Consumption and Society • vol 1 • no 1 • 216–230 • © Authors 2022 Online ISSN 2752-8499 • https://doi.org/10.1332/HKEC2743 Accepted for publication 14 June 2022 • First published online 11 August 2022 216 INTERVIEW Decolonising consumption, the hegemony of consumer culture and the politics of consumption: an interview with Roberta Sassatelli Roberta Sassatelli, roberta.sassatelli@unibo.it University of Bologna, Italy Stefan Wahlen, stefan.wahlen@uni-giessen.de University of Giessen, Germany Daniel Welch, Daniel.Welch@manchester.ac.uk University of Manchester, UK Key words body • consumer culture • consumption • decolonisation • ethical • food • sharing economy • sustainable • consumption To cite this article: Sassatelli, R., Wahlen, S. and Welch, D. (2022) Decolonising consumption, the hegemony of consumer culture and the politics of consumption: an interview with Roberta Sassatelli, Consumption and Society, 1(1): 216–230, DOI: 10.1332/HKEC2743 Italian sociologist Roberta Sassatelli is well known for her work on consumption. She was educated and has taught in Italy and the UK and writes and publishes in both languages, and her work has been widely translated. Probably best known for Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics (2007), she has written extensively on consumer culture, cultural theory, gender studies, the sociology of the body, food, leisure studies and visual studies. Her recent books include the edited collection Italians and Food (Palgrave, 2019) and Corpo, genere e società (Il Mulino, 2018, with R. Ghigi). She is a Full Professor at the University of Bologna and Co-Editor of the European Journal of Sociology. Consumption and Society editors Stefan Wahlen and Dan Welch sat down with Roberta to discuss consumer culture, the politics of consumption, authenticity, the sharing economy, food and the body, and the future of consumption studies. Dan Welch (DW): If I may, I’d like to start our conversation by asking something about the historical emergence of the modern consumer, something you’ve worked on at length. I was struck by a passage you wrote in a chapter on ‘Consumer identities’ 1 in which you place the emergence of the fgure of the modern consumer in a broader cultural geopolitics of colonialism and the commodity fows of empire. I’m Unauthenticated | Downloaded 08/15/22 07:21 AM UTC