Conscious consumerism is a layered phenomenon. "Going green," "fair trade," "buy organic," "carbon footprint," and "shop local think global" are now familiar phrases in the lexicon of American shopping strategies, and conscious consumerism has a relationship with all of them. Groups defined as socially responsible consumers and trends in ethical consumption have been studied for over thirty years. After decades of consumer research and theories about the effects of mass consumerism in culture, conscious consumerism products and marketing campaigns are now major contributors in redefining consumer practices in a postmodern world. The messages they deliver about the changing roles of consumers and consumer goods makes it suitable for rhetorical scholarship to develop a stronger participatory role in the research. I use theories of style, material, and visual rhetoric to examine conscious consumerism today. The texts I examine were also marketing and aesthetic phenomenon. Chapter Three features the "I'm Not a Plastic Bag" canvas tote designed by Anna Hindmarch that was sold at select stores around the world and was one of the first sensations in the reusable bag industry. In Chapter Four, I compare and contrast two artifacts, the Livestrong bracelet and the Support Our Troops magnetic ribbon. I discuss the issues of disposable display, of plastics as markers of belief, and nationalism in our buying practices. Chapter Five is about (Product) RED not just as design but about what its presence does when recognizing issues of globalization. Chapter Six consists of conclusions, limitations, parodic responses to conscious consumerism, and a call for eloquent consuming. While each chapter has a particular focus in theorizing the material of each case study--the communicative praxis of the material rhetoric of canvas, the relationship between the body and the materials bought to put on the body, and larger global concerns within the fabric of language and T-shirts--all three case studies share connections in terms of style and living in a postmodern age.

The Continuing Ballad of Franco the Kid is an installation housing a collection of thoughts, both static and animated, addressing the absurdities of cultural dichotomy in contemporary America. Its theme-park aesthetic is an intentional appropriation meant to echo the spectacle that makes up America’s cultural landscape. Within this presentation the action of various iconic characters merge with fragmented text to form an allegorical matrix used to address America’s consumption and entertainment-obsessed culture and the consequential malaise induced by such obsession. The Continuing Ballad of Franco the Kid addresses this cultural state of being while underscoring current methods of communication and thought-control carefully orchestrated by corporate driven media machines, and the resulting dangers of such productions.

This paper is about retail development and its impact on local and regional communities. As the Big-box phenomena continues to play out in the 21st century, planning departments across the nation have been called to action with respect to addressing negative aspects of retail development. The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of retail, by tracing the evolving retail form and applying critical analysis to planning practices that no longer safeguard community interests in relation to retail industry initiatives. Specifically, this paper discusses issues that shape the social, economic and physical design of urban life. To that end, this paper reflects on the impact of retail and offers guidelines for resolving potential community/retail conflicts. / Master of Urban and Regional Planning

Since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the increase in population, urbanization, cheap energies, and new technologies have bankrupted the environment into destruction. This chaos has created a society that transformed itself into one of continual wasting, where energy and resources are constantly dissipating. The myriad of new materials, the decline of the skilled craftsman, and cheap construction are part of the lexicon that defines the 21st century built landscape and ultimately contribute to current plight. Architecture will become an increasingly significant factor in determining the sustainability of the built environment, as defined in terms of life span, carbon footprint, and in our ability to confine this dissipated and inert energy into near infinite circulation. This thesis investigates methods to maximize the value of existing resources such as waste in the context of a much larger framework of systems—societal, socioeconomic, geopolitical, and environmental factors that concern the current discourse. An analysis of design methods and strategies into the ecology of waste, such as: cradle to cradle, secondary re-use of post consumer materials, embodied energy, life-cycle analysis tools, and design for deconstruction—aid in a series of themed hypotheses and experimental projects. These projects use waste and wasted landscape to seek answers to a series of questions that deal with the future predicament of our cities in order to shift perceptions and form contemporary methodologies that assist in calibrating potentials for future waste and waste-scapes.

