Love Of Things Research Articles

『우리가 볼 수 없는 모든 빛』에 나타난 스피노자적 윤리의 실천

This thesis seeks an ethical way to advance towards the love of eternal and infinite things that Spinoza pursued in All the Light We Cannot See, an American novel published by Anthony Doerr in 2014 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the following year. It is an attempt to examine Spinoza's Conatus as an individual's effort to maintain and sustain life, and that Conatus inevitably includes desire. However, Spinoza sees life pursuing this desire as something that can restrain life and give suffering, but the effort to achieve the third perception leads human beings find bliss, which is the final path to freedom. This paper examines the main character‘s choices and efforts to continue his life, and try to find out whether they have entered the path of freedom in the Spinozist sense. The first section briefly examines how Spinoza explained Conatus and the road to bliss. Werner's Conatus is examined in the second section, and how he perceives three different perceptions Spinoza distinguished in the third section. And in the last section, it will look at how Werner's perception of God's intellectual love is embodied.

Indonesia's Critical View on Public Sector Accounting: Insights from M Nastir's Thought

Purpose — This research attempts to introduce a typical Indonesian critical thought, M. Natsir's perspective, which can be used to study public sector accounting. Design/methodology/approach-- This study used the narrative literature review method. This article then compiled an outline of M Natsir's critical methodology, which focuses on the emancipatory revolution based on the spirit of Islamic values and continues to prioritize democracy and national unity. It hopes the methodology can construct the [financial] state management to align with the nation's interests. Findings — The results of this study indicate that the development of paradigmatic studies in the field of accounting opens great opportunities to complete, perfect, and even present concepts in new accounting models that are in line with the needs of the ages, as shown in this article, which borrows the thoughts of M Natsir. This reflection serves as a methodological basis to present the concept of an emancipatory revolution based on the spirit of Islam and the love for motherland values growing within Indonesian society. Therefore, people's conceptions of love for material things can be oriented in a more beneficial direction for society. It can also construct a country's best financial management method. Practical implications — This research encourages the presence of public sector accounting studies without forgetting the context of local values, love of country, and Islamic spirit in the form of good state financial management. Originality/value—This research framework critiques the concept and practice of NPM and its accrual accounting as a derivative of neoliberal ideology. It also examines the roots of economic policies that are not oriented towards the interests of the people in general. Using this proposed framework, it is hoped that the spirit of love for the motherland and the spirit of Islam can be felt in the state's financial accounting and management. Paper type — Research Papers

The coagulant dipping process of nitrile latex: investigations of former motion effects and coagulant loss into the dipping compound.

Coagulant dipping, the process used in thin glove manufacture, involves electrolyte ions diffusing from the surface of a hand-shaped former into latex compound, causing a deposit (wet gel) to accumulate on the former. In this work, two aspects of the process were examined, both experimentally and theoretically. For the experimental work, a commercial nitrile latex was used. The motion of formers through a latex dipping tank is intuitively expected to affect the electrolyte diffusion and hence the wet gel growth. This was investigated at laboratory scale with small glass formers moving in a metre-long dip tank. Former velocities ranged from zero to almost 0.2 m s-1. No effect of former lateral movement on wet gel thickness was observed. One obvious explanation is that most of the coagulant diffusion occurs within the wet gel deposit, which provides protection to the diffusive flux. However, the critical zone is just ahead of the coagulating front, where coagulant is present in the liquid compound at concentrations below the level needed for coagulation. A fluid mechanical model was constructed that assumed a uniform fluid flow along the side face of a rectangular former. The model confirmed that for calcium nitrate, the most commonly used coagulant, the effect of movement is very small. In the second investigation, coagulant leakage into the host latex compound during the dwell time was investigated by taking samples during repeat static dips. This experiment was modelled using diffusion theory, focusing on the critical zone just outside the wet gel at the point of former withdrawal. The model and experiment agreed well, both showing a small but definite coagulant leakage that tended towards a plateau concentration. Coagulant leakage from a moving former was also considered, from a theoretical perspective. In this case, the mechanism is advective movement of coagulant from the critical zone into the host compound. In the worst case, where all of this coagulant is swept away, the model suggested that the plateau coagulant concentration could reach an amount that would cause coagulation. Reduced flow in the critical zone (boundary layer) and former shape are factors that would reduce leakage.

