Symposium. Conspicuous Sustainability. Consumption, Climate Change and Morality

The Symposium approaches sustainability and consumption as a morally and politically charged arena. Across the contributions, sustainable consumption appears neither as straightforward solution nor merely as status performance, but as an ambivalent practice shaped by symbolic meanings, inequalities, and material conditions. Magnus Boström shows how consumerism and its resistance are sustained by social comparison, moral aspirations, and cultural meanings. Josée Johnston and Emily Huddart Kennedy examine ethical meat, revealing how care may reproduce exclusion and obscure structural limits. Manisha Anantharaman and Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier foreground ecological distinction and North-South inequalities. Arve Hansen extends this perspective across China and Vietnam, linking material growth, distinction, and variegated consumer societies. Finally, Paolo Magaudda and Roberta Sassatelli show how quiet luxury rearticulates status through simplicity, craft, and embodied competence. Together, these contributions show that sustainability simultaneously enables moral engagement and reproduces social divisions, making its ambivalence central to understanding contemporary consumption.