Becoming ethical: Mediated pedagogies of global consumer-citizenship

Abstract

This essay examines the BBC docu-reality series Blood, Sweat & T-shirts (BS&T) as a case study for understanding the early 21st-century’s proliferation of ethical consumer media – media which circulate internationally, attempt to bring commercial and/or popular appeal together with pro-social goals. I argue that the show operates as a transnational technology of ethical global consumer-citizenship in a highly ambivalent manner: it works to cultivate a form of caring for others that is amenable to a liberalized global economy and the maintenance of existing racialized and gendered global hierarchies, but at the same time, it lays bare the deep contradictions that structure this project.

Keywords

Consumer-citizenship governmentality neoliberalism fast fashion ethics

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