To Örebro University

This presentation revits consumer acculturation research through a poetic lens inspired by Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. Analyzing the Windrush generation in the UK, it reveals how migrants use consumption to poetize relations to Otherness and displacement, offering an alternative to dominant host-centered frameworks in consumer culture theory.

This book explores how digital marketing can drive disability inclusion in consumer culture by addressing accessibility, representation, and research methodologies. It offers practical and theoretical insights for academics, practitioners, and policymakers interested in marketing, communication, sociology, and public policy.

The first part, Digital Marketplace Accessibility, examines strategies for reducing the digital divide, including inclusive hiring practices and accessible platform development. The second part, Digital Representation, focuses on how people with disabilities are portrayed in digital media. It analyses topics such as aesthetics, influencer marketing, mental health advocacy, and neurodiversity. The third part, Digital Methodologies, highlights research approaches like netnography and offers reflections on methodological challenges when researching consumers with disabilities. Contributors discuss practices for conducting ethical and inclusive research involving people with disabilities, providing a roadmap for scholars. The final part, Poetic Epilogue, takes a poetic turn, offering an ecopoetic reflection on lived experiences of Alzheimer’s disease.

This book encourages readers to reconsider disability as a complex and intersectional category. It inspires marketers, researchers, and advocates to adopt more inclusive and socially conscious marketing practices, ultimately contributing to a more equitable digital consumer culture.

This chapter examines the use of netnography to explore the digital lives of people with disabilities. As traditional research methods often fall short in capturing the complexity of online interactions, netnography offers a nuanced approach to understanding how digital platforms, for example, facilitate community building, coping strategies, and advocacy. Drawing on insights from netnography pioneer Kozinets, this chapter demonstrates how this methodology amplifies marginalised voices, addresses stigma, and uncovers hidden dynamics within disability communities. Ethical considerations, including data privacy and informed consent, are also discussed to ensure responsible and sensitive research practices. Netnography emerges as an indispensable tool for disability research, offering cultural insights and promoting inclusivity in an increasingly digital world. 

This paper explores the overlooked affective beauty through ‘care’ (Elliott 2016) in a visibly violent consumer culture, the one of Swedish gangster rap. 'Ethics of care' promotes well-being within social relations, but its impact varies contextually. We highlight its beauty and power even under toxic conditions, where excess becomes lethal.

Disability is one of the largest minority groups, with a spending power of approximately 273bn pound every year. Consequently, many advertisers are now weaving people with disabilities into brand narratives. These narratives often evoke feelings of pity or portray people with disabilities as inspiring, solely or in part on the basis of their disability. Meanwhile, social media has emerged as a vessel for social change. Through the netnographic study of twelve influencers with visible impairments, complex personhood is proposed as a social ontology by which disabled lives are acknowledged in less confined terms. Our findings illustrate how social media influencers with disabilities may draw on narratives based on empowerment, playfulness, resistance, and responsibility to present themselves as neither victims nor superhuman agents but as complex human beings. We thus bring forward a complex model in market-mediated representations of disability, beyond the misrepresentational narratives based on pity and 'inspiration porn'.

In 1966, Jean Rhys returned from the dead. After the war, the author of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939) had mistakenly been presumed dead. She was a revenant, a zombi, a living dead haunting the pebbly beaches in Cornwall, herself haunted by memories of her Creole upbringing. She might have developed a taste for rum cocktails—she was briefly put in a mental hospital after attacking a neighbour with a pair of scissors—but she also had a mission; to bring justice to Mrs. Rochester, the “madwoman in the attic” in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Accordingly, Jean Rhys’s best known work, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), is a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Brontë’s original. In this paper, we advance theory on decolonial marketing and transformative branding through a reading of Rhys’s late literary masterpiece, hoping to grant her spectres a hospitable memory.

Disability is one of the largest minority groups, with a spending power of approximately 273bn pound every year. Consequently, many advertisers are now weaving people with disabilities into brand narratives. These narratives often evoke feelings of pity or portray people with disabilities as inspiring, solely or in part on the basis of their disability. Meanwhile, social media has emerged as a vessel for social change. Through the netnographic study of twelve influencers with visible impairments, complex personhood is proposed as a social ontology by which disabled lives are acknowledged in less confined terms. Our findings illustrate how social media influencers with disabilities may draw on narratives based on empowerment, playfulness, resistance, and responsibility to present themselves as neither victims nor superhuman agents but as complex human beings. We thus bring forward a complex model in market-mediated representations of disability, beyond the misrepresentational narratives based on pity and 'inspiration porn'.