In recent years, cities worldwide have employed various tactics to control homeless people's use of urban space. Yet such measures never fully accomplish their goal, because homeless people develop ways to adapt the hostile landscape. In so doing, they not only respond to tactics of spatial control but they also create their own conceptions of urban space that serve to compensate for the structural systems that fail or even punish them. Thus, just as legal categories of property ownership leave homeless people without access to private spaces, they in turn create their own concepts of ownership and continually seek to privatize public space. Whereas legal restrictions are passed that criminalize homelessness in order to protect housed urban residents' "quality-of-life," homeless people develop tactics to protect themselves from the dangers of street life. Just as municipal authorities remove various amenities and add deterrents to try to prevent the use of certain locations, homeless people are attracted and repelled by features that are often beyond the control of authorities. While social services are relocated to encourage either spatial dispersion or concentration, homeless people build internal support networks that often serve their short-term needs better than social services. In short, homeless people not only respond to spatial control tactics in a variety of ways but also create their own landscape that often frustrates attempts to control their use of space. Drawing on interviews with 60 homeless people in Tucson, Arizona, this dissertation attempts to shed light on both these facets of street life, revealing that homeless people constantly strategize to find or make private, safe, functional, comfortable, and supportive places for themselves in a landscape designed to exclude them. Findings indicate that restrictive urban polices aimed at controlling the movements and actions of street people are not only ineffective but also exacerbate the problem of homelessness. These policies have the greatest impact on newly homeless individuals, pushing them toward existing street community in order to access vital information and support networks.

Since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the increase in population, urbanization, cheap energies, and new technologies have bankrupted the environment into destruction. This chaos has created a society that transformed itself into one of continual wasting, where energy and resources are constantly dissipating. The myriad of new materials, the decline of the skilled craftsman, and cheap construction are part of the lexicon that defines the 21st century built landscape and ultimately contribute to current plight. Architecture will become an increasingly significant factor in determining the sustainability of the built environment, as defined in terms of life span, carbon footprint, and in our ability to confine this dissipated and inert energy into near infinite circulation. This thesis investigates methods to maximize the value of existing resources such as waste in the context of a much larger framework of systems—societal, socioeconomic, geopolitical, and environmental factors that concern the current discourse. An analysis of design methods and strategies into the ecology of waste, such as: cradle to cradle, secondary re-use of post consumer materials, embodied energy, life-cycle analysis tools, and design for deconstruction—aid in a series of themed hypotheses and experimental projects. These projects use waste and wasted landscape to seek answers to a series of questions that deal with the future predicament of our cities in order to shift perceptions and form contemporary methodologies that assist in calibrating potentials for future waste and waste-scapes.

This study examines the spending patterns of parents, indentifying differences in the amount of money that parents spend on select items for sons compared to daughters. Using secondary data from the "Consumer Expenditure Survey: Diary Survey" dataset from 2008 through 2010, this study tests the hypothesis that parents with adolescent girls spend more money on apparel, beauty and hygiene products, health care, and education compared to parents with adolescent boys. An interaction effect for gender and socioeconomic status by parental expenditures was also included in order to test the long-debated Trivers-Willard hypothesis that high status parents will spend more money on sons while low status parents will spend more on daughters. In determining whether an association exists between parents\' expenditures and the gender of their children, multiple regressions were used to test the hypotheses, allowing the results to be generalizable to single-child and two-child families of adolescents across the United States. The regressions show that within one-child households, parents with daughters do in fact spend more money when making purchases for apparel, education, and medical expenses. However, these findings do not apply to two-child families, as no significant differences were found within these households. Following these results, limitations to the study are discussed, as well as the study\'s implications for familial relationships, consumer socialization, and gender inequality among children. / Master of Science

In Europe and beyond, pilgrimage centres attract millions of visitors each year. This popularity has provoked a burgeoning academic interest in pilgrimage, and this thesis builds on this expanding literature. It emerges out of a dialogue between old and new forms of movement – a conversation that demands further research on the relationship between religious traditions and late–modern consumer culture, a dialogue made explicit through the study of pilgrimage. Although this thesis pays attention to one case study in particular, namely the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, it draws on multi–disciplinary research in order to set a broader context. It reveals four motivational themes, derived from interviews with pilgrims on the road to Compostela. These I explore in depth through qualitative analysis, while at the same time taking note of parallel quantitative work concerned with the Camino de Santiago as well as other pilgrimage sites in Europe. Ranging from the search for spirituality to recreation, motivations are found to be the result of a conflation of meanings; they are ambiguous narratives, which very often include spiritual as well as secular aspirations. My findings suggest a de–differentiation of poles of meaning such as sacred and profane, movement and place, religion and secularity, community and individual. In short, this is a methodologically diverse study which argues that, contrary to perception, traditional forms of religious rituals are not necessarily incompatible with late–modern consumer culture. Through consumer culture religious traditions are being revitalized. The renewed popularity of pilgrimage today demonstrates how some religious landscapes and spaces have remained important through political and religious movements, while others have been regenerated by literature, new media, specialist tourist markets, advertising and private enterprise. Finally, this study reveals a noticeable democratization of traditional rites, and the landscapes in which they take place. A very wide variety of groups and individuals visit them.

