Toni Eagar

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Verified

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• PhD
• Senior Lecturer at Australian National University

This paper explores the traversing shrine Pooh Bear's Corner as a dynamic place of power arising from pauses in travel dedicated to the act of traversing. Using a boundary work lens we examine how modalities of pausing—taking pause, giving pause, and making pause—create significant orientation points within journeys. Through interviews and field re...

During the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-truth era, it has become increasingly difficult for institutions to establish facts in an environment dominated by polarized social media echo chambers. Here, emotions and personal beliefs often overshadow objective facts. In this paper, we explore how a social movement centered on a belief in science targe...

This research aims to address the problem of the unvaccinated by considering how the social contract is framed by compliers and non-compliers on social media. COVID-19 mitigation measures (CMM), including mask-wearing, social distancing and vaccination, became a flashpoint of social division during the pandemic. Social media has been implicated in...

Purpose Existing brand literature on assemblage practices has focused on providing a map or geography of brand assemblages, suggesting that an artist brand’s ability to evolve and achieve brand longevity remains constant. Using geology of assemblage, this study aims to explore the types and mechanisms of change in brand evolutions to address the pr...

The denied humanity Black people endure daily is often conceptualized as all-consuming. In this study, we examine how the Verzuz, a livestreaming "rap battle" music event offers a virtual space wherein Black joy coexists with pain. Black joy is conceptualised as offering a space where the imagination can be stretched to include a life without White...

In line with the conference theme, this session presents three papers that consider the Black experience in the American marketplace. Across studies of market messages and offerings, these studies present explanations of how Black consumers experience the marketplace and provide some insights into how those experiences may be improved.

This paper proposes that popular culture has the potential to be progressive, opening the possibility for social change and the motivation to drive it. Based on a hermeneutic analysis of twelve popular culture cases, a processual theory of transformation is constructed. Processual theories embrace and emphasize a dynamic temporal sequence where one...

This study uses the Boardania community case to illustrate and discuss two issues that arise from mobility in online consumption communities: (i) the processes involved in the management of consumption community as it collectively shifts in space and (ii) the transformation of the community by the new spaces it inhabits. Inspired by nomadism, it ex...

Five heretical field researchers celebrate human subjectivity in a fractured journey toward St. Augustine Catholic Church in the heart of Tremé in September 2015. They populate their diverse pentagonal thoughts with Mary Douglas’ negotiated concepts of purity and pollution, rituals and symbols as a counterweight in their backpacks. Some are inspire...

Purpose This paper explores the purposive use of the selfie in the construction of personal narratives that develop and support an individual’s human brand. Selfies were divided into archetypical clusters of “genres” that reflected the combined story told through Instagram image and accompanying text captions. Design/methodology/approach The analy...

In the previous stage, Bowie is shown to become a celebrity with the media’s focus on his private self, while Ziggy is seen to be in the initial stages of sacralization that we will show formed the basis for his later iconicity. However, in stage 2 we find that Bowie’s celebrity and his essential humanness mean that there are a number of associatio...

Using David Bowie as a human brand and his various characters, particularly Ziggy Stardust, we address two research themes: who constructs celebrity – the individual or the market, and to what extent can a celebrity emancipate their human brand from the characters they portray? Market-generated materials covering Bowie’s fifty year career were anal...

Human brands can be understood as both celebrities and icons. However, these perspectives have been assumed to be different even when applied to the same person. Applying structuration theory we develop a transformation approach of musician to celebrity to icon, where private, public meanings and wider cultural concerns converge.

This thesis explores the relationship that forms between brand communities and those faces and heroes that represent the brand organisation. Previous research has focused on the direct relationships that individuals form with celebrities in the form of imagined parasocial or pseudo-relationships. The marketing literature has focused on the influenc...

An ethnographic exploration of a brand community and their hero was conducted to understand the outcomes of greatness through proxy and proximity. Proxy allowed an idealized mythology of the hero to form, which was enhanced by the possibility of proximity. However, proximity can expose the hero's feet of clay.

This study explores the mythology that surrounds brand heroes based on stories and perceptions of the brand community. A qualitative study was conducted on the Discworld brand community to explore the mythological stories that form a basis for the community's relationship with their brand hero, Terry Pratchett. The empirical findings from the Discw...

The concept of cult brands is relatively new to academic literature. It is derived from studies of subcultures of consumption and brand community, where there is the recognition of the social networks that form around the consumption experience, in this case social networks around a particular brand where active fan behaviour exists. The purpose of...

This article presents a definition of brand hero based on the literature surrounding celebrity endorsement with particular em-phasis on source credibility and attractiveness. Three brand com-munities and their brand hero(es) were analyzed using an ethno-graphic–grounded theory approach. Findings indicate that brand hero credibility does not solely...