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Dr Anne Cronin

Sociology: Senior Lecturer

Degree: BA, MA, PhD

Associated research centres and groups: Centre for Gender and Women's Studies

Research Interests

Summary of research interests:

My research is focused on the areas of: cities and urban culture; friendship and social ties; advertising and promotional consumer culture; visual culture; gender and culture, cultural economy; commercial cultures and neo-capitalism.

I welcome applications from potential PhD students in any of the above areas.

Current research

URBAN SPACE AND FRIENDSHIP. I'm currently carrying out a British Academy funded a project that explores the connections between urbanism and friendship with a focus on work and workplace. I'm aiming to explore friendships as forms of social ties that are not captured by (academic or popular) narratives of family or narratives of romance. Most often analysed as relationships that facilitate social capital, I'm instead thinking of friendships as forms that create spaces in particular ways (informed by urbanism) and function as ways of orienting the urban experience. This is not a social network analysis but a qualitatively-oriented project that aims to 'listen spatially' to people's experiences of friendship and to examine the forms of those socialities.

Previous Projects

ADVERTISING AND URBAN SPACE. My most recent project was an ESRC-funded analysis of advertising and spatiality, focusing on outdoor advertising in and around cities (Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban, 2010, Palgrave Macmillan). It focuses, firstly, on how outdoor advertising companies' market research practices perform urban spaces and produce certain relationalities with imagined consumers that are spatialised and temporalised. And, secondly, it explores the way in which outdoor advertising - on billboards, panels, buses, building 'wraps' - organises urban space and draws on certain commodity logics, rearticulating the mapping of cities and people's experience of those time-spaces. And, thirdly, the book explores the commercial practices of the industry's actors and how they perform market relationships in the context of neo-capitalism. In the book, I develop ways of thinking about the relationship between visuality, space, and commercial practices, and explore the synergies and tensions between 'public space' and 'commercial space'. I frame outdoor advertising as a kind of 'commercial vernacular' that expresses not only capitalist logics, but also people's more diffuse and potentially resistant experiences of cities.

I have also published an edited collection on consumption and the city with Kevin Hetherington called Consuming the Entrepreneurial City: Image, Memory and Spectacle and a co-edited special issue of Feminist Review called 'Urban Space' (With Liz Oakley-Brown).

Publications

Books:

(2010) Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

(2008) Cronin, A.M. & K. Hetherington (eds) Consuming the Entrepreneurial City: Image, Memory and Spectacle. New York: Routledge.

(2004) Advertising Myths: The Strange Half-Lives of Images and Commodities, London & New York: Routledge.

(2000) Advertising and Consumer Citizenship: Gender, Images and Rights, London & New York: Routledge.

Edited special issues of journals:

Co-editor with Liz Oakley-Brown: 'Urban Space', special issue of Feminist Review, 2010, vol. 96, issue 1.

Co-editor with Tim Hickman of a special section of the Journal for Cultural Research: 2003, Vol. 7, no.2 (April), pp 107-177.This special edition featured articles drawing together the areas of compulsion/addiction and consumption in new, distinctive ways.

Journal articles/chapters in books:

(forthcoming 2011) 'Researching urban space, reflecting on advertising: a photo essay', Space and Culture, 14 (4).

(2009) Re-print of 'Advertising and the metabolism of the city: urban spaces, commodity rhythms', in R. Paddison (ed) Urban Studies - Society, London: Sage.

(2009) Re-print of 'Currencies of commercial exchange: advertising agencies and the promotional imperative' in M. Tadajewski & P. Maclaren (eds) Critical Marketing Studies, London: Sage.

(2008) 'Calculative spaces: cities, market relations and the commercial vitalism of the advertising industry', Environment and Planning A, 40 (11): 2734-2750.

(2008) 'Gender in the making of commercial worlds: creativity, vitalism and the practices of marketing', Feminist Theory, 9 (3): 293-312.

(2008) 'Urban space and entrepreneurial property relations: resistance and the vernacular of outdoor advertising and graffiti', in Cronin, A.M. & K. Hetherington (eds) Consuming the Entrepreneurial City: Image, Memory and Spectacle. New York: Routledge.

(2008) 'Mobility and market research: outdoor advertising and the commercial ontology of the city', Mobilities, vol.3, no.1: 95-115.

(2006) 'Rags and refuse: the newspaper, empire, and nineteenth-century commodity culture', Cultural Studies, Vol 20, no. 5:574-598

(2006) 'Urban advertising: a machine for thinking?' Urban Design, no. 97: 10-11.

(2006) 'Advertising and the metabolism of the city: urban space, commodity rhythms', Environment & Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 24, no. 4: 615-632.

(2005) Translation into Finnish & reprint of 'Consumerism and "compulsory individuality": women, will and potential', Lähikuva, vol. 2: 37-51.

(2004) 'Currencies of commercial exchange: advertising agencies and the promotional imperative', The Journal of Consumer Culture, vol. 4, no. 3: 339-360.

(2004) 'Regimes of mediation: advertising practitioners as cultural intermediaries?', Consumption, Markets and Culture, vol. 7, no. 4: 349-369.

(2002) 'The substance of consumption: alchemy, addiction and the commodity', International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 3: 316-335.

(2002) 'Consumer rights/cultural rights: a new politics of European belonging', European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 3: 307-323.

(2000) "Advertising difference: women, western Europe and 'consumer-citizenship' " in M. Andrews & M. Talbot (eds) All the World and her Husband: Women in Twentieth Century Consumer Culture, London: Cassell

(2000) "Consumerism and 'compulsory individuality': women, will and potential" in M. McNeil et al (ed) Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism. London: Routledge.

(1999) 'Seeing through transparency: performativity, vision, and intent', Cultural Values, (February), 3 (1)

(1997) 'Temporalities of the visual and spaces of knowledge: branding "the third dimension" in advertising', Space and Culture: The Journal, 1(1).

Grants

British Academy Small Grant

2011-12 Project: Friendship, Social Ties and Urban Experience

ESRC Grant

2006-7 Project: Advertising and the city: making the symbolic and political economies of urban spaces

AHRC Research Leave Award

2001-2 Project: Dangerous Images: Advertising, Addiction and the Compulsive Self.

Current teaching:

Undergraduate:

• Consumer Culture and Advertising
• Newspapers, Journalism and Society
• Friendship, Intimacy and Society

Masters:

• Consumer Society
• I currently supervise a number of research students in the areas of advertising, consumer society, journalism, and gender and leisure.

Links

View on-line papers by author

View on-line papers by topic

Eprints Publications Repository and Bibliographic Database

Anne Cronin has 17 selected publication records listed on this webpage. Use links to access abstracts and full text where available. View all records to sort by date, type and title. For all ePrints records go to http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk

Associated Keywords: Advertising and the media, Cities, Consumer, Consumption, Cultural economy, Cultural geography, Cultural Studies, Cultural theory, Culture, Friendship, Gender, Marketisation, Non-representational theory, Photography, Power, Representation, Sociology, Spatiality, Urban studies

View all research activities, ePrints, news and events associated with Anne Cronin.

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