Lifestyle and Consumer Culture

This subject has the following teaching availabilities in 2009:

Usually fifty points of first year arts. Completion of either 106-101 Culture, Media & Everyday Life or 107-132 Introduction to Cinema Studies is strongly recommended.

For the purposes of considering request for Reasonable Adjustments under the Disability Standards for Education (Cwth 2005), and Student Support and Engagement Policy, academic requirements for this subject are articulated in the Subject Overview, Learning Outcomes, Assessment and Generic Skills sections of this entry.

It is University policy to take all reasonable steps to minimise the impact of disability upon academic study, and reasonable adjustments will be made to enhance a student's participation in the University's programs. Students who feel their disability may impact on meeting the requirements of this subject are encouraged to discuss this matter with a Faculty Student Adviser and Student Equity and Disability Support: http://services.unimelb.edu.au/disability

What is lifestyle? When and how did the concept develop, and what functions does it serve in consumer culture today? How does it relate to parallel concepts like taste, style and identity? This subject frames lifestyle as the site where consumer culture and individual identity intersect; where identities are produced through our interactions with the commodities we consume. It approaches lifestyle as the relatively recent invention of advertising, marketing, and related discourses, contextualizing it within the broader rise of modern consumer culture in order to provide a historical framework for understanding the rise and global spread of lifestyle culture today. The subject engages key theories for understanding consumer culture from Marxist accounts of commodity fetishism and alienated labour to contemporary social theories of DIY selves and reflexive individualism. On completion of this subject students should be able to analyse the complex relations between contemporary consumer culture, lifestyle discourse, and individual identity formation, and to trace the workings of these relations through selected cultural sites that may include advertisements, television programs, and Internet sites, and everyday practices like shopping.

A subject reader will be available.

This subject potentially can be taken as a breadth subject component for the following courses:

• Bachelor of Biomedicine
• Bachelor of Commerce
• Bachelor of Environments
• Bachelor of Music
• Bachelor of Science
• Bachelor of Engineering

You should visit learn more about breadth subjects and read the breadth requirements for your degree, and should discuss your choice with your student adviser, before deciding on your subjects.

• acquire advanced research and analytic skills;

• develop critical and ethical self-awareness;

• acquire an ability to develop and communicate effective arguments in both oral and written form;

• have acquired basic skills in media and information literacy and management.

This subject can be credited as an elective subject towards the Graduate Certificate or Graduate Diploma in Gender Studies. This subject is available to students enrolled in the BA prior to 2008 at either 2nd or 3rd year level and can be credited to a major in either Cinema or Cultural Studies. Students who have completed 106-226 prior to 2009 are not eligible to enrol in this subject.