Episode 016: Ela Veresiu
Assistant Prof. Ela Veresiu is a marketing scholar unlike any other. Her research on consumer behaviour deals with an impressively diverse range of topics, from how super-elite members of society at the World Economic Forum talk about poverty, to how Roma migrants in Italy transform their fenced-in refugee housing complex into a space more suited to their own culture. This is a fascinating conversation about how capitalism assumes that the solution to society’s problems is always “better” individual choices.
Transcript
Cameron Graham: My guest today is Ela Veresiu, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University. Dr. Veresiu is the recipient of the 2019 Sydney J. Levy Award presented at the annual Consumer Culture Theory Conference. Her research looks at the nuances of consumer behavior and how various consumer roles intersect with some of the most pressing social issues from global poverty to climate change to mass immigration. Ela, welcome to the podcast.
Ela Veresiu: Thank you very much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here with you today.
Cameron: Your research is centered on the consumer, right? Marketing is a really big field. People do research on corporations and advertising campaigns and stuff. You're looking at marketing from the point of view of consumer behavior and how we as individuals are shaped and become different kinds of consumers and that becomes kind of our role. Your paper that I wanted to talk to you about is called "Creating the responsible consumer: Moralistic governance regimes and consumer subjectivity." So obviously this is about the consumer and who they become, but specifically around this notion of the responsible consumer. You wrote this in 2014, with our colleague, Markus Giesler at the Schulich School of Business. Tell me about how this paper came about? Because you're looking at a particularly interesting data set here.
Ela: Yes. So, I'm very honored and privileged to have been brought on to this project by our colleague, Markus Giesler, who was invited early on in his career to join the German delegation at the World Economic Forum, which is an annual gathering of political leaders, governments, corporations -
Cameron: This is the one at Davos?
Ela: Yes, in Davos, Switzerland. It's held every year and it brings together thought leaders across a whole wide range of industries and governments, as well as journalists. So Markus is a German national, born and raised in Germany, and he was invited by the German delegation to go to the World Economic Forum. So that started the data collection process. Later on when I became a PhD student--I did my PhD at a private university in Germany called Witten/Herdecke--I started working on this project together with Markus. So we went back to Davos, interviewed politicians, heads of corporations, journalists, members of nonprofit organizations, as well as collected all of the in-print and online material stemming from the World Economic Forum and the different meetings and committees held there., in order to understand these members thought process of how consumers can get involved to change different global social political problems from poverty, to the financial crisis, to health crises.
Cameron: So help me understand just the context here. So this Forum in Davos is kind of a gathering of the leading thinkers in economics and business and government trying to come together to address the big, big problems in the world, like environmental problems and global poverty and those kinds of things. So it's a bunch of "enlightened" people, would be one way of putting it, or perhaps "do-gooders" -- depends on how critical you might be about this exercise. So these are people coming together. So your data then was to actually go and observe what they were saying and doing to interview them and capture the way that they were talking about how individuals can have an impact on these big-picture problems.
Ela: Exactly. So how they were talking about them, as well as what they were writing about them, because at the end of these meetings -- the centerpiece being the World Economic Forum once-a-year meeting in Davos, Switzerland, but different committees meet at different times of the year around the world -- they all come up with white papers and reports and a blog post directly on the World Economic Forum website. So we were interested in understanding how these individuals speak, as well as what they write and the policies that are then implemented based on these WEF reports.
Cameron: Would you characterize this as a gathering of elite people or is it-
Ela: 100%. Yes.
Cameron: So it's not extremely diverse. Don't have a bunch of people from poor countries.
Ela: No, no, it's by invitation only.
Cameron: Okay. So this is the way that they talk about the solution to these pressing problems. Is this idea of the role of the individual consumer having an impact, is that a constant theme or is it one of the kind of subsets of talk at the World Economic Forum?
Ela: This was a particularly constant theme across the different pressing social issues. So that's what our paper in the Journal of Consumer Research found, this commonality across the board.
Cameron: You looked at all of this data, you've got the documents that were produced that you talked about, and also the interviews, right? So you're doing what's called a hermeneutic analysis, right? So hermeneutic analysis is looking at the meaning of these phrases and terms within the documents and within the interviews?
