Socio-Ecological Horizons In Consumer Research: Sustainable Visions, Sentiocentrism Shifts and challenging Fantasies of Ethical Consumption

In this special session we wish to critique and reimagine the anthropocentric present. In contemporary consumerist society (Schmitt et al., 2022), the global “free market” is presented as the solution to the environmental and climate urgency through pillars like unlimited growth, responsibilized consumers, and not least, the domination of Nature (e.g. Hornborg 2019). There are alternatives, but those are difficult to realize because we have stopped imagining systems other than capitalism as we know it (Graeber and Wengrow 2021). Here, in any project of reimagination, marketing and consumer research can be vital.
In the default marketing paradigm, a naturalized "Romantic drive" (Arnould 2022) has encouraged scholars to normatively research and promote "ethical" and "green" consumption (e.g. Gupta & Ogden 2009). In so doing, they have come to transfer the responsibility for the socio-ecological crisis from the political public to the private consumer arena. In turn, problematizing this responsibilization, socioculturally-oriented consumer researchers have demonstrated how market actors successfully escape political interventions by shaping "ethical" and "green" consumer subjects (Connolly & Prothero 2008; Giesler & Versiu 2014), by putting them to moral work (Hobson et al. 2021; Ulver-Sneistrup et. al. 2011) and displacing desire for political change (and action) onto "ethical" consumption practices through fetishizing processes (Bradshaw and Zwick 2026; Carrington et al 2016; Cronin & Fitchett; Coffin & Egan-Wyer 2022a, Ulver 2021). In a spirit of intellectual activism, research work to unpack these fantasies of "ethical consumption" will very likely continue as long as these fetishizing and responsibilizing processes prevail.
In parallel, marketing and consumer research journals have begun to curate conceptual work on how we, as marketers, should approach the urgent planetary challenges. Seemingly constituting a complex mélange between semi-accelerationist ideas (Fisher 2009) and sabotage-activism (Malm 2016, 2021), some have called for more "screaming" and presented the dark mood of "terminal marketing" as the only solution (Ahlberg et al 2022). While recognizing this power of the scream, some are hesitantly hopeful that we can use unpacked capitalist fantasies as fuel for reimagination (Coffin 2022). Others have indeed reimagined our marketing paradigm and offered new socio-ecologically embracive ontologies for the future. For example, Descola's (2013) animist ontology including Helkkula and Arnould’s (2022) neo-animist paradigm for consumer research and marketing, "pluriversal" degrowth studies (Escobar 2017), and Soper’s (2022) “alternative hedonism,” all demonstrate a belief that it is possible to reimagine the current system. However, such orientations require a radical re-wiring of both of our economic systems of provision and global supply chains, and what we find meaningful at large (Soper 2022). These are challenges we would like to raise for discussion at this session.
We will delve into different routes towards reimagination: generating sustainable futures through marketers' envisioning, presenting
sentiocentric market moralities as a critical counterbalance to
the anthopocentric, bringing us towards neo-animist consumption, and unpacking
fantasies of "ethical consumption" as a necessary way to move forward.