Vol.
7, No. 2, May 2006
Consumer
Studies Research Network
Research and Areas of Interest, April 2006
Diane Barthel-Bouchier
(dbarthel@notes.cc.sunysb.edu),
Stony Brook University, is working on issues pertaining to cars
and car ownership.
Amy Best (abest@gmu.edu)
George Mason University, studies youth, culture, and social inequalities
with a particular focus on the intersection of popular cultural
forms and youth identity projects.
Gwen Bingle (Gwen.Bingle@mzwtg.mwn.de), Deutsches Museum
Munich, Germany, studies the historical emergence and appropriation
of fitness and wellness in Germany, with a particular emphasis
on technologies linked to food, cosmetics, movement and alternative
health practices.
Sam Binkley (sbinkley@thing.net), Emerson College, addresses
the consequences of new cultures of consumption on individuality
and subjectivity in advance capitalist societies with an emphasis
on countercultures of the 60's and 70's.
Grant Blank (grant.blank@acm.org), American University,
studies reviews of consumer products and the arts emphasizing
the production process that generates the reviews, the various
meanings that consumers attach to reviews, the credibility and
ethics of reviews, and the impact of reviews on society and culture.
Keith Brown (brownkei@sas.upenn.edu), University of Pennsylvania,
studies the construction of markets for Fair Trade products, focusing
on how individuals are mobilized to consume and how consumers
collectively identify themselves.
Thomas Burr (tcburr@ucdavis.edu), University of California,
is developing a definition of, and some day a theory of, markets
as a sequence of interactions between the producers and the consumers
of a product by researching the national bicycle markets of France
and the United States around the turn of the 20th century.
Gordon C. Chang (gcchang@ucsd.edu), University of California,
San Diego, studies the knowledges and discourses constituting
consumer society, focusing on their manifestation in U.S. higher
education, such as in the phenomenon of college rankings and in
the "high-tuition, high-aid" policy movement.
Dan Cook (dtcook@uiuc.edu),
University of Illinois, studies children's consumer culture (recently
food) with particular emphasis on the interaction between marketing
practice and discourse, the construction of children as subjects
through goods and consumption and mothers' efforts to balance
the two.
Michaela DeSoucey
(m-desoucey@northwestern.edu), Northwestern
University, is interested in consumption politics, controversies,
and movements, particularly around food and foodways, as they
connect social, cultural and economic practices in Western consumer
societies.
Dominique Desjeux
(d.desjeux@argonautes.fr), professor of Social
and Cultural Anthropology at the Sorbonne, University of Paris
5, focuses daily life consumptions in France, Europe, Africa,
China and the US focused on social practices, material constraints
and imaginary (new technology of Communication, health, energy,
ordinary goods and services, food, mobility, garbage).
Randal Doane (Randal.Doane@oberlin.edu), Oberlin College,
is presently using Foucault's work on governmentality to design
a study of urban bicycle cooperatives as a new urbanist, anti-car,
anti-sexist, anti-racist technology of the self.
Heather A. Downs (hdowns@uiuc.edu), University of Illinois,
studies women and consumption with particular focus on leisure
activities.
David Ekerdt (dekerdt@ku.edu), University of Kansas, studies
aging and possessions, focusing in particular on episodes of "household
disbandment," being the compass of activities that people
undertake to manage and dispose of possessions when moving from
larger to smaller quarters in later life.
Susan Falls (falls.susan@gmail.com), Tenple University,
explores the semiotics of consumerism through ethnographic research
of the diamond industry (with consumers), while contextualizing
the practice within history, political economy and marketing discourse.
Tally Katz-Gerro (tkatz@soc.haifa.ac.il), University of Haifa,
Israel, studies cultural consumption, omnivorousness, material
consumption, leisure, and time use with particular emphasis on
the way cultural participation and cultural tastes are stratified
in Western societies.
Tarleton Gillespie
(tlg28@cornell.edu), Cornell University, studies controversies
surrounding copyright and new technology, with an eye for
how legal disputes mask the introduction of technologically-mediated
commercial arrangements, and help reify the dichotomy between
producer and consumer.
George Gonos (gonosgc@potsdam.edu), SUNY-Potsdam, focuses
on workers' simultaneous role as commodities and consumers.
Laurel Graham (lgraham@cas.usf.edu), University of South
Florida (Tampa), is interested in the relationship between poverty
and consumer dignity as well as the social construction of parents
as consumers for their young children.
Peter Grahame (pgrahame@comcast.net), Dickinson College,
studies ecotourism and wildlife watching with emphasis on the
Caribbean context with a key focus on the conversion of the working
landscape into a site of consumption.