Istighotsah Sebagai Upaya Menumbuhkan Kecerdasan Spiritual Santri di Pondok Pesantren Putri Al-Mahrusiyah

This article reveals about the implementation and efforts to cultivate the spiritual intelligence of students through the practice of istighotsah. Istighotsah is practiced by Muslims as a medium to ask Allah for help from the dangers of the world that will plunge people into misleading paths and as human ta'aluq siroj to God. This research uses qualitative research with a phenomenological approach. The results reveal that the implementation of istighotsah is used as a medium of communication with the aim of asking for help from Allah, and submitting to Allah. In addition to getting closer to God, istighatsah also trains students to think positively, always be patient, istiqomah, and live life only expecting the pleasure of God. Thus, it will lead to behavior that leads to not getting the pleasure of God, such as immorality, too much love for material things, and so on.

Love of Friendship and Love of Concupiscence

Love of Friendship and Love of Concupiscence Jordan Olver WE LOVE WINE and other lifeless things in a different way than we love our friends. We love our friends for their own sake, wishing good for them and being inherently pleased by their possession of it. We love wine and other such things as objects to be used, enjoyed, or possessed by someone we care about; we do not love them fundamentally as subjects for whom we wish some good but as goods we wish for some subject. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, drew attention to this difference and, through it, identified friendship as essentially a benevolent love, that is, one that wishes good for the loved one for the loved one’s own sake.1 In the thirteenth century, theologians looked back to Aristotle, and presumably to experience itself, and distinguished between two kinds of love: the kind of love one has toward wine they called concupiscence or love of [End Page 573] concupiscence; the kind one has toward a friend they called friendship or love of friendship. Thomas Aquinas received the distinction between love of friendship and love of concupiscence from his Scholastic predecessors, and in a sense from Aristotle as well. He used the terms love of friendship and love of concupiscence throughout his career, and the distinction associated with them eventually came to occupy a central role in his thought on love. Arguably, the distinction became so central that without it one cannot present his thought except in a vague manner, nor can one solve the primary problem associated with his doctrine of love, namely, how love of others for their own sake is possible.2 Scholars have often treated of the distinction between love of friendship and love of concupiscence. Most treatments, however, have been part of a broader inquiry; rarely has the distinction been the proper object of study. The effect has been that scholars have rarely considered the two loves as a controversial topic, one over which to argue.3 But differences in interpretation do exist, some being more obvious, others more subtle. These differences exist in turn because Thomas’s understanding of love of friendship and love of concupiscence is itself difficult to discern. Thomas presents the two loves in a variety of ways, and it is not clear how we are to reconcile these different accounts. Some dedicated studies, accordingly, are needed to [End Page 574] address the various textual difficulties and consider the diverse interpretations in the secondary literature. This study aims to provide such a treatment. With the help of the secondary literature, we will first set out the questions we will seek to answer in our inquiry. Then, to provide a firmer foundation for interpreting Thomas, we will survey his predecessors’ use of love of friendship and love of concupiscence. Afterward, we will examine Thomas’s own use of the terms throughout his career. Finally, we will return to the questions raised and draw conclusions about how we ought to understand the two loves and the distinction associated with them. I. Scholarly Treatment and Possible Interpretations Twentieth- and twenty-first-century interpreters of Thomas generally present love of friendship and love of concupiscence in one of four ways. Some divide the two loves as other-oriented and self-oriented: love of friendship is a disinterested love of others for their own sake while love of concupiscence is a love of something wished for oneself.4 Others divide the loves as being of persons and of things wished for persons: love of friendship is of a person, whether oneself or another, for that person’s own sake, while love of concupiscence is of some good wished for a person.5 Still others divide the loves similarly but [End Page 575] add that the loves are not distinct acts, but two aspects or tendencies found in every act of love: in each act, one tends with love of friendship to some subject for whom one wishes some good and with love of concupiscence to some good one wishes for that subject.6 Finally, some identify multiple senses of the two loves. Most notably, Guy Mansini...

