People Involved in the Project

Kim Humphery

"Kim Humphery"

Kim is the Chief Investigator on the project and has a long-standing interest in theories and practices of consumption, an interest he has pursued as a student and teacher in both Australia and England. He has published widely in this area and his recent work has shifted more fully towards exploring the nature of Western materialism and the renewed politics of overconsumption based on concerns about the social, personal and environmental costs of global commodity capitalism. The impetus for this project came from his interest in the re-emergent critique of consumerism and the realisation that such a critique remains problematic in part because of some of the highly contestable assumptions (about materialism and how to ‘escape’ it) that are made within much of the recent anti-consumerism literature.

At RMIT, Kim teaches history and social theory and coordinates a course entitled ‘Western Materialism’. Besides his work on consumption, Kim has a background in social research in the area of health (particularly Indigenous health) and, in this context; he has worked in the Northern Territory and Victoria. He brings this interest in issues of health and wellbeing to the study of consumption and to his parallel research work on the sustainability of communities, work being undertaken within the Globalism Institute at RMIT University.


Ferne Edwards

"Ferne Edwards"

Ferne is the research assistant for the ‘Anti-consumerism in the Contemporary West’ project. She has studied anthropology, international environmental management and the Spanish language at the Universities of Queensland, Melbourne, RMIT and Salamanca, Spain.

Her interest in the anti-consumerist movement and its link to environmentalism is reflected in her Honours in environmental anthropology, which explored the politics of organic food production, and in her work with Friends of the Earth, Melbourne and with Raleigh International, Chile.

Ferne’s current research interests include human ecology, contemporary Western social movements, and the anthropology of food. Ferne has traveled extensively throughout the developed and developing worlds, has studied in Spain, and is currently completing her Masters in Social Science at RMIT.


Andy Scerri

Andy studied Social Science and Communications at the University of Technology, Sydney, and is currently in a PhD program at the Globalism Institute of RMIT. His research topic, in the field of social theory, focuses on the formation of subjectivity in Anglo-American contexts since the 1970s. His research in relation to ‘Anti-consumerism in the Contemporary West’ springs from an interest in ways that current institutional emphases on individuality may affect ways that anti-consumerist or environmental movements organise.

Andy also has an interest in the relatively recent ‘mainstreaming’ of corporate social responsibility, green and fair-trade consumption and what is, arguably, a concomitant proliferation of ‘luxury’, ‘quality’, and ‘extreme’ commodities in the same social spaces. Andy has worked as a Research Assistant in the School of Social Science & Planning and, in 2005, will coordinate the ‘Cultural Technologies & Changing Global Relations’ course at the School of International & Community Studies.


Kelly Donati

"Kelly Donati"

Kelly joined the Globalism Institute at RMIT in 2005. She originally came from Montreal, Canada where she studied film/cultural theory and women's studies at McGill University, arriving in Melbourne seven years ago to undertake postgraduate studies at Monash University with a focus on psychoanalytic theory and feminist philosophy.

Through her work and recent research, she has developed an interest in the centrality of food and water to our cultural and ecological wellbeing. In 2002, Kelly completed an MA in the innovative Gastronomy program in the Department of History and Politics at Adelaide University where her research focused on the philosophy of pleasure in the Slow Food movement and explored the ethical, ecological and political dimensions of food production and consumption. Drawing on her previous research in social and cultural theory,

Kelly is particularly interested in examining the relationship between agriculture/food policies (regionally and globally) and food culture, with a particular focus on community sustainability and food sovereignty.

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