George Ritzer is an American sociologist, professor, and author who has mainly studied globalization, metatheory, patterns of consumption, and modern/postmodern social theory. His concept of McDonaldization draws upon Max Weber's idea of rationalization through the lens of the fast food industry. He coined the term after writing The McDonaldization of Society (1993), which is among the best selling monographs in the history of American sociology.
Sebastian Spering Kresge was an American businessman. He created and owned two chains of department stores, the S. S. Kresge Company, one of the 20th century's largest discount retail organizations, and the Kresge-Newark traditional department store chain. The discounter was renamed the Kmart Corporation in 1977.
A prosumer is an individual who both consumes and produces. The term is a portmanteau of the words producer and consumer. Research has identified six types of prosumers: DIY prosumers, self-service prosumers, customizing prosumers, collaborative prosumers, monetised prosumers, and economic prosumers.
Naomi Long Madgett was an American poet and publisher. Originally a teacher, she later found fame with her award-winning poems and was also the founder and senior editor of Lotus Press, established in 1972, a publisher of poetry books by black poets. Known as "the godmother of African-American poetry", she was the Detroit poet laureate since 2001.
Anti-consumerism is a sociopolitical ideology that is opposed to consumerism, the continual buying and consuming of material possessions. Anti-consumerism is concerned with the private actions of business corporations in pursuit of financial and economic goals at the expense of the public welfare, especially in matters of environmental protection, social stratification, and ethics in the governing of a society. In politics, anti-consumerism overlaps with environmental activism, anti-globalization, and animal-rights activism; moreover, a conceptual variation of anti-consumerism is post-consumerism, living in a material way that transcends consumerism.
TheDetroiter.com is a website providing articles, blogs, interviews, a calendar of events and editorials for the Detroit, Michigan arts and cultural community. Its motto is "Unearthing a great American city, one story at a time."
Walter Nickell "Nick" Sousanis is an American scholar, art critic, and cartoonist; a co-founder of the TheDetroiter.com, he is also the first person at Columbia University to write a dissertation entirely in a comic book format.
Gad Saad is a Canadian marketing professor at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University. He is known for applying evolutionary psychology to marketing and consumer behaviour. He wrote a blog for Psychology Today and hosts a YouTube channel titled "The Saad Truth".
Charles McGee was an American artist and educator known for creating paintings, assemblages, and sculptures. His artwork is in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. He also had several large-scale public works in the city of Detroit.
L. H. M. "Lily" Ling was a political theorist and scholar whose work focused around the theory of worldism within international relations. Much of her work draws from storytelling, the arts, and non-Western culture to present alternative versions of historical analysis of global affairs. She was Professor of International Affairs at The New School at the time of her death.
Culture jamming is a form of protest used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert media culture and its mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. It attempts to "expose the methods of domination" of mass society.
Green consumption is related to sustainable development or sustainable consumer behaviour. It is a form of consumption that safeguards the environment for the present and for future generations. It ascribes to consumers responsibility or co-responsibility for addressing environmental problems through the adoption of environmentally friendly behaviors, such as the use of organic products, clean and renewable energy, and the choice of goods produced by companies with zero, or almost zero, impact.
Gilda Snowden was an African-American artist, educator and mentor from Detroit, Michigan.
Hubert Massey is an artist of a variety of mediums, and well known for his large-scale installations in the Buon Fresco style. Massey has 15 works of public art throughout the state of Michigan, and has been commissioned by various local organizations including universities, museums, hotels, and the Michigan Department of Transportation. He now resides in Detroit, Michigan with his wife Marquita.
Michael Zadoorian is an American novelist and short story writer of Armenian descent. Zadoorian's work explores love, death, music, memory, things forgotten and found again, the eidetic power of photographic images, and Detroit. He is best known as the author of The Leisure Seeker, published in 2009 by William Morrow and Company. In 2018, it was adapted for a motion picture starring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland, and directed by Italian film director, Paolo Virzi. The film was released in March 2018.
Nancy Mitchnick is an American painter and educator. She most notably started as part of Detroit's Cass Corridor Group.
Bill Rauhauser was an American photographer and educator who documented the city of Detroit from the 1940s.
Dora Apel is an American art historian, cultural critic, author, and W. Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art at Wayne State University in Detroit, where she taught from 1994 to 2019. Her work focuses on issues of trauma, memory, race, gender, national identity, war, and the ruins of capitalism. Her book, Calling Memory into Place, includes essays that delineate her family's history during and after the Holocaust. Two of her books address the history of lynching black people in the United States.
Shirley Woodson is an American visual artist, educator, mentor, and art collector who is most known for her spectacular figurative paintings depicting African American history. Her work that spans a career of 60 years and counting can be found in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among other institutions. Woodson was named the 2021 Kresge Eminent Artist. The Detroit Institute of Arts exhibited 11 of her pieces in "Shirley Woodson: Shield of the Nile" Dec. 18, 2021 through June 12, 2022, the museum's first solo exhibition of Ms. Woodson's work. A painting by Ms. Woodson is featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit exhibition "Ground Up: Reflections on Black Abstraction" April 8-August 16, 2022.
Marek Haltof is a professor (dr.hab.) of film studies. specializing in the cultural histories of Polish and Australian film.
