The seventh moment is about critical scholars helping populations to find their own cultural homes. Researchers should convince people to form their own grounded aesthetics within the spaces of their living world. However, taking sides is a complex process:
- Researchers must qualify (make clear) their own value positions, including the so-called objective facts (ontology) and ideological assumptions (epistemology) attach to that position.
- Researchers should during the research process listen to the perspectives and voices of many different stakeholders; identify values and claims to objective knowledge of positions contrary to their own and analyze these.
- Researchers should advocate for the side of the underdog and in so doing should attempt to create a critical, reflexive, moral consciousness about the appeals to ideology and objective knowledge in (2) and point these out as reflecting a particular moral and historical position, for example, researchers may argue that happiness is not derived from particular material objects, that on the contrary desire to possess is largely fermented, if not created, by manufacturers and marketers.
- Next it is pointed out how such a position may disadvantage and disempower members of a specific group.
- The researcher should thereafter make an appeal for a participatory, feminist, communitarian ethic— representing new conceptions of care, love, beauty, and empowerment.
- Then the researcher applies the ethic in (5) to the specifics of a concrete case, demonstrating how the ethic would and could produce social betterment.
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Next follows a call to action—the researcher engages in concrete steps that would change situations in the future, such as:
- teach people how to associate new values to matters that might be marginalized and stigmatized by a larger culture;
- demonstrate how particular methods or objects may negatively affect the lives of specific people; and
- indicate how particular texts may directly and in-directly misrepresent persons and reproduce prejudice and stereotypes.
Denzin (2001) asserted that critical consumer research in the seventh moment will and must take sides. The aim is to bring the consumer back in, guiding consumers in the development of collective and individual forms of resistance to the consumption cultures of postmodernism. Critical consumer researchers should through storytelling, performance texts, rich local ethnographies, and ethnoscapes help consumers find their own cultural homes. In the seventh moment, society is given an opportunity to come into focus-and hopefully to their rightful being.
Dencin, N.K. 2001. The Seventh Moment: Qualitative Inquiry and the Practices of a More Radical Consumer Research. The Journal of Consumer Research, 28( 2), 324-330, September 2001.
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