Dr. Stephen Murphy
Assistant Professor, Trinity Business School

Projects

• Title
  • "Making something from nothing": Phenomenological insights into handling craftwork from home
• Summary
  • How are craftworkers lives influenced by the demands and expectations of working from home? And how are craft workers' identities enacted to demonstrate an ability to cope with these additional home-based demands? This study brings a phenomenological perspective on home and situated experience to bear on a combination of ethnographic material and interview data collected over a three-year period with female craftworkers in Ireland and the UK. This research shows that while craftwork presents consumers with opportunities to pursue creative work, doing so from the home, also means coping with additional risks, responsibilities, and expectations. In contributing to the growing interest in the contemporary craft revival, this research shows that where craft happens matters to how it is experienced, and that the pursuit of craftwork is compelled and constrained by a range of social, cultural, and economic demands.
• Funding Agency
  • Dublin City Council
• Date From
  • 2021

• Title
  • 'Do Your Own Research': How and when conspiracy theories resonate
• Summary
  • How and when do people become conspiracy theorists? Answers to this question vary by discipline and include explanations made at both individual and societal levels of analysis. Recently, the concept of 'resonance' has been put forward as a means to unite these levels of analysis. Resonance describes how individuals can experience conspiracy theories as 'awakening moments', particularly when these alternative claims to truth enable social groups to handle social problems and grievances. To date, however, studies have not explained the processes and contextual conditions by which experiences of resonance occur. Drawing on data from an extended ethnographic study of the British 'truth seeker' movement, this study examines the specific contexts in which persons, situations and cultural objects combine to create resonance. We show that people's initial receptivity to conspiracy theories is primed by moral emotions, which include feelings of indignations, contempt and resentment. Next, we demonstrate how 'awakenings' are sparked by interactive situations where people work together to solve shared problems. Finally, we explain how the participatory qualities of conspiracy theories sustain lasting transformation in worldviews. This research shows that in the myriad of activities involved in 'doing your own research' the truth seeker subjectivity is created and maintained.
• Date From
  • 2018

• Title
  • Mundane Emotions: Losing Yourself in Boredom, Time, and Technology
• Summary
  • Much marketing and consumer research has drawn attention to the positive and joyful emotional feature of consumer tribes. However, research has little to say on boredom, an emotional state prevalent in consumers' lives that was exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic due to lockdown restrictions. Informed by Heidegger's understanding of boredom as a fundamental mood tied to temporality, this research uses semi-structured interviews to identify two kinds of boredom - superficial and profound boredom - and their specific temporal dynamics. Superficial boredom is common, and refers to a situational restlessness in which people desire distractions. In contrast, profound boredom refers to an existential discomfort in which people struggle with a sense of self, but ultimately can result in authentic self-disclosure. We explain superficial boredom as a symptom of a dominant capitalist temporal regime that comprise connectivity and acceleration. Together these temporal logics fragment and compress time in ways that encourage mundane social media consumption that simply fills time. We also explain how profound boredom stems from an abundance of uninterrupted time spent in relative solitude. We highlight two paradoxes. On the one hand, social media consumption exploits superficial boredom and at the same time suppresses the time and opportunity for its overcoming. On the other hand, it is the depths of distress within profound boredom that reveals possibilities for authentic self-disclosure. In providing a theory of boredom, our research contributes to consumer research's understanding of mundane emotions, and the organisation of time in contemporary consumer society.
• Date From
  • 2021