Melbourne CCT Seminar Series - November

Melbourne CCT Seminar Series II - November

Date: November 21st, 2025

Location: Level 10-Room 17, Building 80, RMIT University.

The Melbourne CCT Seminar Series is a joint initiative by RMIT University, Deakin University, Monash University, and the University of Melbourne to promote research in Consumer Culture Theory (CCT). The initiative is supported by the global CCT Consortium and the first seminar was hosted at Deakin University on September 29, and the next one will be held at RMIT University.

The RMIT event will feature two presentations by members of the Melbourne CCT community, followed by drinks at the nearby The Oxford Scholar. We look forward to seeing you there!

For this session, our presenters are Carol Jianwen Wei (The University of Melbourne) and Dr Rohan Venkatraman (Deakin University).

Presentation 1:

Title: Navigating Intentional Deceleration through Everyday Consumption Practices

Authors: Carol Jianwen Wei, Daiane Scaraboto, and Julie Ozanne (The University of Melbourne)

Abstract: This study explores how consumers use mending to decelerate in everyday life, contributing to the literature on temporal consumption. While prior research emphasises temporal experiences during extraordinary consumption and examines imposed deceleration, less is known about how consumers sustain intentional deceleration through mundane routines. Drawing on 24 in-depth interviews with menders and a netnography of three online mending communities in Australia, this study examines the tensions and strategies involved in intentional deceleration. Findings show that consumers experience three tensions: integrating mending into daily routines; confronting the accelerated commercial logic that privileges novelty and disposability; and structuring a lifestyle that accommodates mending. Consumers address these tensions through three strategies: dabbling, emancipation, and recalibration. This study highlights the complexity of consumers’ intentional and successful deceleration and demonstrates how consumer strategies contest dominant temporal and market structures.

Presentation 2:

Title: Moral Governance Regimes and the Marketplace Embedding of Violent Geographies

Authors: Rohan Venkatraman (Deakin University), Aleksandrina Atanasova (Bayes Business School), Sebastián Ordóñez-Giraldo (University of Melbourne)

Abstract: Marketplaces and political systems are deeply intertwined. By studying media and consumer discourses on transgender healthcare in the USA, this research explores how marketplaces are enrolled into the formation of violent geographies by moral governance regimes. Violent geographies—spaces where certain bodies and identities are deemed unworthy—emerge as moral governance regimes frame access to the marketplace as a moral failing. Findings outline four rhetorical and material positions that demonstrate the intertwining of the marketplace and politics in the spatial marginalisation of bodies, as well as consumer responses to the emergent violence.

Host or Publisher Yoly Yuzheng Li (PhD Candidate at RMIT University)