Ela: Yes, exactly. So what we specifically did is a slightly different hermeneutic analysis. It's called a longitudinal hermeneutic analysis. So we looked at reports and interviews were done in different years across time. So longitudinal means that it's a study that takes several years to complete and we analyze the totality of the data set not focusing on one specific year or one specific event. So that's the longitudinal component. The hermeneutic component is exactly that, where you look at the meaning and try to create commonalities and differences in themes of what is actually being written and what is actually being said. So you would analyze each data point individually, then you would analyze the data points based on groups. So be the interviews or be the specific reports for a specific year and then you would analyze across the different years to reach the totality of data. And then you would also have to tack it back and forth between theories that are out in marketing and sociology and political science to come up with something new and fresh to say, based on the data that we've collected.
Cameron: Right. So basically, you are looking at how particular terms or phrases get used and maybe how that changes over time as a particular meaning of that phrase gets kind of accepted. Right? So the phrase "climate change" versus the phrase "global warming," for instance, that over time, that one phrase might come to be the one that people accept as a way to talk about it? Is that the kind of thing you're looking at?
Ela: That's one and also we found the pattern of responsibilization. We found a routine, which we call the pack routine, which involves different strategies that the world elite at the World Economic Forum do in order to turn regular individuals into these responsible consumers.
Cameron: That's what you mean by responsibilization, it's the idea that it's not enough just for the individual to behave like they want to. They have to be turned in some way into a person who takes responsibility for their choices as a consumer. To choose green products, to choose healthy products or whatever.
Ela: Exactly. To become a "producerly entrepreneur" is for consumers at the bottom of the pyramid to consume financial products more responsibly and be in charge of their education, et cetera, et cetera.
Cameron: There's so many interesting nuances in this kind of an approach to understanding social problems. I'm not talking about your understanding of the discourse, I'm talking about the way that these people understand these social problems. Because one of the issues I've got with looking at people as individuals -- as in a purely economic sense, right, as either producers or consumers -- is that in a democracy, in theory, everybody is equal. But if you start making it about the consumer, so the individual not as a human being but as a consumer, suddenly your ability to spend changes your value in the system in relation to people who have less to spend. Your ability to produce and to master the resources that allow you to produce economic goods or services, changes your value in the system. So when you start talking about individuals as consumers or producers instead of human beings, you've shifted from the possibility of equality to the possibility of inequality in a really radical way. That concerns me. Does anybody worry about that at the World Economic Forum?
Ela: No, not according to our data. They are convinced that by involving as many individuals as possible and to change their consumer behavior, then this is the answer to help solve the world problems. So they're by no means malicious warlords, they are just convinced in what they're saying. They are convinced that this is the best solution going forward. The problem and the critical discussion that we have at the end of this article, and when we do talk about our piece in various circles, is that consumer responsiblization takes away responsibility from groups, from corporations, from government bodies, and puts them on the shoulders of individuals. So that we're all in this together, and it's the individuals that through the choices and decisions sets that they undergo, either exacerbate a problem, a global social problem, or they help solve it. So we are concerned with the fact, my co-author and I, that less and less entities, corporations and governments feel personally responsible to change.
Cameron: Yeah. So the diagnosis of the problem is that the reason we've got global warming, the reason that we've got global poverty, or whatever, is because individuals are making irresponsible choices and if we can just make them more responsible, the problem will go away and that avoids -- eviscerates! -- any possibility of looking at the structural.
Ela: Exactly. Exactly.
Cameron: The other aspect of that is it seems to me that there's a certain amount of blaming the victim in this approach to, right? You got people who are excluded from society in so many ways. In my own research on microfinance, the insight came to me and my co-author that what's at heart here in microfinance is the idea that, "The reason people are poor is they're not taking enough economic risk. They need to be more entrepreneurial." And it's fundamentally flawed, I think.
Ela: Exactly. At the end of the day, it keeps the capitalist system intact. That's part of... Which is a structure that is part of the problem. Part of exacerbating global poverty, part of increasing mass migrations, part of continuing to damage our environment and our planet and the animals and ecosystem within it. So by focusing on the individual, we don't look at the larger structural dynamic at play.
