Emotions in Consumer Culture
The Collective and Affective Origami Tree

This Collective and Affective Tanabata Tree is an invitation for us, CCT scholars, to reflect and share wishes and critical thoughts on how emotions move and affect consumers, markets, and ourselves as researchers. It is an invitation to explore how emotions can open new epistemic possibilities! Emotions, as socially and culturally constructed, shape how consumers experience markets (Isisag et al., 2023) and how scholars produce knowledge (Magalhães Lopes, 2023) and experience fieldwork. Reflecting on the cultural politics of emotions (Ahmed, 2014) and on contemporary times marked by anxiety, polarisation, and uncertainty, this project invites scholars to reimagine how emotions can be more explicitly, critically, and reflexively integrated into CCT theorising and research practice.

 

Through collective and affective participation, this Tanabata tree aims to transform theoretical reflection on how emotions shape and are shaped by consumer culture into a shared, sensorial practice. One that scholars encounter emotions not only as concepts, but as collective, visible, and affective traces. In doing so, this tree expands methodological imagination, deepens scholarly reflexivity, and uncovers how emotions can open new epistemic possibilities for CCT research, following this ancient Japanese tradition.

​

Artwork Location: Conference Hall 1