Culture, Consumption, and Counter-Publics in Social Movements: The Articulation of Slow Food

• In Event: Rhetorical Studies of Public Culture and Social Movements

Abstract

In a re-examination of Habermas’ public sphere, Warner (2002) posits a mass-mediated culture, public, and counterpublics that function primarily through processes of consumption. I interrogate the roles and implications of consumption and production relative to publicity in the public sphere by exploring the Slow Food social movement and conclude that it functions as a foil to some of Warner’s hypotheses and an example of others, exhibiting a modern-day bourgeois public sphere within a mass-mediated culture.

Author

• Leah D. Totten, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill