Shopping for Change: Consumer Culture and Social Movements in America

Catalog description

Consumption has been central to American political, economic, and social life. Americans have engaged in individual and collective action as consumers to fight corporate malfeasance, to influence legislators, and to assert consumers' rights. Yet being a consumer is also a political practice, and forms of consumer activism have been central to some of the most important struggles for social justice, political rights, and freedom in America. This seminar examines the connections between consumption and politics by looking at the role that consumer identities and activism played in various social movements throughout the twentieth century, from the Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902 to the present. By reading primary and secondary sources, we will examine how consumption was a means to challenge gender, race, and class barriers, to claim equality and citizenship, and to fight social injustice. However, in looking at these struggles over access, control, and rights, we will also examine how the focus on consumption was used to co-opt subversive political messages and to contain radicalism.