Welcome to the 2024 GENMAC Conference
The GENMAC Conference will take place on 26–28 June, at the University of Edinburgh Business School, Scotland, UK.
We are living in increasingly polarised times: our political views, opinions about the climate crisis, how to combat a pandemic, whether to control (or open) our borders, and even how we teach sexual education in our schools are the dichotomies that set us apart. We think and act at polar ends of a spectrum, marching for or against our collective causes. We have become thwarted by a duality and fixed orientation which risks stifling the way we think and feel about ourselves and others.
At GENMAC 2024 we invite researchers to QUEER(Y) CONSUMPTION as we question and contest these binaries and hierarchies of power. We understand queer theory to go well beyond mere references to sexuality and sexual identity as it invites us to expand what we “consider legitimate knowledge”, widening our epistemological horizons to new modes of knowing (and being) (Pirani and Daskalopoulou, 2022: 293). Queer phenomenology - as championed by Ahmed (2006) - embraces moments of 'disorientation’ as awakenings that afford new ways of thinking, as they open us up to new directions beyond taken-for-granted margins, dualities and hierarchies.
We see how queer theory has great creative potential for exploring new ways in which gender, markets, consumption, culture and society more generally can be and are being destabilized. It offers researchers scope to unpack how markets and consumption can be fractured, contested, subverted, remade and repurposed. It is such contestations, tensions, and unstable foundations which we will explore together at this conference.
The GENMAC 2024 conference, organised and hosted by the University of Edinburgh Business School brings together scholars across disciplines, methodological and theoretical positions to share their insights on gender, markets, consumption and society with queer, novel, and querying perspectives.
The three-day conference will include plenary sessions; a full conference programme of presentations, panel discussions, poster presentations, Arts-based research track (including photography, painting, art installation, film/video and a poetry); networking opportunities and a vibrant social programme of to make the most of your visit to this beautiful city.
Early bird registration will open on Friday 8 March 2024.
We look forward to welcoming you to Edinburgh & GENMAC 2024!
GENMAC
What is now called the GENMAC Conference began as a series of biennial gender conferences in 1991 under the name Gender, Marketing and Consumer Behaviour conference, with Janeen Costa serving as the engine and motivation as its inaugural chair.
Previous to 2016, these conferences were organized, run, and produced exclusively through the efforts of volunteers who participated by chairing conferences, submitting and reviewing manuscripts, preparing calls for papers and budgets. In 2016, we saw the birth of GENMAC, an organization formed by a diverse group of marketing scholars that is focused on gender research in marketing and consumer behaviour. GENMAC, and its accompanying advisory board, seek to bring together voices of all constituents interested in gender, marketing and consumer behaviour research and serves to more formally support the legacy of those “homegrown” Gender, Marketing and Consumer Behaviour conferences.