MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

One student decides to use this journal as a way to explicitly tell me about himself. To my surprise, another student is fastidious about describing the packaging and extraneous waste that accompanies the things—edible and non—that she buys each day. Other students are so reflective as to unpack their emotional states in the moment of purchase as well as the buyer’s remorse that comes seconds to days later. A few students identify gasoline and electricity as objects of consumption, fueling the cars which transport their bodies and powering the preservation of the foods which nourish them. Another particularly metacognitive set of entries reveals just how much we take for granted, assume as a given or entitled, in the systems within which we participate each and every day. One by one, students itemize, detail their refrain from purchasing, and extrapolate on these, offering evidence of action and reaction to the social, economic, and ecological environments surrounding them. An eleventh grade class of World History students is given the prompt, “What did you purchase/consume over the past 24 hours and what value does it have to you, or what was its use to you?” By identifying each act of consumption and situating habituated behaviors in a larger economic system, the participants of this investigation are able to see how their local actions shape global political, economic, and ecological relationships. In other words, by self-identifying regimens of consumerism (or in some cases, little to low-frequency consumerism), these high schoolers better understand the interdependence of companies, countries, and people who circulate something (i.e., money, goods, ideas) through buying and selling various cultural forms. What my class of thirty-four students buys says something distinct about them as individuals, but this also tells us (US-residing) something particularly interesting about who we are as a cultural group.