Ethical consumption? There's an app for that. Digital technologies and everyday consumption practices

Ethical consumption mobile phone apps are increasingly popular. These apps allow consumers to scan the barcodes of products they are considering purchasing and determine whether or not they align with their ethics. App technologies are often applauded for their potential to provide consumers with targeted, crowd-sourced information about products while shopping and to foster more political, and less individualistic, consumption practices by connecting users to one another and to campaigns. There is a growing field of scholarship conceptually examining the role of information and digital technologies in ethical consumption. However, there is little empirical research on how consumers engage with ethical consumption apps in everyday ways. Drawing on an in-depth study with 21 participants, this paper explores how app use mediates people's experiences of ethical consumption. We contend that the app design structures and limits how individuals engage in ethically motivated consumption and influences their conceptualizations of ethical consumption as a political practice. We conclude by illustrating that critically examining what it means to be “ethical” in a digital world is a crucial area of research for geographers, particularly as these ethics play out through the everyday use of mobile technologies.     

Consuming Ethics: Articulating the Subjects and Spaces of Ethical Consumption

Geography's debates about how to maintain a sense of morally responsible action often emphasise the problematic nature of caring at a distance, and take for granted particular kinds of moral selfhood in which responsibility is bound into notions of human agency that emphasise knowledge and recognition. Taking commodity consumption as a field in which the ethics, morality, and politics of responsibility has been problematised, we argue that existing research on consumption fails to register the full complexity of the practices, motivations and mechanisms through which the working-up of moral selves is undertaken in relation to consumption practices. Rather than assuming that ethical decision‐making works through the rational calculation of obligations, we conceptualise the emergence of ethical consumption as ways in which everyday practical moral dispositions are re‐articulated by policies, campaigns and practices that enlist ordinary people into broader projects of social change. Ethical consumption, then, involves both a governing of consumption and a governing of the consuming self. Using the example of Traidcraft , we present a detailed examination of one particular context in which self‐consciously ethical consumption is mediated, suggesting that ethical consumption can be understood as opening up ethical and political considerations in new combinations. We therefore argue for the importance of the growth of ethical consumption as a new terrain of political action, while also emphasising the grounds upon which ethical consumption can be opened up to normative critique.     

‘Looking alright,feeling alright’: emotions,sizing and the geographies of women's experiences of clothing consumption

Recent work within geographies of consumption has focused on the practices of consumption as a means to find out ‘what people do when they go shopping’. This paper argues that few of these accounts of consumption have considered the significance of emotions in understanding the intricacies of consumer experience. Drawing on material from research about women's experiences of clothes shopping this paper, therefore, utilizes recent work in the social sciences which understands emotions not as inherent or as induced by practices or commodities and instead emphasizes the intersubjective nature of emotions whereby emotions ‘are self‐reflective, involving active perception, identification and management on the part of individuals’ (Lupton : 16). In short, this view posits that the consumer has the capacity to ‘manage’ or to experience and re‐experience emotions in particular consumption moments. Such an understanding offers a conceptualization which does not conceive of women's engagements with consumer culture within a victim/resistance dichotomy, instead uncovering geographies of consumption in which women may feel uncomfortable or depressed in a particular moment but then engage in practices through which they experience that moment differently. These emotional experiences are explored through considering the significance of the spatialities of the changing room, shop floor and the corporeal space of the ‘sized’ body, and the consumption practices of cheating, coping and connecting.     

Editorial Not all sweetness and light: New cultural geographies of food

Despite a resurgence of work that has begun to examine critically the artefactual mediation of memory, very few accounts have focused upon the interconnections between recorded music and daily acts of remembering. Drawing upon in‐depth case study‐based research into recorded music and everyday life with seventeen lower middle‐class households, this paper describes the composition of three practices of remembering with and through recorded music. First, remembering how to choose and ‘fit’ specific purchased music to particular socio‐spatial activities: a creative practice of mimicry, discretion and intuition in which the past is both embodied in the actions of judgement and choice and also functions to compose a co‐present, but not‐yet ‘virtual’ realm. Second, the widespread, ephemeral and subject‐less practice of ‘involuntary remembering’ in which a trace of a virtual past affects ‘in itself’. Finally, ‘intentional remembering’ in which a past is conditioned to occur as a fixed, relatively durable ‘memory’. The paper describes how such practices of remembering are bound up with the emergence of domestic time‐space, and thus the mode of being of the past, via the circulation and organization of affect.     