Cameron: Let's look at some of the things that you identified in this discourse at the World Economic Forum, about the kinds of consumers you identify for them. I presume that if you'd kept looking and kept looking, you might have found others. But were these the four main ones that leapt out, or the only four?
Ela: These were the four dominant ideal consumer subject types that were discussed during the longitudinal set of our data. And we did stop collecting data in 2013, because we had reached saturation.
Cameron: So new types may have emerged since then.
Ela: New types may have emerged in there since then, as more social problems have come to the fore.
Cameron: Okay, so the first one is the bottom-of-the-pyramid consumer. This is the person in the developing world that is expected to become a particular kind of entrepreneurial person in order to be a better consumer. Right? So can you tell me a little bit about how people talk about that role.
Ela: Right. It is akin to what you and your colleagues found in your microfinance study. The bottom-of-the-pyramid consumer is a type of consumer that, rather than thinking of him or herself as a victim, and relying on aid mostly from government bodies, should rather pick him or herself up by the bootstraps, as they say, and become a self actualizing and empowered consumer, by taking more risks, by consuming more microfinance loans and starting his or her own enterprises to get him or herself out of poverty, rather than relying on a system to help alleviate some of these areas that experience, and individuals that experience, extreme poverty in the so-called developing world.
Cameron: There's going to be lots of advantages to that kind of an approach, right? Because it recognizes the agency of every individual, right? Rather than just objectifying them as passive recipient of aid, you begin to recognize that they are an individual capable of making choices. And then in theory that should open your analysis up to the fact that they may experience your poverty in very unique ways compared to somebody else. That should create much more plurality and diversity in your analysis, ideally.
Ela: Ideally, yes. But the nice thing is, indeed that they do have more agency and they can feel personally empowered and enlightened to get out of the situation. So what we're arguing is at the same time, there should be aid for them as well. Companies should engage in more corporate social responsibility, like initiatives rather than just as a marketing tactic. Governments should be structured in a way to alleviate some of this poverty. Yes, there should be some individualized market mechanism in place. So we're not arguing for extreme socialism, if you will, but also not extreme capitalism, but a more nuanced balanced approach.
Cameron: But this kind of an analysis, this idea of the bottom-of-the-pyramid consumer, looking at the individual role, does have the potential to open up the range of solutions, right? To bring in a whole diverse range of allies from every sector of the society and economy, from every part of the globe, to try to address these problems. So it does have some potential for enriching the way that we approach global poverty.
Ela: It does but at the end of the day, there are clear winners and clear losers and the global poor still remain the global poor. While the microfinanciers are usually from the so-called developed world and they still maintain a position of power. So there is still a position of power and dominance.
Cameron: Okay. The second of the roles that you identified was the idea of the green consumer. So this would be the person who, if they are responsible consumer will be choosing environmentally friendly products, making sure that they don't use disposable coffee cups like the one you have on the table in front of you: "Shame, shame, shame!" Right? All of these activities that we are expected to embody as consumers to make sure that we are economically active in creating incentives for corporations to behave in certain ways because we are expressing our preference for green products. Is that the basic idea of the green consumer?
Ela: That is the basic idea of the green consumer. So once again, responsibility is put on the shoulders of individuals to consume in the right way. But the negative side of placing responsibility just on individual consumers in the marketplace is that they still consume and they still consume more. They're just consuming differently now which maybe they're buying into companies that are engaged in green-washing marketing campaigns, where they say that they are environmentally friendly, but the production process, that is not transparent, is not for various products. Whereas the better solution would be for both individuals, corporations, as well as government bodies to work together to help the environment.
Cameron: There's also kind of implicit in this an idea that technology is somehow going to solve all these problems eventually and it's just a matter of us behaving responsibly as consumers to incentivize the development of the right technological solutions.
Ela: Right, and technology, there's not one big answer out there, even though companies and government bodies at the World Economic Forum are trying to find the Big, Big Solution, in capital letters, when in actual fact, you need a combination. So technology is one factor that may enable us to help fight climate change through for example, new renewable sources of energy. But on the other hand, there may be negative, unintended consequences of the production, downstream effects of producing these new types of technologies.
