Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism

Sam Binkley is Associate Professor of Sociology at Emerson College, USA. He is author of Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (2007) and is currently working on a book on neoliberalism and happiness.Jo Littler is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University, UK. She is co-editor (with Roshi Naidoo) of The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of ‘Race’ (2005) and author of Radical Consumption? Shopping for Change in Contemporary Culture (2009).

• 1. Introduction: Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism: A Critical Encounter Jo Littler and Sam Binkley 2. Young Women and Consumer Culture: An Intervention Angela McRobbie 3. Against the commodification of everything: Anti-consumerist cultural studies in the age of ecological crisis Jeremy Gilbert 4. ‘Alternative Hedonism, Cultural Theory and the Role of Aesthetic Revisioning’ Kate Soper 5. Tackling Turbo Consumption: An interview Juliet Schor and Jo Littler 6. Liquid Consumption: Anti-Consumerism and the Fetishized De-Fetishization of Commodities Sam Binkley 7. The elusive subjects of neoliberalism: Beyond the analytics of governmentality Clive Barnett, Nick Clarke, Paul Cloke and Alice Malpass 8. Consuming the Campesino: Fair Trade Marketing between Recognition and Romantic Commodification Matthias Zick Varul 9. Alternative realities: downshifting narratives in contemporary lifestyle television Lyn Thomas 10. Fourth worlds and neo-Fordism: American Apparel and the cultural economy of consumer anxiety Jo Littler and Liz Moor 11. Consuming Authenticity: From Outposts of Difference to Means of Exclusion Sharon Zukin 12. Fashioning Social Justice through Political Consumerism, Capitalism, and the Internet Michele Micheletti and Dietlind Stolle 13. The Quandaries of Consumer-Based Labor Activism: A Low-Wage Case Study Andrew Ross