Women and Alcohol Consumption in Fascist Italy

This article examines discourses and practices around women's drinking in Fascist Italy. The history of alcohol production and consumption in Italy during the fascist dictatorship has only recently received attention; alcohol's gendered dimensions, especially women's drinking, have been hitherto overlooked. While the production of legislation, rhetoric and propaganda on alcohol consumption was dominated by men, women were identified as key constituents whose alcohol-related practices could make or break the causes of fascist propagandists, ‘anti-alcohol’ campaigners and alcohol industry associations. The article explains how Italian women were imagined and addressed by regime propagandists, alcohol industry producers and temperance campaigners as (a) simultaneously the principal victims of and responsibility bearers for male excess alcohol consumption, (b) potential ‘crisis-women’ whose unpatriotic drinking choices (whether English tea, French champagne or American cocktails) denoted their prioritising of fashion over fascist values and (c) gatekeepers of family alcohol consumer practices and consumers of alcohol in their own right. It then moves to examine sources left by interwar Italian women to explore what, how and when they drank. Ultimately, it argues that despite attempts to construct women's drinking in archly nationalistic terms, the discourses and actual practices of Italian women around alcohol consumption operated within profoundly transnational frames.     

ROUTINE MAGIC,MUNDANE RITUAL: TOWARDS A UNIFIED NOTION OF DEPOSITIONAL PRACTICE

This article seeks to advance ongoing discussions within archaeology concerning the relationship between ritual and depositional practices. Previous researchers have argued that ‘structured’ or ‘placed’ deposits are the result of ritual activities, but also that in many societies the disposal of refuse is governed by social ‘rules’. Distinguishing ‘technical’ actions such as rubbish disposal from deliberately ‘placed’ deposits is extremely difficult, however, and reinforces modern dualistic thought. Instead, this article argues that there was a continuum of practices from formal and ritualized events through to small‐scale, informal acts undertaken on a routine basis, including everyday refuse discard. It also questions purely utilitarian interpretations of storage structures. Drawing on ethnographic and ethnohistorical examples, it explores case studies from the later prehistoric and Romano‐British periods of north central England, and concludes by proposing methodologies through which these practices can be explored more fully in the future.     

Prosaic geographies of stateness

Despite long-standing calls to rethink the state ‘as a social relation’, reified understandings that view the state as a differentiated institutional realm separate from civil society are notably persistent in academic and political debate. By contrast, this paper focuses on the myriad ways in which everyday life is permeated by the social relations of stateness, and vice versa. The paper reviews the conceptual difficulties in defining ‘the state’ and suggests that these can be addressed in part through a focus on the mundane practices that give rise to ‘state effects’. It considers how the concept of prosaics, based on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, might provide a fruitful approach for studying such practices, their geographies and the geographies of state effects. A case study of the governance of anti-social behaviour in the UK is used to show the potential application of this approach in empirical research. The paper concludes with some reflections on possible future avenues of research.     

Food Deserts: Towards the Development of a Classification

Many people in developed countries fail to consume a healthy diet. This phenomenon has been linked to the contested existence of ‘food deserts’ in the UK, and the occurrence of ‘food insecurity’ in the USA and elsewhere. ‘Food deserts’ remain contested theoretical territory at least partly because no firm definition has been proposed. This paper argues that the barriers to consumption of a healthy diet may be classified according to whether such barriers are financial, physical, or derive from the mental attitude and knowledge of the consumer. The perception of ‘unsupportive food environments’ by some consumers is contrasted with the geographical existence of multiple sources of fresh fruit and vegetables in certain locations. Using a total of 234 semi—structured interviews in various UK locations, qualitative evidence is gathered for the existence of at least ten different types of ‘food desert’. The paper then goes on to show how such a three fold classification may be developed, using a modified ternary diagram, to assess the most appropriate initiatives to tackle ‘food deserts’ and to monitor progress in alleviating their effects.     

