As we began Unit 2, and started down the path of this research project, J.K. Rowling’s Twitter feed was in the news again. As I thought about what she tweeted and the subsequent response, an idea began to form. I wanted to explore “cancel culture”. At least, I thought I did. However, after our first assignment, it became clear that wasn’t quite right for our purposes.
Then it dawned on me. What is “cancel culture” really, but a form of consumer activism? It is the market voicing their collective displeasure directly to the source. That type of protest has taken many forms over the years, and I was certain I’d be able to find good resources to help in forming my arguments.
My first bit of research involved Google. Doing a search on “consumer activism” I quickly found my first solid source, Caroline Heldman’s Protest Politics in the Marketplace. Our second note-taking exercise spurred a number of questions in my mind:
- What is it about the past 40/50 years that has brought about the shift toward widespread adoption of consumer activism?
- Is consumer activism actually more powerful/effective than voting/being involved politically?
- How has cause-marketing has influenced me?
Google also helped me find R. Henry Weaver’s paper, “Is Consumer Activism Economic Democracy?”, but it wasn’t until the “Complicating Research” assignment, that things really started to take shape. The first tool that caught my eye was “Web of Knowledge”. I found that it and SAGE were both relatively simple to navigate. I loved the option to copy citations to my clipboard, although the citation from SAGE did not include the URL, so I added it manually. My experiments with Backlink Checker were not quite as successful. I tried the URL from the citation for “Political Consumerism as a Neoliberal Response to Youth Political Disengagement” by Georgios Kyroglou and Matt Henn, but that provided me with 2,174,123 total backlinks from 13,328 domains. As a control, I tried backlinking a random article from the Guardian’s website and ended up with similar results! I was somewhat overwhelmed as I navigated through SAGE and Web of Knowledge. The sheer number of options and directions I could take my research was staggering and got me thinking about all sorts of possibilities.
It was the “Rounding Out the Conversation” exercise that helped nail down my sources. After I finished, I realized that I had only cited five, so I went back through everything I had downloaded and found my sixth, which I just added today.
I appreciate how the tools introduced in each assignment have been building on the previous week’s work. At the same time, they’ve gotten me to think differently about the sources I’ve collected and the work I’m trying produce. What started out as a reaction to a news story has developed into a intellectually stimulating exercise. I doubt that I could have predicted that I’d land on the subject of consumer activism, but being able to tie in both the personal and the global is something I’ve really enjoyed, and look forward to completing.
Protest Politics in the Marketplace
Complicating Research – Mike K
Rounding Out The Conversation – Mike K