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Material Culture and Consumption Study Group

Co-ordinators: Anne Cronin and Graeme Gilloch

This is a cross-disciplinary/departmental research group with interests in all aspects of material culture and consumption including commodities, objects and social relations, everyday consuming practices, advertising, spatiality and consumption, promotional practices, museums and collections, politics of display and spectacle, design, time and consumption, history as materiality, gendered consumer discourses, markets and marketing, disposal and waste.

Membership of the group is very informal – just come along to our seminar series, listen to the debate or join in the discussion. All staff and postgraduates are welcome. The group includes members from departments at Lancaster such as English, History, Institute for Cultural Research, Marketing and Management, Sociology, Theatre Studies, Women's Studies. It is currently coordinated by Anne Cronin (Sociology) and by Graeme Gilloch (Sociology).

Previously, we have run seminar series including external and internal Lancaster speakers (both postgraduates and staff). We have also organised events such as the 'Consuming the City' symposium in March 2004 with an associated postgraduate workshop on spatiality and consumption. This was the second part of a series of seminars held in Lancaster and Rio de Janeiro co-funded by the British Council and the Institute of Advanced Studies at Lancaster. The first took place in Rio in September 2003.

We hope that as well as hosting seminars, the research group will offer the opportunity for facilitating collaborative work, developing grants proposals, and planning conferences or day schools. Please send us any suggestions for other activities that the group could coordinate.

If you are interested in presenting a paper or work-in-progress presentation, please email a.cronin@lancaster.ac.uk.

This year's seminar programme

All seminars take place 4.15 - 5.30pm unless otherwise stated. All welcome.

Lent term

Thursday 22/02/07 - Institute for Advance Studies - Meeting room 3
Yoke-Sum Wong (Sociology Department)
'Revisiting the Avant-Garde and Kitsch: Unravelling Japanese Cuteness in Design'

Thursday 08/03/07 - Bowland North - Seminar room 8
Drew Jones (Management School)
'Designing Consumers: Ethnography, Design Work, And the Poetics of Corporate Innovation'

Thursday 15/03/07 - Institute for Advance Studies - Meeting room 3
Elizabeth Shove (Sociology Department)
'Materials of Material Culture:Plastic'

Thursday 22/03/07 - Bowland North - Seminar room 8
Graeme Gilloch (Sociology Department)
'The Mirror of Seduction: Reflections on Baudrillard and the Student of Prague'

Last year's seminar programme

Russell Belk (University of Utah, and LUMS Distinguished Visiting Professor)
'Consumer ethics across cultures'

Isabel Shaw (Sociology dept)
'Making the 'Indian consumer': materialising and naturalising difference'

David Pinder (Queens College, London)
'You are watching me: urban performance and the politics of surveillance'

Stephanie O'Donohoe (University of Edinburgh)
'Consuming, communing and coming to terms with loss: the social context of placing In Memoriam notices in Irish newspapers'

David Hansen-Miller (Sociology dept)
'Sexualizing children in contemporary American culture'

John Tercier (Sociology dept)
'Existential pornography: the morgue as studio'

Tim Edensor (Manchester Metropolitan University)
'The effects of disorderly things in an ordered world: aesthetics, sensation and matter in interstitial urban space'

Liz McFall (Open University)
'The disinterested self: life assurance and the materiality of 19th century promotional practices'

Graeme Gilloch (Sociology dept)
'Fetishism, mimesis and animation: Walter Benjamin meets Woody's Round-Up Gang'

Karl Dayson (University of Salford)
'Consuming money in a cashless society: value, signifier and consumption'

Please visit the events page for up-to-date details.

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