Resilience: Preparing for Inevitable Changes in Consumer Culture
Resilience has become one of the defining cultural questions of our time. People are increasingly called upon to adapt to technological disruption, the ecological crisis, economic volatility, political polarization and social precarity. To be resilient is to endure, yet the resources required for it are not distributed equally. While some have access to infrastructures like welfare states, savings, insurance and social networks, others are left to fend for themselves. To speak of resilience is also to ask: Who is expected to be resilient, under what conditions, and at what cost? When does resilience enable individual and collective flourishing and when does it privatize risk, individualise responsibility, or obscure the market forces that produce vulnerability in the first place? The CCT community is especially well positioned to examine these tensions involved in approaching resilience as a capacity and as an ideology.
The CCT field has long studied how people navigate vulnerability: how markets distribute risk and reward, how objects and environments enable or constrain action, and how cultural narratives make hardship meaningful or unbearable. The question of what allows people to endure, and at what cost, runs through our tradition.
The theme of resilience invites CCT researchers to examine how consumers and communities endure, repair, improvise, care, resist, recover and transform in the face of disruption. It encourages us to ask how market systems and cultural institutions organize capacities to cope or transform, and how everyday practices may reproduce, challenge, or reimagine existing social arrangements.
The theme also invites attention to time and place. Resilience may unfold in moments of acute crisis, through slow and cumulative forms of erosion, within seasonal and cyclical rhythms, or across epochal transformations associated with climate change, technological acceleration, geopolitical instability, and changing social orders. CCT 2027 encourages work that traces these temporalities and asks how consumer culture both responds to and participates in shaping conditions of change.
Hosted in Espoo, in the Helsinki metropolitan area, CCT 2027 offers a distinctive setting from which to reflect on resilience beyond individual endurance. Finland is a society shaped by extremity (climate, light, geography) that has built endurance into its material culture and institutions. Finnish design, including brands such as Iittala and Marimekko, encodes an ethics of durability. The welfare state functions as an infrastructure that distributes resilience through public libraries, social housing, and universal healthcare. Even ritual has a resilience technology: 3.3 million saunas for 5.5 million people, enacting rhythms of stress and recovery. Finland does not illustrate resilience; it makes resilience visible as structure.
Topics of interest
We welcome submissions that approach resilience through diverse theoretical, methodological, and empirical lenses. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Consumer vulnerability and care
- Sustainability transitions
- Circular and sharing economies
- Food systems
- Repair and maintenance
- Digital and algorithmic cultures
- Migration and displacement
- Health and wellbeing
- Financial insecurity
- Community organizing
- Material and affective dimensions
- Consumer activism
- Market-mediated futures
- The politics of adaptation and transformation
In this spirit, the conference theme is intended as an opening rather than a constraint.