Cameron: The third type is the health conscious consumer. This is a little bit different from the green consumer. It's the idea that you should be consuming lots of fiber and buying local vegetables and so forth. Because they would be GMO-free and not treated with different pesticides, or if it's meat products, hormones and those sorts of things. So how do people at the World Economic Forum view this kind of responsible consumer behavior is a solution to something. What is the underlying problem there?
Ela: Oh, the underlying problem is a strain on medical systems on hospitals and on doctors, et cetera, et cetera, that have to go and help individual consumers because they haven't taken care of their own bodies, health, fitness and overall well-being. So this goes hand in hand with the debate in a lot of countries, especially in the US, on whether the medical system should be subsidized by the government or not. Or should be an individual consumers concern. So to try to put less stress on the medical system, world economic leaders are trying to individualize consumers to lead healthier lifestyles.
Cameron: There's a lot of economic thinking that goes into this sort of stuff. Because if the state is paying for the medical system, then that is pictured by people arguing around this topic as a "cost" we can't afford. But if it's privatized then it's part of the GDP, which is good. So there's some basic categories in which we slot these cash flows ,depending on whether they're good or they're bad. So that's at the level of the system. This is trying to push it down to the level of the individual consumer. The solution to these costly problems is just better individual behavior. If you drank the right kind of beverages and eat the right kind of vegetables, then we wouldn't have to have a medical system, would we?
Ela: Exactly.
Cameron: Is that kind of the ultimate goal?
Ela: That is the ultimate goal. Or individuals would not be complaining that their health insurance and the privatized medical system is non-affordable for everyone. Unaffordable. So it's unaffordable, because it's your fault that you're unhealthy. That's the message that the WEF is sending out. Historically the WEF started out, before it was called the World Economic Forum, as an economic think-tank. So they do have these more rational economic ideas that are put into play without taking consideration of the the social dynamics and the cultural dynamics.
Cameron: Yeah, well, I mean, a particular aspect of this kind of thinking is the idea of -- just to look at one particular problem health problem, which would be say, obesity -- the fat shaming that goes on in our society to blame people for their obesity completely neglects the fact that there are certain kinds of production systems for food that create certain kinds of beverages and certain kinds of food products that contribute to obesity. And that these are class distinctions, right? That the people who are wealthy can afford a diverse diet, people who are poor have a more constrained set of diet choices that they can make. Also looking at things like the undermining of public transportation, right? That would contribute to people being able to walk or cycle to work, right? The emphasis on the car as a solution to our transportation problems. All of these things are tied together around this thing that's been identified as the obesity academic, uh, epidemic. Obesity academic? The obesity epidemic! And the idea that the reason we have this problem is because people have not been making responsible consumer choices is again kind of blaming the victim of these things.
Ela: Exactly. It doesn't like you mentioned take into account the nuances of individuals when it comes to class, when it comes to urban versus suburban, et cetera, et cetera. So, at the end of the day, turning people into consumers, turning people into individual responsiblized consumers, makes them a mass that can be more easily controlled, if you will, without looking at individual nuances to help individual communities.
Cameron: The fourth type that you identified was the financially literate consumer. I find this one particularly problematic because this is more in my field of research. The idea that we would avoid some of this volatility in the economic system, especially in the finance industry, if people are more financially literate, right? You have an entire finance system that is designed to market finance solutions to people, whether it's payday loans or low interest mortgages. Sometimes in the United States, we've even seen negative equity mortgages, right? Where you get a lump sum given to you by the bank as an incentive to buy into a mortgage. These kinds of vehicles are leveraging the economic system, the finance system, in incredible ways and creating these forces and these structures that then collapse like a house of cards, as happened in 2008 with the mortgage-backed securities that collapsed. So, to say that the solution to all of this is that we just need smarter consumers and more responsible consumers is really misdiagnosing the problem. That doesn't mean though, that the individual doesn't have a role to play. I think what worries me about this kind of thinking is the idea that it focuses on just one aspect and excludes more systemic, structural solutions as well. If you had some supply and demand parts to a solution, then that might be a more robust system. This is just focusing on the demand side and saying that's where the problem is.
Ela: Yeah, exactly. At the end of the day, the capitalist market or capitalism has created these externalities, these social problems. And then in order to maintain its position of power as a capitalist system, it provides solutions to these problems that it itself created that only maintain the dominance of the market. So the perfect example for the financially literate consumer is that now, there is a new market out there for education courses. For individuals to become public speakers. For workshops to help you get out of your poverty, to help you manage your debt, to help you make more sound financial decisions. Rather than going directly to the root cause of the problem and trying to change the system so that failure doesn't repeat itself.
Cameron: The way that you describe the process of someone being turned into a responsible consumer, you use this P-A-C-T acronym, the PACT acronym. Can you explain that kind of model that you've got?
Ela: Right, so this is directly coming from our data, our interview data at the World Economic Forum as well as all of the reports and white papers and blog posts that were written by members of the World Economic Forum. So in order to get from an individual, just being a human being living his or her life, to a responsible consumer, what we found is that World Economic Forum members engage in what we termed the PACT routine. The PACT routine starts with the first strategy of personalization where through the reports and the interviews, you contrast the idealized responsible consumer with an irresponsible other. So the responsible consumer is heralded as the best way to act in order to solve these various social problems. If you are not engaging in responsible consumer behavior, then you are adding to these problems. You're being irresponsible with not only yourself and your life, but also that of your loved ones and your neighbors community, country, and the globe in general. Then the next step in order to put this idea in motion, we call the strategy of authorization, which sanctifies the responsible consumer subject through expert knowledge. So, reports, thought leaders in various industries, they talk about the benefits of being a responsible consumer, in order to make individuals think that this is the best approach forward.
Cameron: So, this is creating the idea that this particular kind of behavior on the part of consumer is not only possible, but desirable: "We have evidence to back that up. We have an analysis that supports all of that." So creating kind of a knowledge apparatus to support that idea.
Ela: Exactly. And then the the third phase, or the third strategy is capablization, where you develop concrete markets for responsible self-management. That's this idea that I talked about in the financially literate consumer where you have secondary markets such as workshops, consultants, and motivational speakers to tell you how to become, and to show you how to become, a financially literate consumer, which is responsible and desirable, versus a financially illiterate consumer that's irresponsible.
Cameron: This creates all kinds of possibilities now for the people who are involved in this issue to become morally responsible themselves by saying, "I volunteer my time at a local high school teaching kids how to do accounting," or something like that.
Ela: Exactly. At the end of the day, it just maintains the capitalist status quo, nothing major changes on the level of the social problems. And then the last step in the PACT routine is transformation. Where we actually see the adoption of this responsible consumer mindset or in sociological terms, subjectivity. Where individuals adopt their ascribed roles and change their consumption behavior accordingly. So they buy the Fitbit, they no longer purchase straws. They go to a workshop or watch a YouTube tutorial on being financially literate.
Cameron: They save appropriately for their retirement.
Ela: Exactly.
Cameron: Cool. It's an amazing analysis. My only question I've got at the end of all of this is, are you going to get invited back to the World Economic Forum?
Ela: Maybe hopefully, because I think they still believe in freedom of speech. So this is-
Cameron: Is their degree of self-reflexivity at the World Economic Forum? Are they self-critical? Do they understand that this is a difficult conversation to be having and needs to be looked at critically.
Ela: Some members do, some members don't. So it like with all individuals, it varies, but they... Yes, some do, some don't.
Cameron: I want to turn to a second paper of yours that I find quite fascinating. It's a little bit more recent. This is a paper that moves into the issue of mass migration and all the phobias around immigrants and immigration in Western society right now. The paper is called "The consumer acculturative effect of state-subsidized spaces: spatial segregation, cultural integration, and consumer contestation." That's a heck of a title. But the focus of this is a particular enclave, a living situation, for a particular subset of the immigrants in Italy. Can you tell me about that location?
Ela: Yes. So this is one of my first data collection sites that I visited. It is on the outskirts of a town in Italy, which most of us may know because it's one of the main tourist destinations, called Pisa. And what the-
Cameron: This is where the Leaning Tower is?
