Sarah Banet-Weiser lecture – ‘I’m Like Totally Saved’: Branding Religion and the Moral Limits of the Market – 2 October

Media@McGill is pleased to welcome Sarah Banet-Weiser as its fall 2012 Media@McGill Beaverbrook Visiting Scholar. During her stay within the Department of Art History and Communication Studies this October, Professor Banet-Weiser will give a talk entitled, ‘I’m Like Totally Saved’: Branding Religion and the Moral Limits of the Market, on Tuesday, 2 October 2012 at 5:30 p.m. in Leacock 26. The event is a collaboration between Media@McGill and the AHCS Speaker Series, and is free and open to the public.

Abstract:

Branding in the contemporary era has extended beyond a business model; branding is now both reliant on, and reflective of, the most basic social and cultural relations. Brand cultures are spaces in which politics are practiced, identities are made, art is created, and cultural value is deliberated.  One example of a brand culture is religion, where branding religious lifestyles represents a new marketing and business opportunity, where there is not one specific product, but rather a politically diffused notion of religious identity, that is re-imagined and reframed not only within consumer items, but also within the ways in which religion is organized, institutionalized, and experienced in everyday life. Here, I examine two religious brand cultures, Prosperity Christianity and New Age Spiritualism, as a way to address such questions as: what is at stake in the fact that we are increasingly comfortable living in brand culture? What might be gained, and what is lost, through this kind of living?

Biography:

Sarah Banet-Weiser is a Professor in the School of Communication at USC Annenberg and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity. Her teaching and research interests include feminist theory, race and the media, youth culture, popular and consumer culture, and citizenship and national identity. She teaches courses in culture and communication, gender and media, youth culture, feminist theory and cultural studies.

Her first book, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (University of California Press: 1999), explores a popular cultural ritual, the beauty pageant, as a space in which national identities, desires, and anxieties about race and gender are played out. She has also authored a book on consumer citizenship and the children’s cable network: Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Duke University Press: 2007), in addition to her co-edited book, Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, co-edited with Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (New York University Press: 2007). Her most recent book is Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (New York University Press: 2012), co-edited with Roopali Muhkerjee. Her current book project, Authentic™: Political Possibility in a Brand Culture (New York University Press, forthcoming), examines brand culture, youth, and political possibility through an investigation of self-branding, creativity, politics, and religion. It is scheduled to be released in fall of 2012. She has published articles in the academic journals Critical Studies and Media Communication, Feminist Theory, the International Journal of Communication, and Television and New Media, among others.

She co-edits, with Kent Ono, a book series with New York University Press, “Critical Cultural Communication,” and is the editor of American Quarterly.

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