This study aimed to examine how a company like Anamma creates a platform where people can connect and inspire others to buy vegan food and what strategies they use to do so. The empirical material consisted of eight posts on Instagram made by the Swedish vegan company Anamma. The posts are showing how vegan meals can be healthy, tasteful but also how it is good for the environment. Since the material in these posts were both text, pictures and animated videos a multimodal analysis was most suitable to get a valid and true result. Initially the posts were analyzed one by one. Then we summarized the result into three themes based on what was discovered during the first analysis. The study shows that Anamma is using strategic tools like the theory of Two-step-flow, or Word of mouth to make people hear about them. By using hashtags and tagging people they are creating a chain of equivalence, using the digital platform to spread their message. They also use words like, “together”, “all of us” and “save the planet” et cetera, which is assumed to make people want to be a part of making the world a better place. Also, they frequently use statistics as a strategy of persuasion to show how much less effluent vegan food is to the environment compared to meat. Using the word “Anamma-friends” is a strategy that helps create a strong community for their customers. All their strategies combined contributes to creating social identity and a feeling of belonging. However, this study is not a study of communication effects, since that would require a different approach. Therefore the conclusion of this study is that Anammas communication is effective and adequate towards the social context and can be seen as successful in relation to the purpose of the study.

American undertakers first began relocating from downtown parlors to mansions in residential neighborhoods around the First World War, and by midcentury virtually every city and town possessed at least one funeral home in a remodeled dwelling. Using industry publications, newspapers, photographs, legal documents, and field work, this dissertation mines the funeral industry's shift from business district to residential district for insights into America's evolving residential landscape, the impact of consumer culture on the built environment, and the communicative power of objects. Chapters one and two describe the changing landscape of professional deathcare. Chapter three explores the funeral home's residential setting as the battleground where undertakers clashed with residents and civil authorities for the soul of America's declining nineteenth-century neighborhoods and debated the efficacy and legality of zoning. The funeral home itself became a site for debate within the industry over whether or not professionals could also be successful merchants. Chapters four and five demonstrate how an awareness of both the symbolic value of material culture and the larger consumer marketplace led enterprising undertakers to mansions as a tool to legitimate their claims to professional status and as a setting to stimulate demand for luxury goods, two objectives often at odds with one another. Chapter five also explores the funeral home as a barometer of rising pressures within retail culture, from its emphasis on merchandising and democratized luxury to the industry's early exodus from the downtown as a harbinger of the postwar decentralization of shopping to the suburbs. Amidst perennial concerns over rising burial costs and calls for greater simplicity, funeral directors created spaces that married simplicity to luxury, a paradox that became a hallmark of modern consumer culture. Notwithstanding their success as retail spaces, funeral homes struggled for acceptance as ritual spaces. Chapter six follows the industry's aggressive campaign to dislodge the home funeral using advertisements that showcased the funeral home's privacy and homelike comforts. In the end, a heightened emphasis within consumer culture on convenience and the funeral home's ability to balance sales and ceremony solidified its enduring and iconic place within the vernacular landscape.

During the last years, the phenomenon of ultra-fast fashion, specifically the retailer SHEIN, has grown massively and became popular among young female consumers. SHEIN is also known for their polluting productions, bad working conditions, violating (social) sustainable laws and stealing designs from other designers. Still, this does not seem to impact the consumers' attraction towards clothes from SHEIN. The purpose of this research is to investigate the appeal of SHEIN for young female consumers. This research employs qualitative research methods to examine the empirical material in relation to three prominent theories: Hawkin Stern's "impulse buying theory", John Schouten and James McAlexander's "consumption subculture theory", and Russel Belk's "extended self theory". The empirical material for this research was obtained through 10 semi-structured interviews. Given the limited existing research on the phenomenon of ultra-fast fashion, an exploratory research design was chosen to investigate this topic. The empirical findings of this research can be divided into three different themes: The contradicting appreciation, The irrelevance of socioeconomic status and The SHEIN consumption subculture. The central theme lies in SHEIN’s big collection and the respondents’ appreciation for it. Another theme shows that there is not a clear pattern found between the socioeconomic status of the respondents and their SHEIN consumption. Lastly, around the consumption of SHEIN clothes, a consumption subculture is formed. This research is believed to contribute to the under researched area of ultra-fast fashion, as well as further develop and question the selective theories.

