Jacob C. Miller

Affect, Consumption, and Identity at a Buenos Aires Shopping Mall

This paper explores the built environment of a shopping mall in light of recent theoretical interventions that stress the affective dimensions of everyday political life. By drawing on sixteen weeks of ethnographic fieldwork at a shopping mall in central Buenos Aires, Argentina, I explore how retail affects are unevenly distributed across a diverse public, and how different bodies, in turn, affect the mall in particular ways. In short, this paper explores embodiment as an affective experience that coheres around raced, classed, and gendered bodies at the mall. As such, this paper helps clarify how ethnographic research can benefit from nonrepresentational theory and the ‘new materialism’ literature that challenges prevailing conceptual approaches to the politics of consumption.

Teaching Human Geography Through Places in the Media: An Exploration of Critical Geographic Pedagogy Online

Abstract Designed as a hybrid undergraduate class that includes online exercises and in-class discussion, Places in the Media helps students better understand the spatial politics of media that help structure our everyday lives. The article is meant as a do-it-yourself guide for instructors interested in building a course like Places in the Media. As such, it includes detailed description of the course design and how the hybrid learning environment was structured. Also included is a series of reflections on the collective experience teaching the class since it became a part of the regular course offerings in 2011.

The Spatial Dialectics of Modernity and Retail Affect at Abasto Shopping, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Abstract The paper is about the political life of a building: the Abasto. Located in what was called the “most porteño” neighborhood in the first part of the 20th century (“porteño” is someone from central Buenos Aires) when it functioned as the citys main food market, the Abasto became a massive shopping mall in 1998 amid rapid neoliberal restructuring. This paper charts the political life of this building in two steps. First, by drawing on theories of socio-spatial dialectics, this paper charts the history of the Abasto as an urban object in a wider political landscape of porteño modernity. Second, by incorporating recent theories of affect and presenting findings from field work carried out at the mall in 2010 and 2011, this paper develops a framework for understanding the politics of consumption in a “post-neoliberal” urban landscape.

Approximating new spaces of consumption at the Abasto Shopping Mall, Buenos Aires, Argentina

This paper outlines the resources available to researchers interested in approximating the domains of affect, emotion, and assemblage in todays cultural landscapes of consumption. The extended introduction includes a brief review of recent methodological innovations in accessing embodied experience and materiality more generally. Next, I introduce the Abasto Shopping Mall in central Buenos Aires and outline how I approached four months of fieldwork there in 2010 and 2011. I then present the key findings before concluding with a discussion on how to navigate recent empirical and theoretical contributions to the emerging geographies of consumption that are oriented toward affect, emotion, assemblage, and technologies of biopolitical subjectivity.

The critical intimacies of walking in the Abasto Shopping mall, Buenos Aires, Argentina

In recent years, scholars have focused on how affective life becomes implicated in biopolitical interventions in a variety of spaces, including spaces of consumption. Less has been said about how the emotional domain also becomes a space of biopolitics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a mall in Buenos Aires, this paper attends to this link and outlines a methodology that generates insight into the layers of intimacy that help shape these social and political spaces. What I am calling images of critical intimacy point to how these biopolitical spaces may be operating today and also what their limits appear to be.

The Sociology of Consumption: A Global Approach

The growth of consumerism as a dominant way of life is certainly one of the hallmarks of the twentieth century. The promotion and organization of consumption has led many to theorize the capitalist production of consumption, insofar as new industries such as marketing, advertising, and retailing constitute not just an intervention into society, but the active generation of a new kind of society altogether. Consumerism as a metaconcept, however, is always complicated by the specifics of place and the struggles therein. Even though there is no one-size-fits-all approach to understanding consumption, we should strive to specify what dynamics give rise to such a system in the first place. All scholars of consumption are faced with this potential tension between the foundations of contemporary consumption as a way of life (capitalism) and its differentiation in society governed also by other relations of power (e.g., racism, sexism, and heteronormativity). In any case, new spaces, practices, and objects of consumption keep spreading as the forces of globalization and technological innovation make them proliferate in new ways.