Ela: Exactly. This particular gated community is on the outskirts of Pisa, in between Pisa and a small rural town called Coltano. What the three bodies of the Italian government -- the local Pisanian government, the regional Tuscan government, and the federal Italian government -- did was they pooled financial resources together and they created a gated community of townhouses, underneath a highway bridge, that's not easily accessible through any other country side roads.
Cameron: When I think of a gated community, I think of a rich suburb where the the gate is there to keep the ne'er-do-wells out.
Ela: Exactly. In this particular gated community -- and that's what's so fascinating about this research, is that it's the exact flip and reverse. It's meant to keep the undesirables in so that they don't populate the city of Pisa in Italy.
Cameron: Is this effectively a prison or is it not quite so restrictive?
Ela: No, it's not a prison. There is a fence system around it but you can easily access the gate and open and close the gate. But the undesirable population in this particular study is an ethno-racial group called Roma, self-described as Roma but colloquially known as gypsies in Europe. So it was a group of Roma refugees that lived in downtown Pisa that had campsites in various Pisanian neighborhoods with tents and in caravans. So the government decided that they wanted to move this impoverished refugee group away from city centers, away from the tourism areas, away from the main train station and into this gated community where they were giving them a roof over their heads. But they didn't have access to anything else. The school bus was not coming into this neighborhood, so the children had to walk down the dirt road and now the paved road to go to school. There aren't any grocery stores nearby or clothing store. So they're essentially on their own. They do have cars, some of the community members that they share among the community in order to get to places. But most of them walk many, many kilometers or miles in order to access public transportation, buses, to get them to where they need to be for daily survival.
Cameron: So that's the general description just in terms of the actual living conditions. So they got... Is this like a tent town or what?
Ela: No. So the the gated community has two rows of brick and mortar housing in a townhouse or condo style where there are apartments on the ground floor and separate apartments on the first story, if you will. These apartments range from two rooms to three rooms, depending on the family size, but many more individuals live per square footage than traditional Western societies or Italian societies would have. The rooms are tiled, freshly painted, when I visited the first week after the families had moved in to this gated community. Not all of them had electricity or gas for their stoves put in yet. But they were waiting on it. So they will have a sewage system, electricity system, as well as gas for the kitchens.
Cameron: Just from the point of view of research methodology, how did you get into this? How do you get access to it?
Ela: So I worked with a nonprofit, a local Pisanian a nonprofit organization that was not exclusively helping Roma refugees, but general mass-migration communities to Pisa, to help them with legal services, to help find them the basic needs of housing, food, or shelter, food, and clothing. So I contacted this organization because I wanted to work on and better understand the Roma community and understand their consumer behavior. So through this organization, I went down to Pisa. I worked with the organization. They introduced me to the leaders of the various family heads, the male senior members, fathers, grandfathers. Once I had my initial interview, where together with the nonprofit... Sometimes members of the nonprofit would translate. Sometimes, because I do speak Romanian and some of the Roma, very few of them, were Romanian, so I was able to communicate with them in a common language. Then, after they vetted me, I was allowed to interview the rest of their family members. Through snowballing effect they recommended other Roma refugees in Pisa, their neighbors in the gated community. So this way, I was able to visit the gated community several times and interview various members. Usually, in more group like situations, because that's how they felt more comfortable.
Cameron: That raises questions about the ethics of doing research on a vulnerable population. What kinds of concerns did you have going into that to make sure that you weren't exploiting the situation?
Ela: So, I did not pay the informants in money. But I did provide food, perishable and non-perishable items, clothing and games for the kids, as well as tents for some of the members that had not made it via a lottery system into the actual gated community. So they were living in tents outside the gated community. So I donated a lot to the nonprofit organization that then spread the food, the tents, and the clothing to the various families according to their plan. But I do feel responsible to tell their story in an academic journal. So that's what I did.
Cameron: Let's look at how you described the social interactions that you were observing there. So you're using marketing theory to understand the way that this is playing out the dynamics of the social situation. It's kind of a very Foucauldian understanding of power here, right? That power is relational. It's not simply an imposition of force on a subject population, but the nature of that power, in the way that it works, depends intensely on the response of people. That ability to resist is very, very much a part of our understanding of power in this kind of situation. So you looked at three different strategies that the state took. The three different levels that the state working together to try to create a particular kind of behavior in this population. You've contrasted each of those three strategies with a response that changes and shifts the way that things work. So, can you walk me through those three different strategies?
