Dr Damian Sutton & Dr Karen Wenell
‘Not Just for Christmas’ is an AHRC-funded research networks and workshops project looking at how we face ethical decisions at Christmas time - about what we give, what we eat, how we celebrate, and what we celebrate - and how we turn these decisions into everyday practices.
It's getting easier to make ethical decisions at Christmas, with charity Christmas cards, no-gift options, Fair Trade gifts and foods, and other ways to 'opt out' of the seasonal period of overeating and over damaging. Christmas is increasingly a time when we are more likely to think about the environment because we are suddenly faced with gourmet foods and bin-liners full of wrapping and packaging. However, many of these decisions are not so easy to make at other times of the year, and are even less likely to become everyday decisions! But if we reflect on how we are able to make these decisions at Christmas time, then maybe they can even be used to help us understand how we can make ethical choices in consumption every day...?
Through a series of workshops this project aims to bring together academic leaders in the field of popular culture, geography, visual culture, consumption studies and social history alongside those in theology and homiletics, exposition and religious broadcasting to debate the commercialisation of Christmas and other religious festivals in the context of ethical consumption practices.
The first event held in July 2008 called ‘Forgetting Christmas’ brought together a range of participants to discuss the ways in which Christmas is subject to cyclical 'forgetting', to begin to understand how and why we forget the ethical decisions we face at Christmastime.
A second event held in December 2008 included a Research Workshop and Town Meeting. The workshop, with a mixture of academic and non-academic participants, object-led and online discussion, discursive publication and public feedback, revealed flashlight issues which offer new areas of research and inquiry, as well as providing a necessary reappraisal of Christmas in light of changing societal impulses and needs. The workshop:
• Outlined the ways in which ethical decisions made at Christmas time can be transferred to everyday life
• Outlined new areas and directions for research into ethical decision-making in relation to consumption, popular culture and religious observance.
The town meeting:
• Brought together a wider cross-section of researchers and scholars interested in shaping future research into ethical decision-making in consumption, popular culture and religious observance.
For further information, please visit the Not Just for Christmas website.
Or read the project's working paper.