Politik Sufisme

Every personal of a Sufi has a high sensitivity and concern for others. To be able to fight for the religion of God, sometimes a Sufi must enter into things of a worldly nature. Not because of aim or impulses that are not good and because of the attraction or even love for things that are oriented to world, but because of the existence of goals that are unwittingly positive. That's the way was when a Sufi was affiliated to politics. This article aims to uncover what motives and contributions were made from Dr. KH. Musta'in Romly as an Nusantara Sufi who had been involved in politics, and even entered one of the political parties. At that time, the case became a bit of a conflagration and gained some opposition from some quarters. The research of this article results that there are many contributions that Kiai Musta'in produced when he entered politics, especially when he joined the Golkar party. This can be shown from the aspects that return to general public, especially NU residents and aspects that return to the big family of Darul Ulum Islamic Boarding School and TQN Rejoso.

Investigation ways of causes needle sticks injuries, risk factors affecting on health and ways to preventive.

Needle sticks injuries (NSIs) has caused many health concerns, including the widespread infection disease. Needle sticks injuries can have high threaten health human especially, all those who are in contact with health and medical centers. The purpose of this review study was the determination the effects of needle sticks injuries (NSIs) on health care worker and patents. In this a review study of literature studied conducted on international databases included Google Scholar, ISI/WOS (Web of Science), Springer, Scopus, Medline/PubMed. The literature signs a notable undesirable affect from potential needle sticks injuries related to ways to preventive and risks factors among patents and health care worker. The literature was shown needle stick injuries can cause with a variety of ways including needle recapping, non-standard safety boxes, thin gloves, and inadequate personal protective equipment. According to the result this study, needle stick injuries can transfer infectious disease (Human Immunodeficiency viruses [HIV], Hepatitis C virus [HCV]) and increase risk health on health care worker and patients. According to research related to the subject, the ways to prevent reduce needle sticks include personal protective equipment, holding retraining courses for medical staff in the direction to raise awareness can significantly reduce cases of needle sticks injuries. Further research using more sophisticated methodology is warranted.

Out There: Into the Queer New Yonder ed. by Saundra Mitchell

Reviewed by: Out There: Into the Queer New Yonder ed. by Saundra Mitchell April Spisak Mitchell, Saundra, ed. Out There: Into the Queer New Yonder. Inkyard, 2022 [464p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781335425898 $19.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780369718945 $9.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 9-12 In this third and final anthology in a planned trio, seventeen short stories explore LGBTQIA+ identity through the lens of futuristic love, most of it set in a dying version of Earth. Good thing love conquers all, as things look pretty crummy otherwise, with the poor Earth invaded, polluted to the extremes of toxicity, or, in a most creative twist, suddenly bereft of all non-queer people (they disappeared in an instant). "Renaissance" by Emma K. Ohland is a splendid example as two girls who come from drastically different lives (one will someday leave the dying planet in a fantastic, exclusive spaceship and the other will … not) nevertheless find each other and build as tender and memorable a relationship as possible, keenly aware of the ticking clock. Nita Tyndall offers a true gem with "Translating for the Machine," in which Eden's nonbinary identity is an unexpectedly perfect tool for them to tap into and communicate with a mysterious machine that gives (and perhaps shapes) world-changing information. The stories are diverse and feature representation of an impressive range of identities in ways that are fully integrated into the narration and thoughtfully presented. Short story collections, especially a science fiction outing as well-curated and wide-ranging as this one, are a rare treat in teen literature, and Mitchell has ended this series with a bang. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Love of Things: Reconsidering Adorno’s Criticism of Rilke

Love of Things: Reconsidering Adorno’s Criticism of Rilke

Edoardo Tresoldi and the heteronomy of architecture

Edoardo Tresoldi and the heteronomy of architecture

VALUE CONSCIOUSNESS: AN ATTEMPT TO DEFINE

The purpose of the research. The article consider value consciousness is a special sphere of human consciousness that has its own structure and characteristic features. It was discovered in the phenomenological axiology of E. Husserl, M. Scheler, N. Hartmann and D. von Hildebrand. One of the main achievements was the discovery of value intuition-a sense of comprehension of values. The purpose of this article is to systematize knowledge about value consciousness. Results. Value consciousness has its own structure: value intuition; affectivity; free will; evaluation, evaluative judgments; rationality and prejudice of value. The value prejudice plays a general idea of the value consciousness. The way to realize value consciousness is a value response. It performs cognitive and praxiological roles. The definition of value consciousness is given as a way of correlating the real and ideal worlds, through which a person enters into value relations with the world and embodies values. The boundaries between personal and group types of value consciousness are drawn: individual consciousness is more affective, values are realized only through it, it is more complex. Positive and negative experiences, especially suffering and the feeling of death, are identified as sources of value consciousness formation. The fundamental characteristic of value consciousness is its determination by both ideal and real worlds, which leads to the emergence of “disconnection”. This is alienation from objective being, good, higher values as a result of the defeat of consciousness by “value blindness”, moral indifference. They are based on the love of low things, due to the inability to know the highest values.

