Salsa magic: an exploratory netnographic analysis of the salsa experience

This is a paper about the promise of salsa dancing as unfolding social drama. We argue that a turn to dance offers much potential to reinvigorate ways of theorizing consumer culture, necessitating we take seriously talk around such experiences. Based on a netnographic analysis, which is inspired by the informative work of Kozinets (1997, 1998, 2001). We reveal how dance is a reflexive form of knowledge enacted in and through our bodies, where the settled and fixed becomes disturbed. Dance then makes possible shared passions, exhilarations and desires lacking from people's everyday lives granting them a space for expression

Low-income families and coping through brands : inclusion or stigma?

This article highlights the paradoxical coping strategies employed by low-income families. Based on in-depth interviews with 30 families in the UK, it is demonstrated that individuals initiate strategies to avoid the social effects of stigmatization and alleviate threats to social identity. In particular, families engage in conspicuous consumption, with emphasis on ensuring children have access to the 'right' brands. This can be interpreted in two opposing ways. Low-income consumers, in particular single mothers, may be understood as coping within the challenging context of consumer culture to improve the standard of living for their families. However, drawing on underclass discourse surrounding 'chav' culture and single mothers, it is demonstrated that the coping strategies employed to achieve approval in fact fuel further stigmatization and instead of creating inclusion have the opposite outcome of exclusion and marginalization

In pursuit of happiness

Here we present early findings from a critical investigation of the burgeoning “happiness industry”. The happiness industry is an area where science – notably psychology – and the market meet. With ‘Positive Psychology’ as its foundation, its aims are to increase individual and collective happiness through self-management depicted in“how to” manuals, websites, apps, courses, exhibitions, films and media coverage (e.g. www.actionforhappiness.org). In doing so the industry represents the monetizing of mainstream psychological theory. In line with the development of this market, interest in the study of happiness is growing with Ahmed (2010) speaking of the happiness turn and Burnett (2011) referring to the happiness agenda. This interest in happiness is evident across a variety of different contexts, from micro to macro. Burnett (2012) outlines three ideological shocks driving the cultural circuits of happiness: first, happiness is embraced as a macro-political issue in line with a focus on utilitarianism; second, happiness is embraced at the meso-organisations level as a conduit to productivity and third, happiness is embraced at the micro-sociological level under the guise of positive psychology. Our interest in happiness began at a micro level with the “100 Happy Days” project

Challenging representations:constructing the adult literacy learner over 30 years of policy and practice in the United Kingdom

This article addresses the question, How do changes in policy discourses shape public representations of literacy learners and the goals of adult literacy education? It examines specifically how the agency of adult literacy learners is constructed. We carry out a critical discourse analysis of two key adult literacy policy documents from the U.K.: the manifesto A Right to Read (British Association of Settlements, ) and Skills for Life: The National Strategy for Improving Adult Literacy and Numeracy Skills (Department for Education and Skills, ). We describe the overall structure and genre of the documents and analyze the semiotic resources in the texts to explore the discursive shaping of adult literacy learners. Our analysis shows that, while a functional discourse of individual deficit is prominent throughout the texts, each document expresses it differently. A discourse of rights and participation in the earlier text changes to a discourse of social inclusion, conditional on duty and responsibility and narrowed to the sphere of paid employment. The profiles of individual learners are heavily framed by the dominant discourses of literacy and education that constitute the texts. We argue that the discursive shifts we trace in these national documents relate to wider changes in notions of social disadvantage, rights and citizenship, and the emergence of literacy as a key indicator of progress. Our analysis demonstrates the powerful ways in which policy documents articulate relationships between national and transnational literacies

A 'placeful' station? The community role in place making and improving hedonic value at local railway stations

In recent years, railway stations have come to be seen as non-places within society, points of transit and nothing more. The role of the station in place making is disputed with stations seen as both creating and destroying a sense of place within a community. Our study is located within the railway stations of Scotland and explores how local communities have been empowered to reclaim, customise, and re-appropriate stations to simultaneously create a sense of place and better promote their community to the outside world. Drawing on ethnographic research we refute the notion that stations are somehow ‘placeless’. We show how through a process of legitimisation, a sense of ownership and appropriation of the station environment, communities are able to transform the station, improving hedonic value and recapturing a sense of place