Michael Haedicke (mhaedick@ucsd.edu), University of California,
San Diego, studies the expansion and consolidation of the organic
and natural foods industry, with specific interest in how small,
independent businesses work to preserve a distinctive character
in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
Karen Halnon (kbh4@psu.edu), Pennsylvania State University,
has a book in progress, Poor Chic: Poverty Fads and Fashions
in Popular Culture, which is a study of the "how"
and "why" of poverty fads and fashions across popular
culture today that make stylish, recreational, and often expensive
"fun" symbols of lower class statuses.
Amy Hanser (hanser@interchange.ubc.ca), University of
British Columbia, has conducted research on China's emerging service
sector and consumer culture, and her future research will continue
to explore the implications of an emerging consumer culture for
structures of inequality in urban China.
Mary Elizabeth Hughes
(mehughes@soc.duke.edu),
Duke University, is currently investigating the impact of material
aspirations on the timing of marriage with a focus on homeownership
and writing a "thought piece" about integrating consumption
into life course studies.
Shelley Koch (slkoch@mail.ku.edu) University of Kansas,
studies consumption as work, specifically women's work in food
shopping.
Lauren Langman (llangma@luc.edu ), Loyola University,
Chicago, studies transgressive consumption (i.e., Carnival), body
modification and consumer spaces.
Yu Ying Lee (yylee@fcu.edu.tw), Fengchia University, is
conducting research on the formation of Taiwanese consumer
culture and writing a textbook on the "'consumption of sociology"
in Chinese.
Christian Licoppe
(licoppe@enst.fr), Ecole Nationale des Telecommunications,
France, studies buying and selling at a distance, such as activity
studies in call centres and ecommerce.
Lissette Aliaga Linares
(lissette@prc.utexas.edu), University of Texas,
uses a recent survey conducted during fieldwork to study the impact
of supermarkets spatial positioning in street markets customers
comparing low income neighborhoods in Lima and Santiago de Chile.
Carol Lindquist (cslindquist@msn.com), Stony Brook University,
heads up the Household Meals Project which examines the division
of food-related labor in households, including shopping for groceries
to understand domestic political processes and balance of power
among household members.
Linda Lobao (Lobao.1@osu.edu), Ohio State University, looks
at the consumption and production of collectible pottery, glassware,
and other collectibles from old industrial regions, specifically
the Ohio River Valley.
Janet A. Lorenzen
(jlorenzen@sociology.rutgers.edu),
Rutgers University, studies situated global consumerism, consumer
culture networks and the reconfiguration of status in nontraditional
and/or low resource communities.
E. Doyle McCarthy
(mccarthy@fordham.edu),
Fordham University, is writing a book about U.S. culture today,
how consumer culture and mass media foster new "feeling rules"
and highly emotional cultural practices, including spectator sports,
memorializing, new forms of art, leisure, and mass entertainment.
Wm. Alex McIntosh,
(w-mcintosh@neo.tamu.edu), Texas A&M University
presently studies how children and parents spend time and how
this affects their consumption of food at home
and food
away from home.
Jennifer Smith Maguire
(jbs7@le.ac.uk), University of Leicester (UK),
studies consumer body culture (in particular, how fitness and
the social value of the fit body are produced by the media,
cultural intermediaries and leisure industries) and the cultural
economy of style (in particular, how notions of style and taste
are negotiated in the production and consumption of domestic interior
design).
Robert Manning (creditcardnation@yahoo.com), Rochester Institute
of Technology, examines the household lifecycle and the role of
credit/debt—especially in the context of deregulation of
consumer financial services—as it influences cognitive and
behavioral consumption outcomes in the US and abroad (see www.LendingTree.com/livingwithdebt/).
Jan Marontate (jan.marontate@acadiau.ca), Canada Research
Chair in Technology and Culture at Acadia University (Wolfville,
Canada) is currently studying new computer-based creative practices
in the arts and digital imaging in laboratory sciences focusing
the place of interdisciplinary collaborations in innovation and
the implications the use of new media for culture heritage preservation.
Robert Mayer (Robert.Mayer@fcs.utah.edu), Utah, has just
completed a project, funded by AARP, on the advice offered to
consumers on how to protect their financial privacy and, based
on a national survey, the extent to which consumers are following
this advice in their behavior
Laura Miller (lamiller@brandeis.edu), Brandeis University,
is working on a project that examines the relationship between
the health/natural foods industry and natural foods as a social
movement.
Susan Munkres (susan.munkres@furman.edu), Furman University,
examines the sustainable agriculture movement, both on divisions
within the movement over organic certification, and on the conflict
between the "local" and "organic" frames.
Michele Ollivier (ollivier@uottawa.ca), University of Ottawa,
is interested in tastes and cultural practices focusing primarily
on the various uses of the rhetoric of cultural diversity in the
social sciences and in everyday life, especially in relation to
arts consumption.
Lynn Owens (lowens@wesleyan.edu), Wesleyan University,
examines the intersections and interactions between tourism and
social activism, with an eye towards how these two combine to
both produce and consume place.