Renga

Renga Mary Rose O’Reilley (bio) Four geese fly over. Appetite pulls the body, its shameless honking. Longing to be loved is its own kind of honking. Return to the nest. Here in your reed house listen to earth, fire, wind-- think about oceans. All that you can’t cross, weak, mind full of strategy: perfectly simple. Everything loves you. Your mother is everything, all of it singing. Stars along bare branch, magnolia, or memory of wild magnolia. [End Page 180] Mary Rose O’Reilley Mary Rose O’Reilley’s most recent book, Bright Morning Stars, won the 2017 Brighthorse Prize for the Novel. She is the author of two poetry collections, both from LSU, Half Wild (2005 Walt Whitman Prize) and Earth, Mercy. Her three books on teaching concern peace studies and contemplative practice: The Peaceable Classroom, Radical Presence and The Garden at Night (Heinemann). Two memoirs, The Barn at the End of the Worldand The Love of Impermanent Things (Milkweed Editions) explore connections among humans, animals and the natural world. Professor Emerita at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN, she is grateful to remain active as a writer, beach naturalist, potter, and Baroque and folk fiddle player. She lives on a rural island in Puget Sound. Copyright © 2020 College English Association

Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith, by Emma Mason

Reviewed by: Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith by Emma Mason Joshua King (bio) Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith, by Emma Mason; pp. x + 212. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, £30.00, $39.95. A new contribution to Oxford University Press's Spiritual Lives series, Emma Mason's Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith offers a groundbreaking and graceful account of Christina Rossetti's ecological spirituality. Rossetti's sophisticated theology, and, to a lesser extent, proto-environmentalism have attracted increasing scholarly attention. Yet Mason is the first to identify Rossetti's ecological view of grace as foundational to her faith, politics, and poetics. For Rossetti, Mason helps us recognize, grace is a divine energy that originates and sustains life in its interactive evolutionary development, drawing all things toward loving participation in each other and God in a renewal of creation at Christ's Second Advent. "Apocalypse" is in this view not a distant destruction of the world, but a liberating transformation of this one "triggered through the love of things for each other" (21). Rossetti's ecotheology emerges in her practice, through a poetics that celebrates the vitality of all creation and eschews waste, and through devotional prose rich in empirical detail. As a whole, Mason argues, Rossetti's work challenges ecocriticism's residual tendency to "reduce Christianity to a one-dimensional simplification of fundamentalist Evangelicalism" that justifies the conquest of nature and disregards real life by focusing on the world's end (22). Mason seeks to elucidate Rossetti's personal ecotheology as well as its intricate participation in her contexts and the "history of radical Christian ecology" (22). The four body chapters pursue these aims through stages of Rossetti's career. The first reveals the greenness of Rossetti's well-known Tractarian roots, demonstrating the ways in which her ecotheology grew out of Tractarianism's vision of the created world as a "network in which every being was connected with the divine" (35). Immensely important to Rossetti's sense of creation as a community was Edward Bouverie Pusey, leading Tractarian and visiting preacher at Rossetti's Christ Church in London. Pusey affirmed an "intercommunion" of creation with Christ that is especially revealed and encountered through the Eucharist (34). Chapter 2 freshly connects Rossetti's ecological Christology to her mid-century involvement with Pre-Raphaelitism, which reinforced her Tractarian-formed belief in the non-binary integration of the material with the divine. Assimilating Pre-Raphaelitism, Platonism, patristic and Franciscan Trinitarian theology, and William Blake's sense of creation as the divine body of the Savior, Rossetti comes to see creation as networks of humans, other animals, plants, and inanimate things that "are connected through a kinship with God" based on the intercommunion of the Trinity (93). Such kinship is celebrated and threatened in Rossetti's best-known poem, "Goblin Market" (composed 1859, published 1862). Its famous lists (for example, of fruits), Mason claims, act like genealogies in the Old Testament, testifying to an interwoven kinship of creation. Mason could have done more to account for the ways in which the poem also links its profusive lists and similes to sensual self-absorption and objectification of others; that said, Mason illuminates the poem's critique of commercialism for commodifying and selling creation, which God gave to all things for their home. Chapter 3 uncovers in Rossetti's mid-career poetry and prose a view of creation as a sacred commons of companion species evolving over time as part of the divine. This drove Rossetti's passionate opposition to vivisection as "dismember[ment]" of "the divine [End Page 514] body" (112). Mason ranges from Rossetti's children's poems in Sing-Song (1872), to prose studies such as Seek and Find (1879) and Called to Be Saints (1881), to poems less often studied, such as "'All thy works praise thee, O Lord': A Processional of Creation" (1881). Rossetti's own sense of creation as a sacred commons was informed, Mason reveals, by the "urbanature" of London, from Regent's Park to the Zoological Gardens and other green spaces (43). Mason highlights the range of ecotheological botanical works that "affirmed" for Rossetti an "evolutionary and green reading of creation compatible with Christianity...

