title: Exploring the cultural politics of consumption, community and care
Creators: name: Davis, Jack
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2023

description: The cultural facets of consumption have been well documented over the past twenty years, as the umbrella of the consumer culture theory (CCT) programme has been revised, updated, contested and expanded. The CCT programme has thus far provided important socio-cultural insights into consumer behaviour, material culture and market systems. However, in order to understand and address the challenges and possibilities facing contemporary consumption culture, there is scope to build on research which looks beyond the ‘individual’ consumer as a pre-given actuality and contribute to a line of enquiry which more concertedly considers and questions the taken-for-granted assumptions of markets, consumption and culture. Following this line of enquiry, this PhD builds on consumer research concerning the development and exercise of social power across the cultural politics of consumption. In the first empirical paper, presented in Chapter Four, this social power is found in the mechanics of market and state ideology as it manifests in political marketing by analysing how right-wing ideology may emerge from neoliberal hierarchies of power. The second and third empirical papers (Chapter Five and Chapter Six) study the emergence and organisation of everyday care in online communities that revolve around cultural interest in music and literature. Through these latter two empirical chapters, I highlight how the subversion of market orientated hierarchy and domination in capitalist consumer culture can arise through the micro-politics of communities which do not exist for that explicit purpose.
The main body of this dissertation consists of five main chapters. This includes separate chapters for literature review and methodology, three standalone papers which also fit together as a cohesive study, along with an introduction which comprises Chapter One and Chapter seven, which provides the concluding discussion. In Chapter Two, my literature review first considers scholarship which problematises the de-politicised and hyper-individualised perceptions of consumer behaviours and cultural life, which is further explored in my first empirical paper (Chapter Four) as a facet of neoliberal ideology. In the following section, I go on to trace the foundations and emergence of exploring a nascent, collective cultural politics of consumption through research concerning the emergence of care, community and conviviality in consumer research. This foundation provides a springboard for the latter two empirical chapters (Chapter Five and Chapter Six).
Chapter Three outlines the qualitative, digital methods for my empirical research. I introduce the philosophical principles of qualitative design, and the ongoing debates concerning digital research and platform culture. I go on to detail the research design for the empirical chapters of the PhD, the first of which outlines the discursive analysis of infographics in Chapter Four, and the latter research design provides an overview of the process for exploring online communities using netnographic methodology for the empirical components of Chapter Five and Chapter Six. 
My first empirical paper, presented in Chapter Four, addresses literature from the first section of my review in Chapter Two which demonstrates a recent turn towards political pessimism in consumer research. This chapter goes on to argue that to turn away from progressive possibility is to invite something to fill the void. To illustrate my point, I analyse materials from the 2016 European referendum using multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA). The purpose of this is to excavate how ideology is communicated through hierarchies of social power in political marketing. I contribute to previous research concerning the Thatcherite belief that there is no alternative to capitalism (Fisher, 2009), and highlight how this may develop into a growing realization that regressive, right-wing forms of capitalism can emerge in the cracks of neoliberalism. 
I present my second empirical paper in Chapter Five. This paper unpacks the emergence of radical care (or caring with) in online communities. This chapter draws on feminist literature to consider the emergence and scaling of caring with from the individual to the societal level. I employ a netnographic methodology to explore two online Facebook ‘groups’; the first revolved around a UK-based rock band, Idles, and the second is organised by fans of fantasy and science fiction literature. My findings are concerned with how and when care relations emerge within online communities and provide social and emotional support to benefit their mental health. These constitute three dimensions of care relations, which cover the emergence of the feeling of community, the development of affective solidarity through acknowledging their vulnerabilities and the movement towards embodying care relations in offline activities. I then discuss the implications of radical care which starts with the care for the individual self and extends to the other of the community and society as a foundation for scaling the socialisation between and social production of people and their capacity for enacting change. 
My third empirical paper is presented in Chapter Six. This chapter draws on organisational research and anarchist political theory to explore how an ethics of care facilitates prefigurative possibilities for community self-organisation through cultures of mutual aid. Through this process, I theorise the ethics of care in the context of online communities using netnographic data and contributes to our understanding of care as an ethics of prefigurative possibility in social organising. In this study, care ethics are found to be dynamic, and essential to community self-organisation by fostering active participation between like-minded individuals as a process of ongoing transformation. This leads to a discussion of how care ethics enable community members to expand the boundaries of their care and provide a basis for them to organise alternative economies. This is achieved through member’s active participation in the community, which organises collective activity and capacity in the community through the relationships and bonds which constitute it, as opposed to through more formal social or institutional hierarchies. 
This thesis engages with two contrasting contexts in my study of politics, consumption and culture, and reveals both challenges and possibilities through a political lens. The former study (Chapter Four) analyses the challenges which arise in overcoming the inherent power and reproduction of hierarchies in consumption, which reinforce certain inequalities, maintain a sense of political inertia and at times contribute to the proliferation of far-right forms of capitalism. The latter studies highlight the scaling of care from the individual to the societal level (Chapter Five) and outline how care ethics facilitate prefigurative possibilities for plurality in everyday social self-organisation, which offer the possibility of living otherwise (Chapter Six). In closing, my concluding chapter addresses how this research offers a means for contesting the subjectivities of the ‘consumer’ as a pre-given actuality and emphasises the micro-political possibilities of an ethics of care which can prefigure alternative ways of experiencing or ‘living’ in contemporary consumer culture.