Consumption and material culture, new historiographical visions

Mora, Cira Inés (Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano)

Otero Cleves, Ana María (Universidad de los Andes)

Jonathan Woodham (Professor Emeritus, University of Brighton, UK - in person)

Justification

In one of its thematic trends, the new historiography of consumption explores the possible and varied relationships that can exist between design and material culture and consumption. This interdisciplinary perspective and the new history of consumption and its relationship with material culture expand the notion of the consumption category, mechanistically equated to purchasing, the market, hyperconsumption and environmental disaster. This theoretical and historiographical path proposes the understanding of all forms of circulation and acquisition (not only purchasing), use, exchange, disposal and/or reuse of objects, services and places, as well as the experimentation of tastes and desires. These manifestations form a network of meanings in which subjects and groups not only construct themselves in relation to what, how, where and why they consume, but also construct other and/or establish barriers that separate and differentiate them or bring them closer and constitute themselves as a collective.

Objectives

Explore the relationship between the designed object and its forms of consumption to broaden comprehension of phenomena through at least two approaches:

• Study the various forms of identification and differentiation of class and gender through the acquisition of objects, whether necessary, novel or luxurious; the subjectivities and sociabilities present in the rituals of cultural and leisure consumption; or the alternatives for citizen participation and cultural and social visibility that influence the transformation of languages and aesthetics of advertising, the market and politics.
• Refocus the study of design (the designed or in general the material culture) not only of its production but of its demand, allowing the appearance of other more solidary, collective, reciprocal practices and resistances of/to consumption