Consumer Culture

Catalog description

This course explores how social meanings are constructed through commodities and material society, how consumer goods and practices create categories of social difference. In particular, the course focuses on the intersections of consumer practices and gender/sexuality, race and class, articulating the relationship between communication and consumption practices and social/cultural identities. Theoretical approaches include Marxism, Postmodernism, and other economic and social critiques, and explore research methods to empirically investigate questions of culture. Students reflect on questions of social justice in relation to an increasingly materialistic society as they seek to become citizens prepared to "consume with a conscience."