SOCIM0030 Conumption, Environment & Sustainable Development.

SOCI30103 Consumption, Consumer Culture, & Sustainability. 

These two units reflect my research interests in the intersecting fields of the sociologies of culture, consumption, food, sustainability, and environmental change. In both of these, I explore with students the different ways that the figure of 'the consumer' has been understood, and how these shape policy interventions to change consumer behaviouirs today. Taking the climate emergency as a starting point, we work to understand what these fields can tell us about the potential for consumers to change their behaviours in ways that will allow societies to meet the goals of the sustainable development agenda. These courses chart a uniquely sociological perspective that is underpinned by theories of practice, which emphasise the shared nature of consumer behaviours,  which are understood to be complex, interconnected with other practices and obligations in daily life, and are reproduced at a scale that make them resistant to change. In both of these units, we also turn our heads to both the past and future, to imagine what might be possible if the practcies making up our daily lives (such as eating)  were to be reconfigured in order to cause rippling change through multitude of social practices in daily life that also implicate the consumption of resources, rather than seeing this as a problem for consumers to fix simply through amendemnts to their own consumption habits.