Ela: Yes. So, some of you may be wondering, well, what is the actual marketing or consumption aspect of this story? So what the Roma are consuming is the state subsidized housing, the actual community itself, the gated community, the individual apartments within it and also state aid that they may be receiving. So that is the consumption element of this piece. So what I found was that in order to gain access to this permanent state-subsidized housing, the gated community, the Italian nationals working on this project -- the three government bodies I mentioned before, as well as urban planners working for the city and architects (they hired an architectural company from Milan to actually design the housing structure) -- they tried to shape the Roma to acculturate to the sedentary Tuscan lifestyle. So they tried to change their consumer behavior, change their lifestyle, away from their own traditions, their more nomadic predilections, their different traditions and make them the same as Tuscany.
Cameron: This is exactly what's happened over the last century and a half in Canada, trying to change the behaviors of First Nations communities from nomadic behaviors where they might pursue particular large mammals that are part of their hunting diet, and get them to settle down and stay put in one place.
Ela: Exactly. Exactly. In a place that is the most convenient for the the sedentary population, the national population.
Cameron: Yeah, or in Canada, the settlers. So if you can get them-
Ela: Exactly.
Cameron: ... to stop occupying the entire province of Alberta chasing after buffalo, and stay put and look after cows, then, "You don't need the rest of the province, and we'll use it, thank you."
Ela: Yeah, so this first strategy I refer to as race-restrictive zoning. So they made this gated community exclusive for Roma refugees and nobody else. Its physical location was away from the rest of the Italian population, be it the urban ones in Pisa and the rural ones in the neighboring village. The next strategy that they engaged in, and by they I mean the Italians, was domestic space standardizing. So they did not ask the input of the Roma on how they actually wanted the houses to look like and what were their consumer goals and ideals of what home and a homey space should be. Rather, they standardized the space to make it a typical Tuscan-style village villa with the rooms that are westernized, where you have the kitchen and the living space, and the bedrooms are separate. Where there's a roof over your head. Where there's a garden with sunflowers. So very typical Tuscan-style living. And then the third strategy they engaged in is technological self-surveilling. So they did impose the gate as a type of technology to keep the Roma refugees put in one place. And also there were certain rules of living in this space and if you didn't abide by the rules then you would get kicked out and the next Roma family would be invited to stay in. And so again, because individuals have their own agency -- so even if you try to control their behavior from above, they can still respond in different ways -- the Roma informants had more resistance, small micro-resistance-style consumer responses to these three dominant strategies of trying to change them to become more like Italians, or specifically more Tuscanian. So the Tuscan region. So, the first response to this race-restrictive zoning strategy was they turned it into a positive and they decided that it was more community protective, insulating, where within the gated community they were really truly able to be themselves, to cook their traditional recipes, to change the setting -- so various families would live in various houses --, to set up a tent city outside the gated community. So they really made the space their own. They felt they could be protected from the prying eyes of outsiders and so then the outsiders were-
Cameron: So it's really flipping it around.
Ela: Exactly.
Cameron: If you the state are going to constrain us to this space, we're going to use that constraint to make sure that we have our own autonomy in here and our own freedom of expression of our culture.
Ela: Exactly.
Cameron: And you can't interfere with us.
Ela: Exactly. So we're going to homeschool our kids, we're not going to send them out. We're going to cook our own recipes over a campfire outside, we're not going to use the stove, et cetera, et cetera. And then the next strategy was domestic space rearranging and so they did not abide by the home rules of Italians. Which are Western rules. So you have a separate kitchen and living space, and separate bedroom spaces and you have your washroom inside and you have a garden that's arranged in a certain way. So they completely flipped it where they put their living room furniture outside on the front lawn. Because they are more communal and the weather permits it and so they would spend most of their time outdoors on each other's lawns. And then the indoors, sometimes the beds were moved in more communal spaces. Sometimes the actual stove was disconnected, the ones that already had gas, because they like to cook on real fires. So they just changed the space around to work for them and their families and their own consumer behavior and consumption patterns when it comes to houses and rooms and living, rather than following the norms and rules put in place by Italians. Then the third strategy was behavioral boundary testing. They would try to see how much they could push the Italians authorities to not get kicked out of the state-subsidized spaces with different behaviors such as trying to steal cable or burning copper wire, et cetera, et cetera.