Gender and Life Course in the Narratives of Melbourne's High‐rise Housing Developers

Socially constructed ideas about the life course, sometimes encompassing gender relations, have long informed the views of those within the housing development industry about who should be housed where in the city, living what sorts of lives. Drawing on the findings of a recent study of developers’ narratives about the construction of expensive, high‐rise housing in central Melbourne, a relatively new form of dwelling even in this part of the metropolitan area, several themes are found to characterise the taken‐for‐granted ways in which these city‐builders view the gendered life courses of housing consumers. Developers’ narratives oppose the suburban ‘home’ to the high‐rise ‘lifestyle’, consider central city high‐rise residences as appropriate only for people without families, and see women, separately from the couples they make up with men, only as potential victims requiring the security that high‐rise apartment living is said to provide. These narratives reiterate the characteristics of an essentialised ‘empty nester’, or ‘young professional’ housing consumer, who is envisaged to occupy the new housing and is defined according to life course stage and gender. The developers’ partial and narrow accounts of the likely consumers of this high‐rise housing is one factor amongst many that explains the building of precincts of high‐rise housing that have limited facilities for children and for pursuits other than consumption of the individual ‘lifestyle’.     

Travelling in your backyard: the unfamiliar places of parenting

Current theoretical understandings of family-as-activity, as suggested by the terms ‘doing family’ or ‘families we choose’, locate family practices such as parenting, within the realm of the spatial. Feminist geography particularly has been instrumental in conceptualisations of parenting as a spatial project that involves constant renegotiation of the ‘everyday’ spaces of home, work and play. However, what are less evident in the literature are the specificities of the actual places and spaces of parenting: where parents go in the course of their parenting or how they actually use particular spaces. Furthermore, most scholarly work on parenting has been based on the theoretical and material experience of heterosexual parents, with the experiences of non-heterosexual parented families under-documented. Using data from a recent study with lesbian parents, this paper seeks to address some of these conceptual and empirical gaps, suggesting that an exploration of the everyday spatialities of same-sex parenting contributes, not only to expanding current geographic understandings of family and parenting, but also understanding of the material places where these identities—familial, parental, sexual—intersect.     

The role of fluctuating soundscapes in shaping the emotional geographies of individuals living with Ménière’s disease

Abstract

The potential for everyday soundscapes to evoke diverse emotions amongst different cultural and acoustic communities is increasingly recognised within the literature. However, few studies have examined how these soundscapes can shift with the onset and progression of specific hearing impairments. This paper explores such shifts, drawing on a series of in-depth narrative interviews conducted in the south west of England with individuals diagnosed with Ménière’s disease; a long-term progressive vestibular disorder characterised by episodes of vertigo, tinnitus, sensorineural hearing loss and, for some people, hyperacusis (high sensitivity to sudden irregular sounds). Located in the subfield of ‘emotional geographies’, the paper discusses how participants were forced to connect with and attune to previously unremarkable aspects of their everyday soundscapes in ways that were both emotionally and socially challenging. Four aspects of participants’ embodied, emotional soundscapes are critically explored: hearing life in ‘2D’; corporeal and environmental ‘sonic intruders’; corporeal sound ‘symbols’; and seeking to regain a semblance of control through soundscape (re)-negotiations. Such insights are important to inform conscious acoustic design efforts that respect the ‘ears and voice’ of people living with varying levels of auditory sensitivity, rather than urban and community planning policies that continue to prioritise vision and transit.     

Alongside Violence: Everyday Survival in Chocó, Colombia

The naturalization of violence in Colombia has made gory testimonies a common yet counterproductive product when creating narratives that reproduce some of the violence they attempt to scrutinize. This article explores women’s activism as an everyday survival practice, as well as the ethics of researching and writing about survival in Chocó. I focus specifically on two groups of Chocoan women activists and their counternarratives of violence: (1) the group Vamos Mujeres founded by women from the rural community of San Francisco de Ichó and (2) the members of the Gender Commission of a farmworker’s organization, both groups belong to Consejo Comunitario Mayor de la Asociación Campesina Integral del Atrato (COCOMACIA), the Main Community Council of the Integral Peasant Association of the Atrato River. Based on my ongoing collaboration with COCOMACIA’s Gender Commission since 2010, I argue that everyday practices reflect an ‘alongside’ (which is neither oppositional nor resistant) narrative of violence that challenges linear explanations of survival within the Colombian armed conflict. Centering survival narratives allows us to move from gory memories that reproduce violence, to an ethical rehearsal that recognizes the utopian potential of moving beyond victimhood.     

