Taste In Turbulent Times: Cultural Consumption, Crisis, and the Remaking of Distinction

This session examines taste, cultural consumption and aesthetic judgment under conditions of turbulence—economic precarity, political polarization, pandemic aftershocks, climate anxiety, and algorithmic disruption. Classic accounts treated taste as a stable marker of class position and a quiet engine of social reproduction. But moments of crisis expose taste as contested and dynamic: boundaries are redrawn, hierarchies wobble, and the symbolic value of cultural goods is renegotiated. We invite empirical and theoretical papers that ask how people consume, classify, and justify culture when familiar frames are destabilized. Topics may include: taste in artistic fields; shifting repertoires of legitimate and illegitimate culture; omnivorousness, eclecticism, and their limits; the moralization of consumption (ethical, sustainable, anti-consumption); nostalgia, comfort, and "cozy" aesthetics as crisis responses; the role of platforms and recommendation systems in reshaping taste; and how consumers in the Global South and beyond the Euro-American canon assert distinct cultural hierarchies. We especially welcome comparative and non-Western perspectives, quantiatative or qualitative research designs. By foregrounding taste as a site where social order is both reproduced and disrupted, the session contributes to understanding how meaning, status, and belonging are remade in turbulent times. Papers from early-career scholars and across world regions are strongly encouraged.