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Research Profile

  • After completing her PhD in Cultural Studies, at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2011, Alison taught at the University of Iceland, Beijing Foreign Studies University, University College Dublin, and Royal Holloway, University of London. She was also the Ron Lister Visiting Fellow at the University of Otago, New Zealand in 2014. Alison is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Chair of the UK Global Studies Association.  She joined the University of Northampton in 2017. Before becoming an academic, she was a radio and TV presenter.

  • Alison is module leader on the undergraduate modules International Development: Social and Cultural Issues and Debates; Globalisation and Development in the 21st Century, and the International Fieldtrip Module, and on the postgraduate module Political Economies of International Development. In addition, she teaches on the third year undergraduate module Development and Change in the Global South and supervises PhD students.

  • Alison specialises in the socio-economic development of China, alongside consumption, globalisation and material culture, more generally. Her academic background spans Media Studies, Anthropology and Cultural Studies, and she made her way to International Development via Politics and Human Geography, so has genuinely interdisciplinary credentials. 

  • For publications, projects, datasets, research interests and activities, view Alison Hulme’s research profile on Pure, the University of Northampton’s Research Explorer.

  • Monographs

    • On the Commodity Trail: The Journey of a Bargain Store Product from East to West. Bloomsbury Academic Publishing (Published 2015)  

    Edited volumes

    • Consumerism on TV. London: Ashgate Publishing (Published 2015)
    • The Changing Landscape of China’s Consumerism. Oxford: Elsevier (Published 2014)

    Journal articles

    • ‘Importing the Night Market: Urban Regeneration and the Asian Food Aesthetic in London’, in Food, Culture and Society.(Published 2017.) 
    • ‘The Rise and Rise of the Pound Store: Functionality and Freedom under Austerity’, in History of Retailing and Consumption. (Published 2016)
    • ‘Following the (unfollowable) thing: Methodological Considerations in the Era of High Globalization’, in Cultural Geographies. (Published 2016.)
    • ‘F**k the Cupcake Revolution! David Cameron, Samuel Smiles, and the Geographies of Neo-Victorian Thrift’, in Antipode. (Published 2016.)
    • ‘Projecting the Good Life at Home and Abroad: Lineages of the Chinese National Image from 1949 to the Present’ in ‘Re-thinking China’s Soft Power: Culture as Global Medium, Resource, Agent’ – a special issue of New Global Studies. (Published 2015) 
    • ‘Following the Thing: Afters’, in Progress in Human Geography. (Collaborative paper with Ian Cook et al). (Published 2010)

    Book chapters

    • ‘Greening the Chinese City: China’s Urban Youth and the Sense of a Culture of ‘Modernity’, in Mark Jayne (ed) Chinese Urbanism: Everyday Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge (Published 2017)
    • ‘Shrimps not whales’ – Building a City of Small Parts as an Alternative Vision for Post-Industrial Society’, in Krzysztof Nawratek Re-industrialisation and Progressive Urbanism. New York: Punctum (Published 2017)
    • ‘Imprinting Industriousness in the Quest for the Good Life: Lineages of the Chinese Revolutionary Image from 1949 to the Present’, in Calvente and Garcia (eds) Imprints of Revolution: Global Resistance, the Popular, and (Post)/(Neo) Colonialism. Duke University Press (Published 2015)
    • ‘From ‘make do and mend’ to ‘your country needs you to spend’: Constructing the Consumer in late-modernity’, in Alison Hulme (Ed) Consumerism on TV. London: Ashgate (Published 2015)
    • ‘A Tale of Two Cinemas: Embracing and Rejecting Hollywood’s Influence in 1930’s Shanghai – a Precursor to 21st Century Capitalist/Communist Dreams?’ in Lisa Funnell and Yip Man Fung: American and Chinese-Language Cinemas: Examining Cultural Flows (Advances in Film Studies series) New York: Routledge (Published 2014)
    • ‘Iron Rice Bowls and Plastic Money: The Push and Pull of Consumerism’s Rise in Capitalist/Communist China’, in Alison Hulme (ed) The Changing Landscape of China’s Consumerism. Oxford: Woodhead Publishing (Published 2014)