Consuming Crisis
Commodifying Care and COVID-19
- Francesca Sobande - Cardiff University, UK
"Trenchant and moving. This book offers critical hope." - Dr Naya Jones, University of California Santa Cruz
Consuming Crisis is a crucial account of how consumer culture capitalized on Coronavirus (COVID-19). Sobande explores how brands claim to care while they encourage people to ‘keep calm and consume’. This critical analysis of the power and politics of marketing examines an eclectic mix of campaigns, content, and experiences. Such work outlines the societal significance of fast-fashion adverts, banana bread’s pandemic ‘moment’, university social media strategies, and how digital technology mediates memories and work. Based on the belief that brands cannot be activists, Sobande creatively considers how brands construct care, camaraderie, culture, and so-called ‘normal’ life during times of crisis.
Francesca Sobande is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Studies at Cardiff University
The Social Science for Social Justice series challenges the Ivory Tower of academia, providing a platform for academics, journalists, and activists of color to respond to pressing social issues.
Supplements
In this episode of the Surviving Society Podcast, Drs Francesca Sobande and host Dr Chantelle Jessica Lewis take a deep dive into the marketisation and capitalist exploitation of care during the COVID-19 pandemic. They return to the inequitable ways the pandemic impacted people and how we continue to live through a care crisis both locally and globally.
In “Consuming Crisis”, Franscesca Sobande documents and analyses different examples – from advertising campaigns to online trends – through which constructions of everyday care, normality and comfort were renegotiated during the COVID-19 crisis. Paying particular attention to questions of power, Sobande exposes diverse attempts by corporations and Universities to position themselves as caring, contrasting these with ever-increasing power imbalances and inequalities across the axes of class, race and gender. An essential reading for anyone interested in a critical and reflective understanding of the entanglements of care, consumer culture and racial capitalism.
