the inventor of the “In a world…” phrase. ...
I realised I should read a bit more Kierkegaard when one of our undergraduates made reference to him when writing on consumer culture and commodified selves/identities – and I found I had overlooked a thing or two in my first reading of him a decade ago. Delving into the Sickness unto Death, what I found ...
this is an illustration to be read in conjunction with the conclusion of my last post here. i’ve just come across an old Mirror article which Bob Doherty and Sophi Tranchel highlight in their article “Radical Mainstreaming” (in Equal Opportunities International – you need a subscription to access this). the article is from 5th November ...
[This is a talk I have given at a Great Western Research Sustainability Seminar, 2nd November 2009] In the UK, fair trade has been around for at least thirty years now – but it was only in the late 1990s that it became an object for academic reflection. And it was only in the 2000s ...
(Paper presented at the 4th International Plessner Conference, 16th to 18th September, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands) pdf Consumer culture has few defenders and there are even fewer who dare to argue that consumer culture may in a sense make us broader and deeper personalities. In this talk I will try to make the case ...
[this is an opinion piece i’ve written for e-IR] The idea of fairtrade is, at first glance, a paradoxical one. Observing that the capitalist world market works to the disfavour of producers in the Third World, left wing and Christian campaigners from the 1970s onwards tried to use this unfair market to establish equitable North-South ...