The Cultural Privileging of Personal Authenticity: a Critical Postmodern Perspective

Postmodern consumer research highlights the consumer quest for personal authenticity whereby consumers transform mass produced, branded products into ingredients for personal identity projects. Drawing on the lens of Critical Postmodernism, we reveal the cultural privileging of the quest for consumer personal authenticity as a hotly contested and problematized social phenomenon. Our interpretation of consumer activist, corporate, and consumer blog data reveal that the branding and corporate social responsibility practices of companies serve to sanctify, or privilege, consumers by decoupling them from the ethical and moral implications of modernist production practices. However, our analysis of the evolution of consumer and corporate blogs also reveals a potential Critical Postmodern turn whereby modernist production issues are increasingly becoming part of the postmodern consumer endeavor

Dysplacement and the Professionalization of the Home

This research directs our attention to the dynamics surrounding the changing cultural understanding of the place we call home. Traditionally, the home is regarded as a place of singularization that is to be aligned with the homeowner’s unique identity. This traditional meaning has come to be confronted with a contradictory understanding of the home as a marketplace asset. Homeowners come to experience a market-reflected gaze that shuns singularization while driving homeowners to exhibit expertise in aligning their homes with marketplace standards. Professionalization of the home, through marketplace expertise and standardization, discourages personalization, leading to an experience of disorientation with the place of home. In this ethnography of the home renovation marketplace, we build on the concept of ‘dysplacement’ whereby this contradictory cultural understanding of the home disrupts the homeowner’s ability to achieve implacement. The concept of dysplacement and the corresponding place disorientation experience has the potential to enrich our theoretical understanding of place by integrating the cultural meaning of place as a domain with marketplace dynamics and individual consumer practices surrounding place

Huron Heritage Minute: Rev. Simpson A. Brigham

This video is about the life and influence of Rev. Simpson A. Brigham and his contributions to Huron College and Walpole Island