University of Gothenburg
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Christian Fuentes

Gothenburg Research
Institute
Telephone
+46 31-786 27 06
Mail
christian.fuentes@handels.gu.se
Visiting address
Viktoriagatan 13, plan 3
41125 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 603
40530 Göteborg

About Christian Fuentes

Research profile: Consumption, Markets, and Materialities
Christian is a marketing scholar interested in consumption and the making of markets. His research focuses on the reconfiguration of everyday consumption practices and the role that marketing work and market devices play in this.

He often takes a socio-material approach, emphasizing the active role of materiality (devices, technology, infrastructure) in the enabling and reconfiguration of everyday practices.

Christian has worked on a number of research projects, many of them addressing issues that have to do with sustainability and/or digitalization.

He has conducted research on the topics of Ethical Consumption, Green Marketing, Sustainable Retailing, Alternative Markets, Digitalized consumption and Retailing.
I have, for example, studied how marketing inscribes outdoors product with green moral, how new technologies such as smartphones reconfigure in-store shopping practices, how ”sustainability” apps reconfigure everyday life and enable ethical consumption, how digital devices changes the way we listen to music, and how marketing devices work to construct alternative food markets.
His studies on these topics have been published in the European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, Consumption, Markets and Culture, Business Strategy and the Environment, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, International Journal of Consumer Studies, as well as in a number of other outlets.

Ongoing research projects

PLATEFORMS
Can innovations within food distribution such as e-commerce, food box schemes, and consumer-to-consumer food networks promote sustainable food consumption in the household? New technology has brought with it new solutions for food provisioning. These innovative distribution platforms are often proposed as possible tools for the promotion of sustainable food consumption practices within households. However, we know little about the potential of these platforms and if they can be used to promote the sustainable consumption of food on a larger scale. The overall objective of the PLATEFORMS project is to produce in-depth and practically oriented knowledge on how sustainable household food consumption can be enabled through socio-technical innovations in food provisioning platforms. 

Alternative Food Markets
The overall aim of this project is to provide in-depth knowledge regarding how alternative food markets can be organized, sustained, and expanded. There are today a number of on-going efforts to establish alternative food markets – markets that are organized differently and with the aim of promoting sustainable and healthy food alternatives. While this development seems promising, there are a number of knowledge gaps that need to be addressed if we are to understand how alternative food markets work and their sustainability potential. We know today very little of how alternative food markets emerge, become stabilized, expand or dissolve. Taking an ethnographic approach this project sets out to understand three types of alternative food markets: markets for (vegan) alternatives, local markets, and consumer-to-consumer markets.