Continuous campaigning and electoral outcomes: The Liberal Democrats in Bath

From the 1950s onwards, David Butler and a number of co-authors of the Nuffield studies of British General Elections stressed the perceived futility of local campaigns, dismissing them as ritual, irrelevant exercises. During the 1990s, a new orthodoxy emerged. Using their own surrogate measure of campaigning, three groups of scholars found that the more intense a party's campaign in a constituency, relative to its opponents', the better its performance there. The significance of campaigning appears to vary across the country's three main political parties; however, it seems to be particularly important to the success of the Liberal Democrats. These findings are entirely consistent with arguments regarding the role and efficacy of local campaigning, but there remains a need for more direct evidence. If the traditionalists are correct, then local campaigning will have no impact on either turnout or the electoral performance of the party involved. If the ‘revisionists’ are correct, then where a party campaigns intensively it should be better able to identify and mobilise its core supporters, ensure that they turn out to vote, and thus improve its performance relative to its opponents. To evaluate these two arguments require data on where and how a party campaigns intensively, at local scales which can then be linked to electoral turnout data for those small areas. Such an evaluation is reported in this paper, using a case study of one ward in the City of Bath at the 1999 local government elections there.     

‘Living Liminality’: everyday experiences of asylum seekers in the ‘Direct Provision’ system in Ireland

Mechanisms to exclude people seen as ‘other’ which were once considered exceptional have now become normal. Global patterns of increased state security lead to people on the move or seeking protection being detained, dispersed and deported, their lives treated as ‘waste’ or ‘reject’. The Irish ‘Direct Provision’ system is part of an increasing network of liminal, or threshold, spaces, situated between and within borders, in which such people are detained or forced to wait in often inhumane conditions and often for years at a time. Based on ethnographic participatory photographic research, this article explores the ways in which imposed liminality plays out in people’s everyday lives in ‘Direct Provision’. The article looks at how liminality is lived in spatial and temporal terms and develops the idea of ‘ontological liminality’, a means of expressing the ways in which a chronic sense of fear, insecurity, invisibility and a highly controlled existence are lived and internalized; it also shows the ways in which people negotiate this imposed liminality through everyday practices, creating various forms of attachment, engagement and belonging. Exploring the concept of liminality in this context holds broader implications not only for understanding experiences of people waiting or held in the increasing number of refugee camps, border zones and detention centres in and beyond Europe, but also provides insight into the architectures of exclusion created by states to contain or exclude the ‘other’.     

Turn your trash into… Rubbish,art and politics. Richard Wentworth's geographical imagination

This paper analyses the photographs and installations of artist Richard Wentworth in order to examine his urban imagination and the cultural politics of rubbish that underlie it. In doing so this paper contributes more broadly to understandings of rubbish and material culture, and to geography's attention to artistic understandings and inhabitations of urban spaces. Central to this analysis are the geographies of Wentworth's work, its production, consumption and circulation. The paper attends to three nested sets of practices: the ‘everyday’ practices of people which draw Wentworth's eye, the potential of creative cultural practices for developing critiques of space and place, and the practices of the artist. As a result the paper pushes forward debates around the relationship between geography and art, reflecting on the analytical value of art practice to contemporary social-cultural geographies.     

Parents of global youth: contesting debt and belonging

In the United States, recently arrived migrant youth encounter competing media and institutional discourses that cast them as dependents who have been rendered ‘left behind,’ ‘on their own,’ or ‘unaccompanied’ by their parents. A corresponding narrative emerges in which young migrants’ parents are framed as abusive, neglectful, and ignorant. Combined, these portrayals may garner specialized services and contribute to success in the legal realm. At the same time, however, they fail to recognize and even imperil the intimate intergenerational networks that facilitate transnational migration. In this article, we trace the homogenizing power of public discourses on young people and their families across two diverse ethnographic contexts, that of Chinese and Guatemalan migration. Focusing in particular on narratives of debt and belonging, we argue that the pervasive pathologization of migrant youths’ parents diminishes and contorts valued relationships over time. It correspondingly demands broader efforts to historicize and to contextualize youth mobility.     

