My Life With Things: The Consumer Diaries 

Unconventional and provocative, My Life with Things is Elizabeth Chin's meditation on her relationship with consumer goods and a critical statement on the politics and method of anthropology. Chin centers the book on diary entries that focus on everyday items—kitchen cabinet knobs, shoes, a piano—and uses them to intimately examine the ways consumption resonates with personal and social meaning: from writing love haikus about her favorite nail polish and discussing the racial implications of her tooth cap, to revealing how she used shopping to cope with a miscarriage and contemplating how her young daughter came to think that she needed Lunesta. Throughout, Chin keeps Karl Marx and his family's relationship to their possessions in mind, drawing parallels between Marx's napkins, the production of late nineteenth-century table linens, and Chin's own vintage linen collection. Unflinchingly and refreshingly honest, Chin unlocks the complexities of her attachments to, reliance on, and complicated relationships with her things. In so doing, she prompts readers to reconsider their own consumption, as well as their assumptions about the possibilities for creative scholarship.

Chin's participation in the ArtCenter Dialogues is co-hosted by the Humanities and Sciences and Graduate Media Design Practices departments.

Life Without Objects

The 2016-2017 ArtCenter Dialogues theme, “Life Without Objects,” will contribute to ongoing conversations about ecological and economic sustainability by exploring the ideologies shaping the creation, circulation, consumption and afterlife of designed objects. What are the ethics and politics of making objects today, and how might designers learn from this complex landscape to reflect on their own practices? What opportunities and frameworks for design emerge when objects are understood and approached differently? This lecture series will convene artists, designers and scholars from across the arts and sciences to explore these questions, as ArtCenter advances a critical discussion of the social, political, economic and cultural implications of designing and making in a world full of stuff.

The ArtCenter Dialogues, a lecture series made possible by a generous endowment from the Toyota Motor Corporation, brings eminent speakers to the College from a wide variety of art, design and educational backgrounds to inspire creativity, promote thoughtful discussion and broaden perspectives.

Image — New slaves: Chin reminds us of the original imperial and racial inflections of capitalist consumption and its ongoing conjunctions with slavery, migration and global labour. Source: Alamy, Times Higher Education