Consumption

Our team is committed to theoretically informed and methodologically innovative, high-quality research, which exposes the dynamics of power operating through processes of mediated consumption. Cultural messages about how to save the environment, what to eat, what clothes to wear, how to have sex, and how to engage in a multitude of other everyday practices pervade our lives through television, magazines, advertising, books, comics, and increasingly new media forms. We engage in inter-disciplinary and critical and creative analysis of media and cultural texts to lay bare the ways in which such messages serve to reinscribe social inequalities on distinct subjects, identities and forms of embodiment.

Our research explores identity and the myriad and complex influences upon ideas of selfhood, including popular culture, landscape and environment, race, gender and ethnicity, migration and the psychological and social impacts of appearance change during cancer treatment and after face transplants. 

We examine how processes of normalisation and marginalisation operate through articulations of ‘taste’ in popular culture. Specifically, we explore how the consumption of products, services and cultural artefacts serve to promote some subjectivities and embodiments as normative, acceptable and desirable and others as abject and disgusting. Popular culture is both an artefact for consumption – people watch television, read books, buy comics and so on – and also provides instruction, education and information about consumption, including advice on clothes to buy to look good, what to eat and what not to eat, how to decorate your home and even what products will clean your bathroom. Drs Hannah Frith and Jayne Raisborough, and Orly Klein have contributed to the debate with their analysis of lifestyle media. From the portrayal of food consumption in television programmes about diet and eating, to the representation of fatherhood in children’s books, to the fashioning of identities on makeover shows, we explore the mediation of class, gender, sexuality and other social inequalities.

Our researchers consider the influence of landscape and environment. In the AHRC-funded project entitled ‘Writing the landscape of everyday life: lay narratives of domestic gardens’, Professor Andrew Church, Mark Bhatti and Professor Paul Stenner analysed narratives from the Mass Observation Archive (MOA) to find out more about the experience of living, working and imagining the landscape of the domestic garden.

Dr Kanwal Mand’s work explores social identities informed by notions concerning race, gender and ethnicity and how these relate to place and migration.

This research explores the representation and consumption of heterosexualities in contemporary culture. In particular it takes the construction of orgasm as a focal point for exploring the ways in which women’s sexuality is presented and packaged in post-feminist media culture and how women respond to and resist these representations. Dr Hannah Frith leads on this work, which is concerned with articulating how representations of sexuality become worked into how we make sense of our own bodily experiences and how we engage with the bodies of others. Orgasm, as an embodied experience, sits at the nexus of the production and consumption of a range of different ‘expert’ knowledge which offer norms and standards by which our sexual ‘performance’ can be judged by self and others. As such the consumption of sexual knowledge, artefacts, products, and practices becomes a central mechanism for producing sexual subjectivities.

Dr Kanwal Mand’s research interests centre on South Asian familial practices, gender and the life course within a transnational context, with a focus on children’s experiences of transnationalism. Using innovative methods and creative research with children has enabled us to gain valuable insight into their sense of place, emplacement, mobility and belonging for this specific age group.

At the other end of the spectrum, anti-ageing culture feeds into age discrimination, social isolation and poor health of the old/elderly and also encourages younger people to disavow their ‘future self’. These are real harms yet much of our popular culture involves direct instructions to not get old. We ask how these instructions are understood, taken up and negotiated.

Dr Jayne Raisborough’s Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) fellowship has enabled her to explore the real world problems associated with anti-ageing culture. More specifically, she investigates what other forms of learning (personal and political) are used to help navigate anti-ageing culture as one ages. Her empirical project involves feminist-identified women of different ages in a reflexive identification of the framing devices, and their complex responses to them, in the television show How Not to Grow Old and in the production of a self-conscious pedagogical film How to Grow Old. The intention is to identify and share different articulations of ‘learning to be old’ as a means to interrogate and interrupt the workings of anti-ageing discourse, its psychosocial harms, and the reproduction of neoliberal rationalities working through them.

In the UK, the prevalence of mental ill-health is occurring against a backdrop of far-reaching reform and cost reductions imposed on health service provision. Simultaneously, there is ongoing controversy regarding both the efficacy of medication to treat psychological problems and the quality and accessibility of psychological therapies.

With a growing interest in the social, cultural and structural factors involved in mental ill-health, it is useful to explore alternative or complementary treatments.

Researchers Dr Matt Adams and Martin Jordan conducted an evaluation in collaboration with local charity group, Grow. The Grow Project supports people with experience of mental distress by facilitating their connection to nature and its associated wellbeing benefits through outdoor activities in a safe and supportive group. Funded by the Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP), researchers analysed the impact of activities rooted in ecopsychology and ecotherapy.

The project gave the researchers hands-on involvement in a project allied with their theoretical, applied and research interests and provided Grow with useful evidence explaining why activities had the desired outcomes and impact and contributing to vital funding bids.