Personal profile

Research interests

My research interest lies in the area of cultural consumption, and specifically focus on the shaping of marketplace practices from an embodied-practice perspective. Crucially, my research projects explore the interweaving of body, time and space (rhythm) to understand how market practices perpetuate social inequalities, and their implications on marketing and public policies as well as on identity politics.

My early work draws on the existential-philosophical works of Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger to explore the ambivalence surrounding the donation of body parts. This research problematises the gifting economy that underpins the marketing of organ donation. The research raises questions pertaining to posthuman identities, the liminality between life and death as well as biotechnological citizenship.

More recently, I explore the inclusion/exclusion of singles from the marketplace and in social policies. This project contributes to an understanding of how the marketplace perpetuates heteronormative structuration and how singles ‘make do’ and orient themselves within these structures through micro-practices. This project was featured on the BBC 4 Radio Programme, Thinking Allowed, Being Single and Modern Romance (Visit: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06grz17).

I am also the principle investigator of a cross-institutional research project (in collaboration with colleagues from the Open University, University of Leicester, Royal Agricultural University and Coventry University), which aims to develop an understanding of how urban food markets can be reimagined as nodal points that connect disparate urban food networks in a manner that is inclusive and sustainable. Using a rhythmanalysis-historical approach, this project traces the evolution of shopping practices and market systems from the middle-ages to the Post-Covid-19 era to observe structural shifts in the practices of food consumption and provisioning away from urban traditional markets to supermarkets.

My work has been published in journals such as Journal of Marketing Management, Qualitative Market Research, Advances in Consumer Research and a book chapter in Susan Dobscha’s (ed.) Death in Consumer Culture, Routledge Interpretive Marketing Research. 

Research Groups and Themes

  • MGMT Marketing and Consumption
  • MGMT theme Sustainable Production and Consumption

Keywords

  • Embodiment
  • Rhythmanalysis
  • Gender and Consumption
  • Sustainability + Food Market
  • Organ Donation
  • Heteronormativity
  • Consumer Culture
  • Singles + Queer Theory
  • Posthumanism
  • Mortality
  • Phenomenology

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  • Best Paper Award

    Lai, A.-L. (Recipient), 2010

    Prize: Prizes, Medals, Awards and Grants