Krista Paulsen (kpaulsen@unf.edu), University of North Florida,
is currently studying residential real estate marketing and sales
practices, with an eye to how representations of home and community
may perpetuate segregation in terms of race, class, age, and family
status.
Jan Phillips (jphillip@bates.edu),
University of Southern Maine/Lewiston-Auburn College, is currently
researching the ways we accomplish or enact family through the
routine, recurring work of consumption.
Robert Rattle (at758@ncf.ca),
Independent Researcher/Consultant, studies and consults on various
aspects of sustainable consumption integrating themes across different
sectors with an emphasis on the (social) determinants of health
within a population health approach and an ecosystems health framework,
with current projects in the following general areas: tobacco,
healthy living and sustainable consumption; integrated impact
assessment; Aboriginal well-being and non-renewable resource development;
and book "Globalization, ICTs and Sustainable Consumption"
anticipated late 2006.
Julie Raulli (jraulli@wilson.edu),
Wilson College, studies resale consumption, the destigmatization
of used goods in U.S. society, and the social, political and economic
implications of resale consumption in the context of increased
economic inequality in the United States.
David Redmon (dwredmon@yahoo.com) utilizes visual sociology
that links the connections between labor, consumption, and local
carnival economies. www.mardigrasmadeinchina.com.
George Ritzer (Ritzer@socy.umd.edu), University of Maryland,
applies social theory to the everyday realms of the economy and
consumption
James Roebuck (roebuck@ag.arizona.edu), University of Arizona,
studies the sociology of /sound/ with an emphasis on how class-based
cultural preferences relate to the socioacoustic properties of
musical genres.
Joe Rumbo (rumbojd@jmu.edu), James Madison University,
is currently working on three manuscripts related to my research
on how participants in an alternative sociocultural formation
known as the Rainbow Gathering interpret the significance of their
wide-ranging cultural practices, beliefs, and identity projects
with respect to the marketplace.
J. Michael Ryan (mryan@socy.umd.edu), University of Maryland-College
Park, studies the social geographies of consumption, the relationship
of consumption to new urbanism, and the interplay between consumption
and globalization.
Marc Sanford (mmsanfor@uchicago.edu), University of Chicago,
researches consumption as a measure of neighborhood homogeneity
using grocery store scanner data.
Juliet Schor (juliet.schor@bc.edu), Boston College, has
focused on issues pertaining to trends in work and leisure, consumerism,
the relationship between work and family, women's issues and economic
justice over the last ten years.
Joel Stillerman (stillejo@gvsu.edu), Grand Valley State University,
examines embedded retail transactions and the public character
of shopping areas via ethnographic analysis of street markets
and malls in Santiago, Chile.
Lakshmi Srinivas
(srinivasl@earthlink.net), Wellesley College,
studies film reception, consumer practices and lived experience,
public culture, media ethnography, globalization and Indian cinema.
Bas Spierings (B.Spierings@rug.nl), University of Nijmegen/
Groningen, The Netherlands, studies the social production of consumption
spaces with particular emphasis on commercialisation processes
in cities and the impact of counternarratives and alternative
movements.
Anna Tikhomirova (atikhomi@yandex.ru), University of Bielefeld,
Germany, studies fashion and clothes consumption of "women
of intelligentsia" in the GDR and the Soviet Union in comparison,
in the 1960s - 1980s, with particular emphasis on the mechanisms
of "distinctions" in the late state-socialist societies
with their politics of levellings.
Zsuzsanna Vargha (zv2003@columbia.edu), Columbia University,
is interested in risk and calculation in consumer practices regarding
finance, the operation of financial markets for consumers, and
the advertising industry both as cultural producers and as a trade
or profession.
Thomas Volscho (thomas.volscho@uconn.edu), University of Connecticut,
studies radical political economy and is working on a Neo-Marxist
theory of consumer society that emphasizes the dialectics of interests
between workers and consumers.
Jeff Wang (wang1@email.arizona.edu), University of Arizona,
examines the intersection of consumption and components of social
relationships (e.g., independence, obligation, and responsibility)
by studying the phenomenon of consumer debt.
Amelia Rosenberg Weinreb
(ameliaro@sas.upenn.edu),
University of Pennsylvania,
studies links between citizens
and consumers and consumption and migration in Latin America (particularly
from Cuba and Costa Rica), and the meaning of consumption in welfare
states.
Lois West (westl@fiu.edu),
Florida International University, is researching kids and their
experience in Wannado City (in Florida), the first role-playing
theme park in the U.S.
Frederick Wherry (ffwherry@sas.upenn.edu),
University of Pennsylvania, investigates how international tourism
and the global market for handicrafts have affected the economic
development of communities where most of the residents earn their
living directly or indirectly from handicraft sales in Thailand
and Costa Rica and entrepreneurial endeavors (artistic and non-artistic)
in Philadelphia's ethnic and cosmopolitan neighborhoods.
Home
|