Cameron: This is a fascinating study from the point of view of observing a unique kind of culture of the Other, right? For me as a white Canadian, this is a different culture ,and isn't it interesting how these people behave? What are the kind of translations that you can make to a broader understanding of our behavior as a society that is a takeaway, if you will, from that kind of a study.
Ela: So a key takeaway is that when we think of others as Others, that community thinks of us as their Others.
Cameron: Their Others.
Ela: So they'll create their consumption behavior in opposition to us. So that they are able to maintain their traditions and negotiate a space for their traditions to live on. So it's a matter of negotiation.
Cameron: Is that hopeful? In the sense of the way that our society is moving today with the kind of political discourse that we got and the economic upheaval that we're experiencing and the shifts around protectionism and the dismantling of protected unionized labor. All of these things are going on around us all the time. I guess part of me wants to think that this is a hopeful story, that there are possibilities for resistance and change. Is that your reading of it or am I being too optimistic?
Ela: There is a little bit of hope. Equally, I'm more of an optimistic scholar and try to take more positive takeaways. But at the same time, there are still cycles of domination. But when there is dominance, there's also resistance. So that's the hopeful message. I think that's what Foucault would say as well, in his theories.
Cameron: Okay. I want to just touch briefly, before we wrap up, about the way that you take this kind of an academic article and translate it for a more popular understanding. I know that your work is appeared in venues like The Conversation and Huffington Post, Huffpost. Do you see academics is having a role in creatively explaining their work in that way? And how has it worked for you?
Ela: Oh, definitely. I think that academics should not, once their work is published in an academic journal, they should not just leave it there and move on to the next process. But rather, they should create a press release and shop the press release around and really translate their work. Remove the jargon and filter it down to the key takeaways and how they got to these key takeaways. Because it's important for our work to be out there for various individuals to read them: government bodies, industries, nonprofit, our students and regular society members, community members.
Cameron: Did you get trained how to do that in your PhD program or have you just kind of invented it?
Ela: My colleague, Markus, trained me... Or together, we worked on press releases for our projects. So I learned a lot from him on how to translate my work and how to create a press release for every single one of my studies and shop that press release around.
Cameron: When you publish a version of your paper in something like Huffington Post, is that something that you write or do you hand it over to a journalist to write it?
Ela: In the Huffington Post and in The Conversation, I write them myself with my co-authors, or if it's a single-authored [paper], by myself.
Cameron: Do you get paid for that?
Ela: No, I do not get paid for it.
Cameron: Does the Huffington Post and The Conversation earn a profit off of that work?
Ela: I would imagine, through the advertising that gets put on the specific web page or through their readers that pay a subscription.
Cameron: So this is not much different from an academic journal in the sense that we give our research away to the academic journal and then they turn around and charge us a fee for putting it in the library.
Ela: Yes. Sadly. The capitalist system at play again.
Cameron: In your understanding of your work, you're working at the level of the consumer and trying to understand consumer behavior. Is there a translation of your work into policy implications or corporate strategy or corporate marketing behaviors that you would like to see, or is it simply educating the individual about this kind of stuff?
Ela: Oh, I wholeheartedly hope that my work will be put in play and taken into consideration for public policy, as well as corporate changes. I actively try to speak with members of these communities and dialogue with them to ideally change the current status quo.
Cameron: It's a big ask for any academic to not only understand the world and come up with a way of doing research on it to diagnose some of the things that they're seeing and find a vocabulary to make sense of that, and then in addition, ask them to take that and move it into public discourse in some way. So I appreciate the load that you are carrying with this work. It's phenomenal. So with that, I want to thank you for being on the podcast and explaining what you're doing. I look forward to more conversations with you going forward.
Ela: Likewise, and thank you very much for inviting me. It was a real pleasure to speak with you today.
Cameron: Super. Thanks, Ela.
