ABSTRACT
The cultural studies deal with questions of ethics and morality in consumer culture in a wide variety of ways; and yet it has some consistent and recurring traits that define its approach. Most notably, perhaps, cultural studies tends to treat the idea of the autonomous sovereign consumer with profound skepticism, as an ideological fiction useful to the political right; and yet its approach has also necessarily involved taking the powers of the consumer, and the contexts in which ethical consumption has emerged, very seriously indeed. It elaborates characterization by attempting to describe what a cultural study is in relation to its treatment of the ethics of consumption. The chapter discusses two key aspects of cultural studies and how they have been significant in providing new and important ways of understanding the ethics and morality of consumer culture. Both conjunctural analysis and interdisciplinarity, as we have seen, have been, and continue to be, integral to cultural studies.
