School Research Seminar Series

21 November 2012

Time: 1:00 - 2:00pm
Venue: Francis Bancroft Building, Room FB4.04/08 (4th Floor)

Time: 1.00 - 2.00pm

Speaker
Dr Amy Rungpaka Hackley (née Tiwsakul), Lecturer in Marketing, School of Business and Management, Queen Mary, University of London

Bio
Dr Amy Rungpaka Hackley (neé Tiwsakul) is Lecturer in Marketing at the School of Business and Management. She was previously Lecturer in Marketing at Durham Business School, Durham University, and prior to that, Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Surrey. Dr Hackley obtained her PhD from the School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, where she also worked as a Teaching and Research Associate. Dr Hackley's other qualifications include a MSc Marketing from the University of Birmingham, UK and a first degree in Mass Communications. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and a member of Association for Consumer Research (ACR). Her research interests cut across issues of integrated marketing communications (IMC), advertising, product placement, experiential consumption, brand symbolism, consumer identity, promotional regulation and ethics, critical marketing, consumer research, consumer culture theory (CCT), death consumption and death rituals.  

Seminar title
Consuming the Dead: Symbolic Consumption, Identity and Death

Abstract  
This research project contributes to the conceptual understanding of death as a site of symbolic consumption by drawing on evidence from the Thai tradition of Theravāda Buddhism. Our cultural semiotic analysis focuses on ritual aspects of the Pee Ta Khon ‘hungry ghost’ festival for the uniqueness of its mythology and its cultural context, and the vividness with which the presence of ghosts are represented. The paper broadens death consumption from a unilaternal concept focused on the management of death by the living, to a symbolically reciprocal exchange which has implications for the identity of the living, and of the dead.  

Research themes
Symbolic consumption, Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), Identity

Additional information
The seminar will run from 1.00 to 2:00pm (suggested: 50 minute talk and 10 minute Q&A)

Please confirm your attendance by emailing a.alele@qmul.ac.uk