Advertising and Consumer Culture

This course reviews advertising strategies across a range of different media to understand the construction and functions of consumer culture and citizenship in poliitcs, economics, art, and everyday life. We shall critically examine theories and case studies primarily from North America.

Please note: This course is typically offered in the fall term

This course examines the role played by advertising in consumer culture from the mid- 20^th century to the present. While advertising is often seen as pervasive and homogenizing, our understanding of the relationship between this mode of communication and our experience of our world, and other parts of the world, is often superficial. To redress this elision, this course examines the way in which advertising functions as a dominant trope of our culture, mediating the ways in which we understand not only ‘goods’ and ‘products’ as commodities, but also politics, sexuality, identity and globalization. Drawing on writings from communications, sociology, media studies, cultural studies, global studies, and political science, the courses traces the many tentacles of advertising and the way in which they pervade our everyday life.

It is often easy to “see through” advertisements of other eras and marvel at the simplicity of their message. In order to better understand the role played by advertising in contemporary culture, we will begin by examining what kinds of consumption are important to us, how are own views of the world (what we watch, what we buy, what we eat, how we look, how we vote) are shaped by advertisements, and consider the ways in which we define our own selves through consumption.