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Dr. Tad Skotnicki recently delivered a paper at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. Titled “Purity politics? On quality as a proxy for ethics in consumption,” Dr. Skotnicki’s paper explores how activists made a link between ethical value and the quality of consumer goods.

From the paper abstract:

The study of ethical consumption, despite some uncertain gestures, has not sufficiently reckoned with its history, role, and form in capitalist societies. Through a comparative historical genealogy of a contemporary tendency to treat quality as a proxy for ethics in consumption, I propose a way to identify continuity, not just change, in ethical consumption. When we assess the purity claims of early consumer activists, we reveal the political processes through which activists associated ethics and quality. Drawing on the historical cases of late eighteenth century abolitionists and turn-of-the-twentieth-century consumer activists, I explore how these activists participated in an ongoing civil project to purify consumption by relating a) the treatment of the laborers, b) the quality of the labor, and c) the quality of the goods.