There is a rich tradition of inquiry in consumer research into how collective consumption manifests in various forms and contexts. While this literature has shown how group cohesion prescribes ethical and moral positions, our study explores how ethicality can arise from consumers and their relations in a more emergent fashion. To do so, we present a Levinasian perspective on consumer ethics through a focus on Restaurant Day, a global food carnival that is organized by consumers themselves. Our ethnographic findings highlight a non-individualistic way of approaching ethical subjectivity that translates into acts of catering to the needs of other people and the subversion of extant legislation by foregrounding personal responsibility. These findings show that while consumer gatherings provide participants a license to temporarily subvert existing roles, they also allow the possibility of ethical autonomy when the mundane rules of city life are renegotiated. These sensibilities also create ‘ethical surplus’, which is an affective excess of togetherness. In the Levinasian register, Restaurant Day thus acts as an inarticulable ‘remainder’—a trace of the possibility of being able to live otherwise alongside one another in city contexts.

Desire for what is good—and for a good life—is one of the human universals spanning across all societies and cultures. Yet, how people imagine a good life differs significantly according to the individual, and it also depends on numerous social, political, cultural, economic and geographical variables. In this book we explore what a good life looks like for young people in a place that, at first glance, may appear difficult or hostile for human inhabitation: the Arctic region. The Arctic is often portrayed in popular and scientific literature as a frontier characterized by the catastrophic impacts of a changing climate and resource extraction. This adds to the image of the Arctic as a region that is ill-fit for human wellbeing and emplacement, where outmigration should be the default goal of the young generation. In a globalized world, however, youth have more choices than ever where to emplace themselves and how to realize their dreams. This introduction focuses on three principal questions from a theoretical vantage point rooted in the anthropology of wellbeing. What affordances does the Arctic offer for a good life as young people make their choices? What can empirical evidence from working with young people in the Arctic contribute to our general understanding of wellbeing as a concept in the social sciences? Which factors make Arctic towns attractive as places for youth to realize their dreams in life? The chapters in this volume all approach these questions in their own way with empirical evidence from various places in the Arctic.

This exploratory study concerns the evocation of multisensory experiences at travel fairs. In this context, stimulation of the senses is vital in engendering feelings of pleasure, arousal and dominance. The purpose of this study is to explore the ways in which travel fairs evoke multisensory experiences and internal responses in consumer visitors. To accomplish this task we gathered ethnographic data (pictures, videos and audio recordings) together with interview data from visitors, and applied the classic stimulus-organism-response conceptualization to the data analysis. The findings contribute to existing knowledge concerning the management of retail atmospherics in shedding light on customer experiences beyond (dis)-satisfaction in the little studied context of travel fairs. Our findings imply that the travel fair encompasses visually dominant stimuli whereas tactile stimuli are somewhat lacking. Although visitors to these fairs seem to find the experience manageable and pleasurable, the aspect of excitement is somewhat lacking. We suggest that the visually dominant environment that is characteristic of fairs should move in a multisensory direction in terms of offering visitors experiences that are more appealing. It is also crucial to manage the volume and intensity of senses effectively to prevent information overload and sensory overstimulation.

This article is inspired by the social life of methods approach, joining a movement among social scientists engaging with ‘big data’ to contribute to methodological innovation and conceptual development in research and knowledge translation. It explores human-drug associations using a computational tool, Medicine Radar, meanwhile raising questions about the ways a digital device pushes us to rethink how drugs are known in the everyday. Medicine Radar is an apparatus for exploring human-drug associations by means of Suomi24 (Finland24) data, containing 19 million health-related online posts spanning a period of 16 years. Using defined markers, Medicine Radar sorts the medicine talk in health-related discussions, thereby assisting us to ‘see’ the actions of the drug and human responses to them. This kind of approach distances the drug from the illness experience, drawing attention to the private details of the human-drug relationship. The empirical analysis separates three areas of antidepressant use: articulations of reactions, stabilizing the life effects of drugs and coming to terms with antidepressants. Together, the online posts urge us to think of everyday experience where the effects of drugs – intended or unintended – are always lived. The side effects of antidepressants, including drowsiness, ravenous hunger, loss of sexual desire and emotional numbness, become life effects. As will be demonstrated, the move from conceptualizing such fallout as side effects to understanding them as life effects has political ramifications. The computation tool adds collective weight to antidepressant experiences and calls for politicizing their effects on life.