Prácticas, signos y consumos contraluz: entre ambivalencia estética y agencia crítica. Una conversación con Roberta Sassatelli.

This interview with Roberta Sassatelli reflects on her work on consumption and interdisciplinarity, as well as on key issues in contemporary global consumer cultures, such as digital cultures and sustainability. Drawing on sociology, semiotics, and material culture studies, she explores how consumption connects everyday experiences with broader social, cultural, and economic structures. Discussing brands, Sassatelli stresses that they are continuously objectified, yet remain practical realizations that do not simply impose meanings. Rather, brands are continually appropriated, reinterpreted, and ritualized in both professional and lay domains. Their significance emerges through the interaction between symbolic representations and material practices. The body occupies a particularly important place in these processes, functioning simultaneously as an objectified medium and as a visible site for the constitution of subjectivity. The interview also considers how desires and affects are mobilized to shape contemporary consumption, while emphasizing the need to historicize the processes of moral valuation that contribute to establishing social boundaries between lifestyles and consumers. Rather than treating consumption as inherently positive or negative, Sassatelli invites us to examine its contradictions and ambivalences. This perspective ultimately opens the way toward a more plural and less Eurocentric sociology of consumption—one attentive to the manifold and stratified localization of the global, the continuing relevance of materiality in the context of the development of social media, and the importance of practices of repair and care in the face of the divisive logic of profit.