Culture, consumption and gambling at the Sosiologipäivät

The yearly Finnish Sociologists’ days — an important ‘get together’ for sociologists – is held in Jyväskylä this week.
While CEACG-researchers are typically divided between many different workshops, one that they will most certainly be present in is the one concerned with culture and consumption. Since 2014 Riie Heikkilä and Anu Katainen have arranged the Culture and Consumption workshops.

The combination of the concepts of culture and consumption in sociology has typically been connected to research traditions concerned with taste and distinction, but the group has emphasized that it welcomes studies in which culture and consumption are interpreted in a broader sense. The workshop has come to assemble a wide variety topics, such as how gender is presented in Finnish TV commercials, what kinds of feelings are associated with smart phone use and how working-class men negotiate their masculinity in relation to anti-aging products, just to name a few.

The popularity of the workshop can also be seen as reflecting the international ‘currents’ of the sociological study of consumption, in which e.g. practice theory and themes related to sustainable consumption have been megatrends for over an decade.

Lately, the workshop has also witnessed the rise of the Finnish gambling and game studies. This year, game research has its own workshop, coordinated by Jani Kinnunen and Juho Karvinen from the Game Research Lab at the University of Tampere. In addition, a workshop coordinated by Johanna Järvinen-Tassopoulos also involves papers from the area of gambling research.