Mini-miracles:transformations of self from consumption of the Lourdes pilgrimage

This paper explores transformations of self through pilgrimage consumption. A three year ethnographic study of Lourdes, one of the largest Catholic pilgrimage destinations, reveals the concept of “mini-miracles” to refer to those miracles that occur in and are important to an individual’s life, but are unlikely ever to be officially deemed as miracles in the eyes of the church. Mini-miracles transform selves and in turn draw pilgrims annually and recurrently to consume the Lourdes pilgrimage experience. The findings reveal the existence of three forms of subjectively experienced mini-miracles: physical, social and peaceful, each of which act as intangible word-of-mouth consumption drivers to the Lourdes pilgrimage. Lourdes, as a business institution, should capitalize on the word-of-mouth mini-miracles shared amongst consumers as a means of building and maintaining stronger networks and relationships within Catholic/ Christian communities at both the national and local level

Cost-of-Living Crisis:Consumer Resilience and Stakeholder Interventions

The main aim of this project was to explore consumer resilience during the cost-of-living crisis and the scope for various stakeholders to co-create solutions to help consumers cope with the crisis. A cost-of-living crisis occurs when disposable incomes in a significant number of households are no longer sufficient to cover essential needs for food, heating, transportation and a minimum level of leisure activity. Scotland, and indeed the rest of the UK, is currently experiencing an enduring cost of-living crisis which started in 2021 when a rapid rise in inflation caused prices on food, energy and other essentials to rise dramatically. Within the span of just one year, consumer price inflation increased by more than 10%. Whilst inflation is currently falling, it would be ill-informed to draw the conclusion that we are no longer in a cost-of-living crisis

Robust fault diagnosis of physical systems in operation

Ideas are presented and demonstrated for improved robustness in diagnostic problem solving of complex physical systems in operation, or operative diagnosis. The first idea is that graceful degradation can be viewed as reasoning at higher levels of abstraction whenever the more detailed levels proved to be incomplete or inadequate. A form of abstraction is defined that applies this view to the problem of diagnosis. In this form of abstraction, named status abstraction, two levels are defined. The lower level of abstraction corresponds to the level of detail at which most current knowledge-based diagnosis systems reason. At the higher level, a graph representation is presented that describes the real-world physical system. An incremental, constructive approach to manipulating this graph representation is demonstrated that supports certain characteristics of operative diagnosis. The suitability of this constructive approach is shown for diagnosing fault propagation behavior over time, and for sometimes diagnosing systems with feedback. A way is shown to represent different semantics in the same type of graph representation to characterize different types of fault propagation behavior. An approach is demonstrated that threats these different behaviors as different fault classes, and the approach moves to other classes when previous classes fail to generate suitable hypotheses. These ideas are implemented in a computer program named Draphys (Diagnostic Reasoning About Physical Systems) and demonstrated for the domain of inflight aircraft subsystems, specifically a propulsion system (containing two turbofan systems and a fuel system) and hydraulic subsystem

Cost-of-Living Crisis:Consumer Resilience and Stakeholder Interventions

The main aim of this project was to explore consumer resilience during the cost-of-living crisis and the scope for various stakeholders to co-create solutions to help consumers cope with the crisis. A cost-of-living crisis occurs when disposable incomes in a significant number of households are no longer sufficient to cover essential needs for food, heating, transportation and a minimum level of leisure activity. Scotland, and indeed the rest of the UK, is currently experiencing an enduring cost of-living crisis which started in 2021 when a rapid rise in inflation caused prices on food, energy and other essentials to rise dramatically. Within the span of just one year, consumer price inflation increased by more than 10%. Whilst inflation is currently falling, it would be ill-informed to draw the conclusion that we are no longer in a cost-of-living crisis

Patient, client, user, consumer? Issues involved with approaching vulnerability with consumer-focused terminology

This presentation aims to build upon the central themes emerging from our ESRC seminar series on Consumer Vulnerability (2013-2014). These seminars provided a space to critically engage with the notion of consumer vulnerability in two key ways. First, they brought together international speakers from the fields of marketing, consumer research, sociology, social policy, law and medicine to ensure developments in thinking and best practice were shared across academic networks and across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Second, policy and practitioner organisations played a key role in our series, thereby adding a more practical element to discussions. An overarching concern emerging from the seminar series was the nature of the language we use when discussing those experiencing vulnerability, and how this language impacts on the relationship s between individuals and the services they used (both private and non - commercial). In particular, this presentation will consider the issues involved when approaching vulnerability with consumer - focused terminology