ECREA16-Abstract

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Consuming with the Stars: Commercialization, Celebritization and Citizenship in Fair Trade Campaigns by Oxfam-Worldshops

L. Van der Steen

University of Antwerp, Department of Social Sciences, Antwerp, Belgium

Many European Fair Trade-organisations adopted commercial strategies in the early 2000s to improve the availability and sales of Fair Trade in non-dedicat‑

ed outlets such as retail supermarkets (Schokkaert, 2011). However, there is a lack of research into the implications of commercialization for how Fair Trade

discourses conceptualize the role of citizen engagement in Fair Trade. The aim of this paper is to investigate evolving notions of citizenship in the recurring

celebrity poster campaigns of the last 25 years by Oxfam-Worldshops in Belgium. These celebrity poster campaigns represent an unique opportunity to

study how discourses have changed from the first (1993) to the last campaign (2014). In so doing, this paper starts fromMouffe’s agonistic pluralist frame‑

work of citizenship (1992; 2013) and Goodman’s work on the celebritization of Fair Trade (2004; 2010; 2013). The posters themselves, articles from internal

periodicals for volunteers of the organisation related to the campaign and any campaign materials made available to the public (press releases, etc) were

analysed using critical discourse analysis. Our findings show that these campaigns used a strongly politicized discourse in the 1990s, which emphasised

the changeability of unjust international trade relationships between North and South. Any notion of citizenship is absent, while the celebrities are present‑

ed as authoritative voices on the politics of Fair Trade. After the turn of the century, a new discourse takes increasing precedence which emphasises the apo‑

litical appeal of poverty and the individual power of consumerism. Between consumers and celebrities a community is suggested around a moral duty to

counter poverty with individual acts of consumption. In 2014, discourses about poverty are supplemented by discourses about the Fair Trade-products

themselves. The superiority of the products is presented as the primary reason consumers should consider Fair Trade vis-à-vis non-Fair Trade alternatives.

Celebrities become the authorities on the superiority of FairTrade-products.The paper concludes by relating these findings to broader discussions regarding

the consequences of commercialization and celebritization on the depoliticization of Fair Trade.

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Envisioning Sustainability Transformations: Towards an Agenda for Cross-Country Sense-Making Analysis

V. Wibeck

, T. Asplund

, B.O. Linnér

Linkoping University, Department of Thematic Studies - Environmental Change / Centre for Climate Science and Policy Research, Linkoping, Sweden

Today there is growing attention to the need for societal transformation as the basis of sustainability. The question now is thus not whether environ‑

mental change will generate societal transformations, but to what extent these transformations are influenced by social, political and cultural practices

and whether and how they can be successfully instigated, governed or accomplished. Exploring how different actors across different world regions make

sense of and communicate problems, goals and action alternatives is important for increasing our understanding of the processes through which transfor‑

mations take place and what drives such processes. In 2015, two events epitomized the need for research that goes beyond the rhetorical consensus use

of the transformation concept, to scrutinize the inherent cultural and ideological differences on what such transformation would entail. Countries’ back‑

ground documents to the UN General Assembly decision on the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris climate change negotiations reveal profound

differences in the understandings of transformation, in terms of goals and actions as well as fundamentally to what extent transformations can at all be

governed. Although scholarly and policy literature frequently highlights the need for research into societal transformations, studies are lacking on what

sustainability transformations actually mean to different groups of actors, in different societies.This paper outlines ideas for a new research programme into

sense-making of sustainability transformations and presents preliminary results from pilot studies of international media reports and Swedish lay people’s

focus groups. The larger research programme is planned to draw on a mixed-methods approach, entailing comprehensive literature review, media analysis,

focus group interviews with lay people, survey results from the International Negotiations Survey (INS) from UNFCCC COP 15 to 21 as well as an analysis

of different pathways outlined in all the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) ahead of the Paris negotiations. The project also plans to in‑

clude in-depth case studies of how policy makers and lay people in four economically and culturally diverse national contexts - Cape Verde, Colombia, China

and Sweden –make sense of the problems facing contemporary societies, the goals to be achieved (“sustainability”) and the pathways for change (“societal

transformations”).To this end, we take our theoretical point of departure in a dialogical approach to sense-making (Bakhtin 1986; Linell 2009), emphasising

contextual and interactional features of human thinking, discourse, and action and taking into account how sense-making occurs through interaction a)

in factual encounters between actors involved in conversation, b) between standpoints, arguments and ideas expressed in communication, and c) when

actors involved in communication draw on broader “sociocultural traditions”(Marková et al 2007). So far, we have initiated the first pilot study in Sweden,

fromwhich we will present preliminary results, in addition to results from the pilot study of international media coverage of sustainability transformations.

Moreover, the paper will discuss methodological challenges related to the design and analysis of cross-country focus group studies.