Matthew M. Mars

This chapter situates the public and applied humanities within the everyday organizational and institutional environments of contemporary higher education. It

This chapter reflects on an applied humanities approach to care that centers student life within the larger contexts of personal, academic, and systemic

This chapter explains how the public and applied humanities can shift what constitutes humanities research, who participates in and benefits from such research,

This chapter suggests core curricular componentry for the public and applied humanities. It addresses mechanics—that is, what to teach—while also considering

This chapter describes the public and applied humanities in terms of ontology and practice, that is, what it means to be guided by an ethic of public and

The entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) metaphor attempts to describe how actors, organizations, and networks converge to influence local entrepreneurial development (Mars, 2020; Fortunato & Alter, 2015...

Conservation is consistently expressed across the American craft brewery sector, with breweries routinely promoting wildlife protection, public land stewardship, and waste reduction through marketing schemes and materials. However, little attention has been directed at the patterns and themes characterizing such pro-environment marketing. Accordingly, this qualitative multi-case study explores the designs of pro-environment labels (i.e., eco-labels) and adjacent materials (e.g., product descriptions) from six purposively selected breweries across three regions: the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, and the Mid-Atlantic. We aim to (a) pinpoint design variations in pro-environment marketing and (b) conceptualize a pro-environment marketing device (PEMD) typology to better inform pro-social marketing campaigns. The resulting PEMD typology features two dimensions: (1) indication (hedonism–conservation–environmentalism) and (2) orientation (greenwashing–environmental voyeurism–environmental stewardship). We contextualize these dimensions along an iconological progression (pre-iconography–iconology) to reveal the complexities and risks of pro-environment branding, especially by unintentionally leveraging the environment as an inauthentic sales prop (i.e., greenwashing). This typology helps pro-social marketers design and advance genuine pro-environment messaging. Additionally, it offers sustainability researchers a novel lens to interrogate how marketing design choices affect perceived brand authenticity and subsequent consumer behaviors regarding conservation and environmentalism.

Thrift shopping, or “thrifting,” has gained widespread popularity over the past 15+ years. Sociological inquiry into thrifting has linked the phenomenon to a wide‐ranging blend of conditions and factors that principally include economic necessity, resistance to economic, environmental, and labor injustices, and hedonism. Yet, how thrift shoppers come to engage thrifting as an agentic, identity‐forming process remains relatively neglected in the relevant literatures. This article introduces a new theoretical perspective to this body of research that centers on a reciprocal dynamic between human and material agency that spurs and sustains thrifting as a form of reflexive consumption and identity work. Data were collected through semi‐structured interviews with 37 undergraduate student thrift shoppers at an American public research university. I articulate three core elements that characterize thrifting as a form of reflexive consumption and identity work: (1) initial thrifting experiences, (2) reflexivity and self‐formation, and (3) agentic reciprocation. The study empirically shows how thrifting can be an agentic act underpinned by a reciprocal dynamic that turns on materiality, reflexivity, and ongoing identity work.