
Dr Ai-Ling Lai
BA, PhD
Expertise
Current positions
Senior Lecturer in Marketing
School of Management - Business School
Contact
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Biography
I taught on a number of marketing related units at both institutions, which include Consumer Behaviour, Research Methods for Marketing, Integrated Marketing Communications and Consumer Culture.
I am a interpretive consumer researcher, and my work specifically focus on the shaping of marketplace practices from an embodied-practice perspective. My research projects explore the interweaving of body, time and space (rhythm) to understand how market practices perpetuate social inequalities, and their implications on marketing and public policies as well as on identity politics.
Research interests
My research interest lies in the area of cultural consumption, and specifically focus on the shaping of marketplace practices from an embodied-practice perspective. Crucially, my research projects explore the interweaving of body, time and space (rhythm) to understand how market practices perpetuate social inequalities, and their implications on marketing and public policies as well as on identity politics.
My early work draws on the existential-philosophical works of Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger to explore the ambivalence surrounding the donation of body parts. This research problematises the gifting economy that underpins the marketing of organ donation. The research raises questions pertaining to posthuman identities, the liminality between life and death as well as biotechnological citizenship.
More recently, I explore the inclusion/exclusion of singles from the marketplace and in social policies. This project contributes to an understanding of how the marketplace perpetuates heteronormative structuration and how singles ‘make do’ and orient themselves within these structures through micro-practices. This project was featured on the BBC 4 Radio Programme, Thinking Allowed, Being Single and Modern Romance (Visit: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06grz17).
I am also the principle investigator of a cross-institutional research project (in collaboration with colleagues from the Open University, University of Leicester, Royal Agricultural University and Coventry University), which aims to develop an understanding of how urban food markets can be reimagined as nodal points that connect disparate urban food networks in a manner that is inclusive and sustainable. Using a rhythmanalysis-historical approach, this project traces the evolution of shopping practices and market systems from the middle-ages to the Post-Covid-19 era to observe structural shifts in the practices of food consumption and provisioning away from urban traditional markets to supermarkets.
My work has been published in journals such as Journal of Marketing Management, Qualitative Market Research, Advances in Consumer Research and a book chapter in Susan Dobscha’s (ed.) Death in Consumer Culture, Routledge Interpretive Marketing Research.
Publications
Selected publications
07/08/2015The abject single
Journal of Marketing Management
Class talk
Journal of Marketing Management
Cyborg as Commodity
Advances in Consumer Research
Recent publications
31/05/2022Mobilising the walking-with technique to explore mundane consumption practices: practical and theoretical reflections
Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal
"In the Flow: Materiality, Value and Rubbish in Lagos
Advances in Consumer Research
The Art of Solo Dining: a Rhythmanalysis of Restaurant Spaces
Advances in Consumer Research
Class talk
Journal of Marketing Management
The ‘mortal coil’ and the political economy of death
Death in a Consumer Culture