In Swedish society, food is the fourth most prominent area of consumption. The number of large grocery shops is increasing, and today a consumer can choose between several different brands for the same product. However, there is still a lack of knowledge about defining sustainable food consumption as well as a lack of knowledge about how the consumer receives communication about sustainable food consumption. By using semi-structured qualitative in-depth interviews with students from a Swedish university, this study investigates whether sustainable food consumption is relevant to young people living with limited resources and how they define the concept. The study also examines how the interviewees make sense of communication promoting sustainable food consumption. Results illustrate that sustainable food consumption is not as relevant for students due to today’s expensive food prices. However, these students were also motivated and informed. They knew how to consume sustainably but were constrained by the economic situation. In addition, the students had difficulty defining sustainable food consumption, while they had no problems defining the more general concept of sustainability. Secondly, the public opinion about communication to promote sustainability was negative because the messages were either misleading or not transparent enough; the recipients became confused and critical. The messages were therefor interpreted as inauthentic.

Farmers’ markets are often thought to be the hallmark of the local food movement. However, there appears to be relatively little research which considers farmers’ experiences there. Drawing on 12 open-ended interviews with 16 farmers on Vancouver Island, BC, I explore how farmers’ markets support small-scale farmers, although they are losing farmer focus. I explore three key themes in this research: mainstream economic assessments of farmers’ markets, how consumer culture affects small-scale farmers, and whether organic certification works for small-scale farmers. The intent of my research is not only to consider farmers’ experiences at farmers’ markets, but to show how to improve their current organization on Vancouver Island and elsewhere. As such, this refocuses farmers’ markets back to local food, small-scale ecological farming, and food sovereignty. / Graduate

My thesis investigates an interdisciplinary narrative of the transatlantic migration of Surrealism to Mexico during the 1940s. I focus on the ways exiled European Surrealists approached notions of Mexican material culture in a hybrid society where local traditions coexisted with a global modernity. Looking to popular and print culture outlets, I concentrate on how Mexican material culture was perceived, promoted, and marketed through a Surrealist lens. Specifically, I consider the collaboration of the German pharmaceutical company Casa Bayer, S.A. and exiled Spanish-born Surrealist Remedios Varo, who produced a series of medical advertisements during her first decade in Mexico City from 1943 to 1949. Through an examination of Varo’s work, my thesis explores the changing boundaries of fine and commercial art that resulted from the efforts of artists who participated in modern mass culture and consumerism. I investigate the significance of her Surrealist advertisements for Casa Bayer as a material culture bound on one side with fine art and the other side with the development of Mexican advertising. This case study supports my argument that Surrealism, as a transnational aesthetic, was one alternative way of demonstrating the new cultural meanings of advertising in an ambiguous, modern Mexican society. Examining Varo’s illustrations in light of the movement of western Europeans to Mexico and the country’s commitment to modern progress explains why the artist negotiated her past avant-garde sensibilities with her Mexican present. / Art History

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This dissertation is a history of the change in form and location of ballparks that explains why that change happened, when it did, and what this tells us about broader society, about hopes and fears, and about tastes and prejudices. It uses case studies of five important and trend-setting ballparks to understand what it meant to go to a major league game in the twentieth century. I examine the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium in the first half of the twentieth century, what I call the classic ballpark era, Dodger Stadium and the Astrodome from the 1950s through the 1980s, what I call the multi-use ballpark era, and Camden Yards in the retro-chic ballpark era—the 1990s and beyond. I treat baseball as a reflection of larger American culture that sometimes also shaped that culture. I argue that baseball games were a purportedly inclusive space that was actually exclusive and divided, but that the exclusion and division was masked by rhetoric about the game and the relative lack of explicit policies barring anyone. Instead, owners built a system that was economically and socially stratified and increasingly physically removed from lower-class and non-white city residents. Ballparks’ tiers allowed owners to give wealthier fans the option of sitting in the seats closest to home plate where they would not have to interact with poorer fans who owners pushed to the cheaper seats further from the action. That masked exclusion gave middle- and upper-class fans a space that was comfortable and safe because it was anything but truly accessible to all Americans. I also argue that owners had to change the image of the ballpark and tinker with the exclusion there as fans’ tastes and their visions of what a city should look and feel like changed. / History