Subverting Consumerism

Subverting Consumerism PDF Author: Robert Crocker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317281136
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
There is now a widespread interest in reuse in many domains, from opera houses built over old warehouses, to vintage clothes and everyday goods incorporating repurposed materials or parts. Despite its ubiquity, this extensive creative work is typically seen in narrowly environmental terms, as a means of reducing carbon, resource use or waste. However, as this volume shows, reuse also has aesthetic and cultural dimensions and a rich social currency, invoked to consciously subvert the accelerated consumer culture responsible for our unfolding environmental crisis. In three parts, the essays in this book consider reuse in terms of values, aesthetics and meaning, its application in contemporary urban and spatial settings, and the revival of social practices involving a more conscious recourse to reuse and repair. These are bookended by the editors' essays: the first, on the significant relationship between reuse and technological and social acceleration evident in the surrounding consumer society; and the last, on the multiple forms of reuse deployed in a contemporary alternative building practice, and their contributions to presenting alternative ways of living in the world. Challenging dominant understandings of ‘waste’ and ‘consumption’, Subverting Consumerism shows how reuse has become a means for many to creatively engage with the past, and to discover a continuity and sense of place eroded by the accelerative regimes of contemporary consumerism. Becoming a means of resistance, and offering a range of aesthetic, social and economic possibilities, reuse can be found to subvert and challenge the obsessive quest for the new found in contemporary consumerism.

Subverting Consumerism

Subverting Consumerism PDF Author: Robert Crocker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317281136
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book

Book Description
There is now a widespread interest in reuse in many domains, from opera houses built over old warehouses, to vintage clothes and everyday goods incorporating repurposed materials or parts. Despite its ubiquity, this extensive creative work is typically seen in narrowly environmental terms, as a means of reducing carbon, resource use or waste. However, as this volume shows, reuse also has aesthetic and cultural dimensions and a rich social currency, invoked to consciously subvert the accelerated consumer culture responsible for our unfolding environmental crisis. In three parts, the essays in this book consider reuse in terms of values, aesthetics and meaning, its application in contemporary urban and spatial settings, and the revival of social practices involving a more conscious recourse to reuse and repair. These are bookended by the editors' essays: the first, on the significant relationship between reuse and technological and social acceleration evident in the surrounding consumer society; and the last, on the multiple forms of reuse deployed in a contemporary alternative building practice, and their contributions to presenting alternative ways of living in the world. Challenging dominant understandings of ‘waste’ and ‘consumption’, Subverting Consumerism shows how reuse has become a means for many to creatively engage with the past, and to discover a continuity and sense of place eroded by the accelerative regimes of contemporary consumerism. Becoming a means of resistance, and offering a range of aesthetic, social and economic possibilities, reuse can be found to subvert and challenge the obsessive quest for the new found in contemporary consumerism.

God's Good Economy

God's Good Economy PDF Author: Andrew Hartropp
Publisher: Inter-Varsity Press
ISBN: 1783597658
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
‘The earth is the Lord’s’ (Ps.24:1). God states that He is the rightful owner of the earth and everything in it. God wants people to enjoy material things – but God must be the centre of our lives. Christ’s radical call to his followers includes the call to let him drive our economic and business life. This means letting God’s justice rule all our economic relationships: treating people rightly; a constant seeking of justice for, especially, the poor and needy; working so that all participate in God’s blessings, including material blessings. In Part 1, Andrew Hartropp looks at how Christ’s followers are to do justice in our economic relationships: as individuals, as households, in the workplace and as church communities. Then, moving outward (in concentric circles), Part 2 shows how Jesus’s disciples can do justice in and through secular institutions, including companies and firms, banks and other financial institutions, then government institutions, and then in the international/global context. The epilogue is on the glorious vision of God’s everlasting kingdom, which both drives us and also keeps our efforts now in proper perspective.

Buying Power

Buying Power PDF Author: Lawrence B. Glickman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226298663
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
A definitive history of consumer activism, Buying Power traces the lineage of this political tradition back to our nation’s founding, revealing that Americans used purchasing power to support causes and punish enemies long before the word boycott even entered our lexicon. Taking the Boston Tea Party as his starting point, Lawrence Glickman argues that the rejection of British imports by revolutionary patriots inaugurated a continuous series of consumer boycotts, campaigns for safe and ethical consumption, and efforts to make goods more broadly accessible. He explores abolitionist-led efforts to eschew slave-made goods, African American consumer campaigns against Jim Crow, a 1930s refusal of silk from fascist Japan, and emerging contemporary movements like slow food. Uncovering previously unknown episodes and analyzing famous events from a fresh perspective, Glickman illuminates moments when consumer activism intersected with political and civil rights movements. He also sheds new light on activists’ relationship with the consumer movement, which gave rise to lobbies like the National Consumers League and Consumers Union as well as ill-fated legislation to create a federal Consumer Protection Agency.