Educating Desire: Conversion and Ascent in Dante’s Purgatorio

In Cantos 17 and 18 of the Purgatorio, Dante’s Virgil lays out a theory of sin, freedom, and moral motivation based on a philosophical anthropology of loving-desire. As the commentary tradition has long recognized, because Dante placed Virgil’s discourse on love at the heart of the Commedia, the poet invites his readers to use love as a hermeneutic key to the text as a whole. When we contextualize Virgil’s discourse within the broader intention of the poem—to move its readers from disordered love to an ordered love of ultimate things—then we find in these central cantos not just a key to the structure and movement of the poem, but also a key to understanding Dante’s pedagogical aim. With his Commedia, Dante invites us to perform the interior transformation which the poem dramatizes in verse and symbol. He does so by awakening in his readers not only a desire for the beauty of his poetic creation, but also a desire for the beauty of the love described therein. In this way, the poem presents a pedagogy of love, in which the reader participates in the very experience of desire and delight enacted in the text. In this article, I offer an analysis of Virgil’s discourse on love in the Purgatorio, arguing for an explicit and necessary connection between loving-desire and true education. I demonstrate that what informs Dante’s pedagogy of love is the notion of love as ascent, a notion we find articulated especially in the Christian Platonism of Augustine. Finally, I conclude by offering a number of figures, passages, and themes from across the Commedia that provide fruitful material for teachers engaged in the task of educating desire.

Abstract P3-03-38: Sentinel lymph node biopsy procedure: using surgical pliers eliminate radiation exposure risk

Abstract Introduction The use of radioactive compounds for sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) is now generally accepted for surgical treatment of breast cancer albeit the risk of radiation exposure to the surgeon. The purpose of our study was to compare the theoretical maximal radiation dose (TMRD) at the injection site of the breast versus fingers radiation dose (FRD) of the surgeon performing SLNB. Patients, Material and Methods This is a monocentric, prospective study on a single surgeon performing SLNB with different dosimetric measurements. Periareolar intradermal injections of technetium-99m colloidal rhenium sulphide (Nanocis® of Curium Laboratory) were administered in the nuclear medicine unit. For one and two day protocols, the activity was 25 MBq and 40 MBq ± 10%, respectively. During surgery, the nodes in the axilla were visualized with the injected blue dye and by a hand-held gamma probe. During surgery, the absorbed dose to the surgeon's right (dominant) and left hands were recorded using thermoluminescent dosimetry in a ring form From Landauer Laboratory. This lithium fluoride dosimeter enables monitoring equivalent skin dose “Hp007” with a minimum dose threshold of 0.1 mSv. On the hands, one ring was placed on each thumb under the surgical glove and another dosimeter on the nipple of the breast, covered in two thin surgical gloves. The radiation exposure to the hands of the surgeons (FRD) and injection site of the breast (TMRD) were measured by the rings' dosimeters from incision to the cutaneous stitch. Results Between 02-01-2018 and 04-30-2018, a total of 38 SLNBs were included in this study: 9 mastectomies, 28 lumpectomies and 1 sentinel node alone were performed by the same surgeon. The mean patient age was 57 years (range, 31-81). For one day protocol, 36 patients received 22.8 MBq (range, 15-26), and for the last two patients in the 2 day protocol, the activity was 39 and 40 MBq. The mean exposure time was 57 min (range, 19-73) and the overall time of exposure was 33 h and 31 min. In our study, the TMRD is around 8.8 mSv for 3 months and represents approximatively 35 mSv per year for a breast surgeon. The FRD is similar between right and left hand, 0.16 and 0.15, respectively for 3 months and about 0.6 mSv per year. Discussion It is evident that the surgeon received the highest radiatiodose in the operating theatre, the 3 months TMRD was 8-fold higher in injection site than the FRD, 35-fold per year. Nevertheless, the maximal dose at the injection site was below the critical dose (150 mSv) recommended by the French Nuclear Safety authority (ASN). Surgical techniques using tools such as pliers significantly decrease the dose on surgeon's finger (8.8 vs 0.15mSv for 3 months). According to a French Directive, workers exposed to radiations must be monitored if the effective extremity's annual dose is likely to exceed 50 mSv. Radioactivity in operating room is systematically monitored at our institute. We encourage young surgeons to perform surgery using surgical pliers to manipulate the radioactivity injection site of in the breast, to minimize exposure to radioactivity. Citation Format: Tunon de Lara C, Rois M, Caron J, Herit S, Stein P, Lortal B, Cazeau AL, Godbert Y. Sentinel lymph node biopsy procedure: using surgical pliers eliminate radiation exposure risk [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2018 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2018 Dec 4-8; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2019;79(4 Suppl):Abstract nr P3-03-38.