Thesis advisor: Jane E. Regan / Few would dispute the notion that consumerism is a prevailing feature of American culture. The extent to which consumer culture dominates the way most people see the world makes imagining alternatives to consumerism almost impossible. This stultification of imagination is highly problematic. As it stands, consumer culture, measured by the principles of Catholic Social Teaching, demonstrably tends to inhibit human flourishing on personal, social, and global levels. There is a need to transform consumer culture in order to support human flourishing more robustly, and this barrenness of imagination impedes that transformation. This dissertation assumes that it is a task of teachers in faith to educate toward cultural alternatives that better support human flourishing. This task requires engaging in and developing what Scripture scholar Walter Brueggemann calls "prophetic imagination." The prophetic imagination involves both deconstructing the taken-for-granted dominant culture and entering into a community whose practices, values, and ideals effect an alternative culture. While here focused on consumer culture, this model of educating for prophetic imagination has broader applicability; it can also be used, for example, to challenge cultures of racism, sexism, and militarism. This education in imagination develops in what scholars of management Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger call "communities of practice." Jesus and his disciples model for Christians a community of practice that imagines and acts prophetically. Communities of practice that educate for prophetic imagination ought to measure their own imagination against Jesus's prophetic imagination, shaped by his understanding of the Reign of God. This portrait of communities of prophetic practice is fleshed out in an exploration of empirical studies of communities that engage learners and draw them into an imagination that re-shapes not only how they see what the world is but also how they envision what the world can be. Communities of practice that educate for prophetic imagination can foster the transformation of consumer culture into a culture that better supports human flourishing. In order to do so, however, they must start with an anthropology that adequately understands what flourishing entails. These communities ought to be attentive to three aspects of the human person that tend to be given short shrift in consumer culture: the person's role as a creative producer, the person's inherent relationality, and the person's need embrace finitude, the limitations of human capability. The Church should be utilizing communities of practice to overcome the sterility of imagination and contribute to a culture of what might be called humanizing plenitude. This culture supports the fullness of human thriving by re-imagining what that thriving entails and engaging in practices to facilitate it. The Church as teacher can be involved in this education for the purpose of cultural transformation to enhance human flourishing in various arenas. Finally, this dissertation particularly proposes that this education can happen in higher education, in parishes, and in collaboration with the wider community. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry.

In attending to consumption as a defining feature of life in Western societies, existing consumer research has tended to envisage, construct and reproduce ‘the consumer’ as either enthusiastically embracing the delights of the market, or as actively resisting or rebelling against its evils. The extant research has therefore tended to assume a high degree of reflexive conscious engagement in consumption as the norm. In this research, I argue that this might have inadvertently obscured the possibility of non-participation in various aspects of consumption through disinterest. This appears within the field as a theoretical space where people relate to consumption opportunities with rather less reflection or emotion and allows for the choice not to buy to be part of an accepted and unreflected-upon aspect of existence; a diverse shadow-realm of consumer inactivity in which feelings of indifference may be significant. Though a general lack of interest in various aspects of consumption may constitute an ontologically common experience, indifference has remained a largely unnoticed and under-theorised element of social reality in a consumer culture. In this study, I explore the possibilities of indifference in a consumer culture, not as a psychological construct or symptom of pathology but as a lived experience, understood in different ways and constituted through different discursive contexts. In this research, I draw on 29 phenomenological interviews to offer an empiricallygrounded interpretation of what it means to be indifferent to consumption. From the stories the informants shared with me, I articulate how the experience of indifference can appear as a genuine blindness towards a spectacular world of consumption, underpinned by other sociocultural narratives that construct the marketplace as a remote, unfamiliar or unappealing domain. In other stories, experiences of indifference appeared to be maintained by a constant and taken-for-granted adherence to a classification system that denotes consumerism as a powerful source of physical and spiritual pollution. Whilst in other narratives, a general lack of interest in various aspects of consumption revealed a paradoxical desire for a personal identity forged from a dismissal of consumption; a culturally-shaped performance of pseudoindifference that involved refusing ‘consumer activity’ in order to construct a defiantly nonconsumer self. In addressing the cultural narratives and contexts that seem to account for nonconsumption through indifference, this study contributes to wider debates on processes of disengagement and less material living, and invites consumer researchers to develop a greater sensitivity to indifference within sociological accounts of consumption.