The Seventh Moment: Qualitative Inquiry and the Practices of a More Radical Consumer Research

My intentions in this essay are fivefold: (1) to show how the discourses of qualitative inquiry and cultural studies in the seventh moment can be put to critical advantage by consumer researchers; (2) to discuss the cultural studies assumptions that define a consumer research agenda; (3) to offer a set of interpretive, methodological, and ethical criteria that can be used by consumer researchers; (4) to apply these criteria to a concrete case, a reading of the Hollywood “hood” films of the last decade; and thereby (5) to establish the relevance of this approach for the practices of critical consumer research. Throughout I use examples from the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s.