Beyond-personal love – Experiencing love beyond the person

ABSTRACTLove is seen as interpersonal phenomenon in western society. The love of things that are non-interpersonal or ‘beyond-personal’ is less understood. A sample of 208 adults responded to a questionnaire asking what they loved, and how much they loved 61 common objects, activities, experiences and ideas. An exploratory factor analysis yielded five distinct categories of beyond-personal love including spiritual ideology, physical activity, material objects, hedonic experiences and social experiences. Loving physical activities predicted life satisfaction, happiness, and presence of meaning. Loving social experiences predicted happiness and presence of meaning. Loving hedonic experiences, spiritual ideas or material objects did not predict any of the outcome variables when all factors were considered, but material love was correlated with search for meaning. Results show that beyond-personal love can be considered adaptive, yet the target of beyond-personal love can predict whether one feels life satisfaction, feels subjectively happy or has meaning in one’s life.

Film deposition and consolidation during thin glove coagulant dipping

ABSTRACTIn this article, we examine the rate of film build‐up and the evolution of polymer volume fraction in coagulant dipped films. The results are for nitrile and natural rubber compounds. We describe a model for the build‐up of a latex film that coagulates onto a former as a wet gel and consolidates by a wet sintering process. We achieve this by applying diffusion and reaction kinetics for the coagulant transporting from a former into the latex bath. Wet sintering, the underlying mechanism for serum exudation from the wet gel, is modelled for a consolidating aggregate of latex particles. The parameters used in the models are either measured in separate experiments or are available from the literature. We compare the model predictions with the experimental results. The first, rapid, stage of film build‐up is modelled successfully by simple diffusion of the coagulant cations. At longer dwell times, it is found that the reaction between coagulant and surfactant is the primary mechanism for the rate reduction. The rate of consolidation of the wet gel could be modelled reasonably well using a previously developed equation for latex film formation. The rate was chiefly dependent on the stress relaxation modulus of the polymer. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Polym. Sci., Part B: Polym. Phys. 2017, 55, 1633–1648

The life of things, the love of things

The life of things, the love of things

For the Love of Things

For the Love of Things

For the love of small things: consumerism and the making of maternal identities

Purpose – This paper aims to consider the increased commercialisation of motherhood and particularly the consumer practices of women as they prepare for the birth of their first child. The commercial world appears omnipresent in the lives of new mothers in Western societies. Design/methodology/approach – Based on a five-year study of motherhood in the UK, the paper focusses on women’s relationship to the marketing and consumption of everyday maternity and baby products made available to them through readership of pregnancy magazines and mainstream commercial outlets. Findings – Documenting how consumer culture features in the lives of mothers-to-be, the study identifies age and socio-economic status as key features in shaping the maternal experience and consumer “choice”. Originality/value – The paper explores the significance of consumption as preparatory work in the transition to motherhood.