The State,the Rebel and the Chief: Public Authority and Land Disputes in Assam,India

Based upon an ethnographic study of two land disputes in the rural Assamese district of Karbi Anglong (India), this article challenges the idea that the entry of new institutional players, with their multiple sets of rules, inevitably leads to open institutional conflict. Although a wide range of political actors are involved in the regulation of land tenure in Karbi Anglong, they cannot be regarded as institutional structures ready to undercut one another. As in other parts of Northeast India, none of the claimants of public power involved —‘the state’, ‘the rebel’ or ‘the chief’— attain full sovereignty, which forces them to exercise authority predominantly through practices of negotiation and accommodation, and only selective contestation. If open institutional conflict does occur, as in the Dhansiri forest and the Singhason plateau cases studied here, this is due to the fact that one of the institutional players has overstretched and attempted to exercise authority beyond its realm of power. This article thus argues for a more agency‐oriented method of analysis in the study of land relations. The focus on everyday interactions between ‘the state’, ‘the rebel’ and ‘the chief’ in Karbi Anglong is a first attempt in that regard.     

Reading fair trade: political ecological imaginary and the moral economy of fair trade foods

This paper begins to explore the changing political geographies of alternative development as practiced and envisioned in the global South. Looking specifically at the growing movement and market for fair trade foods, this form of alternative development has become the moral business of latte drinkers and other reflexive consumers in Europe and the US. Fair trade attempts to re-connect producers and consumers economically, politically, and psychologically through the creation of a transnational moral economy. This re-connection is accomplished through material and semiotic commoditization processes that produce fair trade commodities. The semiotic production of these commodities and their traffic in particular ‘political ecological imaginaries’ is essential to the formation of ethical production-consumption links, acting to also politicize consumption and fair trade eaters. Fair trade's moral economy rides the tension between the ethical relationships it fosters and the need for the wily characteristics of enterprise in the construction of transnational trade networks. Bringing recent work on moral geography to bear, constructing this moral economy is an attempt to facilitate a sense of ‘solidarity in difference’ in the experiences of global economic inequalities between North and South and growers and eaters. At the same time, fair trade networks look to produce an expansive ‘spatial dynamics of concern’ in the fashioning of ethical places of production and consumption. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the continuing dilemmas critical for fair trade and suggestions for further empirical study of fair trade provisioning and alternative development networks.     

Socio-cultural proximity,daily life and shopping tourism in the Dutch–German border region

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses feelings of socio-cultural proximity and distance with a specific focus on the tourist experience in cross-border shopping and everyday life practices in border regions. We examined shopping practices of Dutch border crossers who visit the German town Kleve in the Dutch–German border region. This particular border context has allowed us not only to reflect on a multidimensional approach towards socio-cultural proximity and distance, but also to examine how these different dimensions express themselves in the tourist experience when it comes to people and places that are geographically ‘close’ but assumingly socially and culturally ‘distant’ from home. Although some differences prompted feelings of discomfort, in particular, differences in social engagement, feelings of comfort stand out in our analysis of cross-border shopping tourism. Furthermore, our study shows that shopping tourism and exoticism, on the one hand, and everyday routines and the mundane, on the other hand, are closely intertwined in the lives of people living in a border region, resulting in a fluid interpretation of the exotic and the mundane in the cross-border context.     

The Cripps mission of 1942: A reinterpretation

In 1926, the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) was established to foster empire trade without the use of tariffs. It was to simulate imperial preference by redirecting consumer choice away from ‘foreign’ goods and towards the produce of ‘home and empire’. Using newspapers, pamphlets, film, exhibitions and poster displays, the EMB aimed to ‘bring the empire alive’ to British consumers. This paper analyses the presentation of three settler dominions—Australia, New Zealand and Canada—in the EMB's advertising campaigns. The EMB's large visual archive has been the subject of only limited study, most of which has focused on a homogeneous reading of empire. This article argues that the work of the EMB reveals the presence of a separate discourse of empire—a ‘dominion discourse’—that has not been recognised in cultural histories of empire, which, with the recent exception of ‘British world’ studies, have been more interested in mapping and conceptualising the formation of identities in other colonial settings. The ‘dominion discourse’ emphasised the familiar, white and ‘British’ nature of the former colonies of settlement, attributes that are clearly displayed in the campaigns of the EMB, but can also be found in settler culture much more widely. In doing so, the white dominions stressed not only their difference from the dependent colonies, but their similarity to Britain. Though the inter-war period is often associated with the rise of distinctive national identities and the loosening of imperial bonds, the production of these attributes in an imperial and metropolitan context draws attention to both the transnational nature of identity formation and the continuing importance of Britain and empire in the construction of settler culture in this period.