Sustainable Consumption and Production, Volume II

Sustainable Consumption and Production, Volume II PDF Author: Ranjula Bali Swain
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030552853
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Circular economy principles are driving to overcome the challenges of today’s linear take-make-dispose production and consumption patterns through keeping the value of products, materials, and resources circulating in the economy as long as possible. Sustainable Consumption and Production, Volume II: Circular Economy and Beyond aims to explore the sustainable consumption and production transition to a circular economy, while addressing critical global challenges by innovating and transforming product and service markets towards sustainable development. This book explores how consumers, private sector, relevant international organizations, and governments can play an active role in innovating businesses to help companies, individuals (consumers and citizens), organizations, and sectors, to remain competitive, while transitioning towards sustainable markets and economies. It is of interest to economists, students, businesses, and policymakers.

Con$umed

Con$umed PDF Author: Benjamin R. Barber
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393330893
Category : Capitalism
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
An examination of the effects of capitalism on American culture and society reveals how consumer capitalism overproduces goods, targets children as consumers, and replaces public goods with private commodities.

Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design

Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design PDF Author: Jonathan Chapman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317435923
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 701

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Book Description
As a cultivated form of invention, product design is a deeply human phenomenon that enables us to shape, modify and alter the world around us – for better or worse. The recent emergence of the sustainability imperative in product design compels us to recalibrate the parameters of good design in an unsustainable age. Written by designers, for designers, the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design presents the first systematic overview of the burgeoning field of sustainable product design. Brimming with intelligent viewpoints, critical propositions, practical examples and rich theoretical analyses, this book provides an essential point of reference for scholars and practitioners at the intersection of product design and sustainability. The book takes readers to the depth of our engagements with the designed world to advance the social and ecological purpose of product design as a critical twenty-first-century practice. Comprising 35 chapters across 6 thematic parts, the book’s contributors include the most significant international thinkers in this dynamic and evolving field.

Subverting Masculinity

Subverting Masculinity PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004456635
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Contemporary Western societies are currently witness to a “crisis of masculinity” but also to an intriguing diversification of images of masculinity. Once relatively stable regimes of masculine gender representation appear to have been replaced by a wider spectrum of varieties of masculine “lifestyles” taken up by the media and the market, to produce new and immensely flexible forms consumerised gender hegemony. The essays in Subverting Masculinity concentrate on contemporary film, literature and diverse forms of popular culture. The essays show that the subversion of traditional images of masculinity is both a source of gender contestation, but may equally be susceptible to assimilation by new hegemonic configurations of masculinity. Subverting Masculinity maps out the ongoing relevance of gender politics in contemporary culture, but also raises the question of increasingly unclear distinctions between hegemonic and subversive versions of masculinity in contemporary cultural production. Subverting Masculinity will be of interest to students and teachers of gender, cultural, film and literary studies.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole PDF Author: Benjamin R. Barber
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393070392
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
"Powerful and disturbing. No one who cares about the future of our public life can afford to ignore this book." —Jackson Lears A powerful sequel to Benjamin R. Barber's best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld, Consumed offers a vivid portrait of an overproducing global economy that targets children as consumers in a market where there are never enough shoppers and where the primary goal is no longer to manufacture goods but needs. To explain how and why this has come about, Barber brings together extensive empirical research with an original theoretical framework for understanding our contemporary predicament. He asserts that in place of the Protestant ethic once associated with capitalism—encouraging self-restraint, preparing for the future, protecting and self-sacrificing for children and community, and other characteristics of adulthood—we are constantly being seduced into an "infantilist" ethic of consumption.

Observations on the Castrati in Britain

Observations on the Castrati in Britain PDF Author: Paul F. Rice
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527590828
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This book highlights the experiences of castrato singers in Britain during the long eighteenth-century. These singers stood apart from traditional cultural and sexual norms of the period by nature of their altered bodies. The work investigates the fears surrounding the possibility of Catholic influence in the nation, and the ability of sensual Italian operatic music to feminize the male population and weaken the country’s leaders. The castrato as a possible romantic rival to “normal” men is also discussed, while the contributions of the castrati to cultural leadership in the areas of teaching, concert direction and social influence are examined. This book will appeal to music historians and those interested in cultural and gender studies.

Production Processes and Product Evolution in the Age of Disruption

Production Processes and Product Evolution in the Age of Disruption PDF Author: Francesco Gabriele Galizia
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031348214
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 858

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Book Description
This book includes state-of-the-art and original research contributions from two well-established conferences, which collectively focus on the joint design, development, and management of products, advanced production systems, and business for sustainable customization and personalization. The book includes wide range of topics within these subjects, ranging from industrial success factors to original contributions within the field. The authors represent worldwide leading research institutions.