'Not Just for Christmas': Consumption, Popular Culture and Religious Observance

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This workshop will engage academic and non-academic participants in the discussion of issues surrounding ethical responses to visual culture, consumption, and their embedding in moral and religious narratives at Christmas. The interdisciplinary workshop will, through a series of events, bring diverse scholars together to critically explore the ethical dilemmas faced in contemporary cultural experience of Christmas and open a positive dialogue over how such choices are informed by popular culture and also expressed through religious symbolism and ritual. The overlapping layers of this debate, intensified during the festive season of Christmas, will be related to sustainability and ethical consumption in daily life. The project recognises the following critical intersections:- Broadcasting, advertising and marketing employ the reflexive ethical awareness of consumers, often expressed through resistance- Ethical approaches to Christmas are often led by religious or charitable organisations, yet also embrace wider issues relating to all consumption- Embedded or nested narratives of Christmas in visual culture are often appreciated independently from their religious origins, yet are nonetheless historically reliant upon them- Ethical or spiritual concerns of consumers are translated into, or appropriated from, Christmas traditions, rituals, objects, spaces and narrativesThe complex issues raised by these intersections are illustrated in media approaches to Christmas, in the religious symbolism and liturgical practices of Advent and Christmas, as well as by consumer practices and in the spaces of consumption. The workshop will, using a mixture of object-led and online discussion, discursive publication and public feedback, reveal 'flashlight' issues which will offer new areas of research and inquiry, as well as provide a necessary reappraisal of Christmas in light of changing societal impulses and needs. The workshop events respond to and address complex debates which may transcend religious belief but which often rely upon shared conceptions. Such debates cover the commercialisation of Christmas and other religious festivals in the context of ethical consumption practices including Fair Trade, charity donations, gift-giving alternatives and greeting cards.A project workshop will host academic leaders in the fields of popular culture, geography, visual culture, consumption studies and social history, alongside those in theology and homiletics, exposition and religious broadcasting. Initial participants will come from New York, Galway, Nottingham, Exeter, Canterbury, Warwick, London, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and represent existing and new generations of expertise. A timed online forum, hosted through JISCmail, will engage scholars across disciplines and develop the flashlight issues for discussion at the symposium. A working paper will outline the initial flashlight issues and highlight the key areas where popular culture and religious celebration of Christmas overlap but also diverge from each other to shape the ethical and moral consumer decisions. Finally a symposium, staged at Christmastime, will engage the public with generative ideas about the decisions they face in interpreting, understanding and engaging with ethical, moral and spiritual issues presented to them through visual culture and consumption.The intellectual contribution of the project will be an informed 'user guide' to ethical consumption and the moral and spiritual issues it raises for everyday life, guided by serious and sustained critical debate around Christmas. This guidance will be disseminated through the archived online forum and symposium, as well as the project's webpage. Central to this will be a 'working paper', written in plain language for a wide audience, which will frame the guidance that these discussions have for viewers, consumers and religious practitioners in daily life, and not just for Christmas.