Faculty
Related Organizations
Media Research and Action Project
Examples of Research Projects:
The Commercialization of Childhood
The consumer marketplace is being re-shaped as it directs its attention to young people, and increasingly children. This project analyzes how children are being marketed to by going "inside" the advertising industry as a participant-observer. A quantitat ive component measures children's level of "consumer involvement" and using structural equation modeling, assesses its impact on their well-being. A second phase looking specifically at boys of color is being planned.
Faculty
Related Publications
Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture New York: Scribner, (2004).
"The Commodification of Childhood: Tales from the Advertising Front Lines," Hedgehog Review, 5(2): 7-23, Summer 2003:
Consume and Discard: Globalization, Empire and Unsustainable Consumption
The development of a global production system, based on cheap labor and exploitation of natural resources, has resulted in a growing ecological burden associated with US consumer behavior. This project looks at how cheap imports are accelerating the cycl e of consumer accumulation and discard in manufactured goods, and how a worldwide economy of trade, rooted in US power, is re-shaping global consumer connections.
Faculty
Related Publications
"Prices and Quantities: Unsustainable Consumption and the Global Economy," Ecological Economics, forthcoming, 2005.
"Cleaning the Closet: Toward a New Ethic of Fashion," in Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the 21st Century, edited by Juliet Schor and Betsy Taylor, (Boston: Beacon Press) November 2002.
Wear and Donate: The Global Fashion Circuit
The proliferation of low-wage, high-environmental impact South and East Asian textile production has been widely studied. In this project we look at how its expansion has resulted in a cycle of rising acquisition and more frequent discard of garments by US apparel consumers. Donated apparel is then shipped abroad, to Africa, Latin America and Asia. A global circuit of fashion has been created, based on a globalized, sweated, and environmentally damaging apparel industry. Our model shows the linkages.
Faculty
Juliet Schor, Kristen Heim
Venus In Video: Cybernetic Social Control and the Power of Fascination
Venus in Video is the second phase of a three-part program of theoretical research and writing on the socio-historical conditions and ethical-political implications of postmodernity as an emerging global cultural phenomenon. The first phase of this proje ct, Death at the Parasite Cafe: Social Science (Fictions) and the Postmodern was completed in 1992 and published by St. Martin's Press. Venus in Video extends this investigation by critically examining the historical origins and social impact of the appl ied science of cybernetics as a new global technology of power. Of particular concern is the capability of cybernetics to engineer social control in the areas of military power, business, consumer society, and popular culture. At issue is the ability of cybernetic feedback mechanisms to steer conformity, not merely through the power of punishment, threat or censure, but by the somewhat magical technological production of seductive and often captivating states of psychic and bodily fascination.
Faculty
Related Publications
"New Global Technologies of Power: Cybernetic Capitalism and Social Inequality," Chapter 23 in Mary Romero and Eric Margolis, eds., The Blackwell Companion for Social Inequalities, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2005, pp. 1042-1132.
"Theses on the Cyberotics of History: Venus in Microsoft, remix," in Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric J. Cassidy, ed. Cyberotics: Virtual Futures, Technology and Post-Human Pragmatism, New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 11-29.
"The Cybernetic Delirium of Norbert Wiener," in CTHEORY: Theory, Technology and Culture, Vol. 20 (1997), pp. 57-87.
"Twilight of the Parasites: Ultramodern Capital and the New World Order," Social Problems, Vol. 40, No. 2 (May 1993), pp. 801-827.