This case study of gender in advertising through the lens of two campaigns – one by Virgin Atlantic and one by Bud Light – examines these brands’ alignment with modern gender perceptions and the subsequent consumer responses. It considers how advertising mirrors or moulds society’s gender norms and how companies navigate this spectrum. Beginning with Virgin Atlantic’s ‘See the World Differently’ campaign and updated gender-identity policy in 2022, this example indicates the campaign’s success in its positive reception. Conversely, Bud Light’s collaboration with trans activist Dylan Mulvaney for the ‘Easy Carry Contest’ faced a polarised reception. While aiming to resonate with a younger, more inclusive demographic, the backlash from conservative corners illustrated the risks involved when a brand ventures into socially charged territories without thorough consideration of its diverse customer base.

The comparison between Virgin Atlantic’s holistic approach to embedding inclusivity into their brand ethos contrasts with Bud Light’s reactive stance, highlighting the importance of proactive engagement with social issues in brand strategy.

This chapter explores how value creation is shifting. Amidst the saturated media environment where consumer attention is a prized commodity, brands face the challenge of standing out and maintaining relevance. Traditional metrics of competition such as price and quality are no longer sufficient differentiators; instead, brands are increasingly evaluated by their contributions to society and the authenticity of their engagement in cultural and social issues. In articulating the complexity of value in the context of brand and society, this chapter suggests that value is not merely about economic transactions but also involves co-creation with consumers and societal impact. It explores how brands are moving beyond traditional corporate social responsibility (CSR) towards more polarising and purpose-driven stances: that is, engaging in brand activism. This new dynamic places brands as facilitators of change, influencing culture and engaging with consumers on deeper ethical and moral grounds. Brand activism has implications on consumer perception and loyalty, where the importance of authenticity in brand activism is picked up on by consumers and can drive meaningful consumer/brand connections.

This chapter considers the significance of authenticity in the context of branding and consumer behaviour. Authenticity is a complex construct that cannot be directly measured or calculated like other marketing metrics. It is particularly valued during times of change and uncertainty, serving not just as a unique selling proposition for brands but also as a means for consumers to align their choices with their self-identity and self-projection, underscoring the importance of consistency, conformity, and connection in understanding authenticity. These aspects not only help in defining what is ‘authentic’ but also demonstrate the strategic use of authenticity by brands to establish themselves as landmarks within the cultural landscape of consumers.

This chapter explores how perceived authenticity, influenced by a consumer’s narrative of self-identity and self-projection, aids in navigating the cultural landscape. This navigation involves using brands as landmarks to move closer to, or further from, consumers’ ‘authentic’ selves, thereby underscoring the crucial role that brand authenticity plays in consumers’ lives.

The second case study in this book offers a deep dive into the brand activism of two distinct entities: the fashion giant Kate Spade and the social enterprise organisation Change Please. These two brands show how brand activism, especially when authentically aligned with a brand’s mission, can significantly influence targeted societal groups. Kate Spade is highlighted as a brand with activism ingrained in its DNA, focussing on women’s empowerment and mental health. Change Please is showcased as a social enterprise born with a mission to tackle homelessness through the daily habit of coffee drinking. It demonstrates how a brand built on social activism can enable significant societal change while operating a sustainable business model. Furthermore, this chapter indicates the importance of partnerships in amplifying brand activism, showing how Kate Spade and Change Please exemplify the ways in which brands can serve as navigational landmarks for consumers, and thus providing a blueprint for other entities seeking to embed activism into their business models.

In Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (2005), I sought to establish and build upon the hermeneutic thesis that Heidegger’s concern to reform education spans his entire career of thought. In my view, a radical rethinking of education – in a word, an ontologization of education, one that situates a transformative death and rebirth of the self at the very heart of the educational vision that founded the philosophical academy in Plato’s Republic – forms one of the deep thematic undercurrents of Heidegger’s work, early as well as late. We will come back to this “ontologization” of education at the end, but I want to begin by addressing a worry I did not previously thematize and confront. If my interpretive thesis is correct, then we should expect to find some sign of Heidegger’s supposed lifelong concern with education in his early magnum opus, Being and Time. The fact, then, that little or nothing had been written on Being and Time’s “philosophy of education” before my first book came out could reasonably be taken to cast doubt upon my thesis that a philosophical rethinking of education was of great importance to Heidegger’s work as a whole. Such a worry, of course, does not arise deductively; even if Being and Time contained no philosophy of education, one might be able to explain such an omission in a way that would leave my general thesis intact. Rather than trying to preserve the thesis in the face of such a hermeneutic anomaly, however, I will instead demonstrate that no such anomaly exists. This chapter will seek both to show that Heidegger’s philosophy of education deeply permeates Being and Time and to explain some of the context and significance of this fact, thereby coming to understand yet another interlocking set of philosophical implications arising from Heidegger’s phenomenology of existential death.

In Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude, Carol White pursues a strange yet once common hermeneutic strategy, namely, reading Heidegger backward by reading the central ideas of his later work back into his early magnum opus, Being and Time. White follows some of Heidegger’s own later directives in pursuing this hermeneutic strategy, and this chapter critically explores these directives along with the original reading that emerges from following them. The conclusion I reach is that White’s creative book is not persuasive as a strict interpretation of Heidegger’s early work, yet it remains extremely helpful for deepening our appreciation of Heidegger’s thought as a whole. Most importantly, I shall suggest, White helps us sharpen and extend our understanding of the pivotal role that thinking about death played in the lifelong development of Heidegger’s philosophy.

The chapter illuminates diverse musical encounters or engagements between ‘minority’ cultures and what was, until recently, an Anglo-Australian majority over four periods of social, cultural and political foment between the pre-Federation colonial era and the present. It first examines the pre-WWI musical contributions of German-speaking residents and visitors, and Italian and Jewish influence on musical entertainment in the inter-war and post-war era. It then considers how, from the 1980s, the twin forces of local multiculturalism and ‘world music’ intersected in Australia to foster a wealth of musical diversity, including creative musical interventions and experimentations. We also consider the many multi-faceted present-day music ‘scenes’ associated with diasporic communities by honing into the local world of Indonesia-related music-making in Australia. Music of minority cultures tends to become articulated through uneven power relationships with the majority culture and its institutions, but the chapter provides a more nuanced view of this relationship. It demonstrates, for example, how ‘minority’ musicians have strategically deployed the ‘power’, or value, of ‘difference’ for professional or other advantage, exploiting opportunities provided by the mainstream, which can simultaneously shape and even redefine minority music.

This chapter begins by interrogating the ideal of authenticity as a paradigmatic modern response to the crisis of master narratives. It critically examines practices of narrative selfhood, and discusses the ways in which social roles offer scaffolds for the development of a self without fully constituting such a self. Role-playing – the inhabitation of social and narrative roles – is an outstanding example of the exercise of imagination, its double function of finding and making, and its for-the-most-part inherited, moulded, and largely habituated practice. The chapter concludes with a theological discussion of the ways our habitual imagination of selfhood can be broken open without pretence that we might be able to find a fully realized authentic self beneath our narrative and social roles.

This chapter introduces the main topic of this book, inducing intimacy, and explains that the focus is deceptively induced sex and intimate relationships (i.e., sex and sexual and/or romantic relationships). It then sets out the book’s core aims, that is, to examine how the law has responded to inducing intimacy as a form of wrongdoing and source of harms and what can this tell us about the justifiability and desirability of using law to respond to these practices in the present age. The chapter also outlines the scope of the book and the sources used before introducing the theoretical framework that informs the analysis in the remaining chapters, which is based on the cultural significance of sex and marriage, including their significance for self-construction. The chapter closes by outlining the main arguments of the book, including the potential for its historical analysis to inform contemporary debates about whether and how to respond to inducing intimacy via law today.

This chapter summarises the overarching narrative of this book and argues that as was as being intrinsically valuable it can inform contemporary debates about using law to regulate the practices of inducing intimacy. The discussion is organised around three sets of issues: the public and private dimensions of sex and intimate relationships, including the interests protected by law, the form of response (i.e., state or non-state), and the variety of legal response (i.e., public or private); the structure of legal responses, the meaning of consent and its relation to deception, targeted modes of deception, culpability matters, the requirement for a causal link between deception and ‘outcome’, and the temporalities of the legal wrong; and the substance of deceptions, including the dynamics governing the range of topics about which transparency has been expected. Drawing the discussion together, the chapter concludes by offering a new framework for constructing legal responses to deceptively induced intimacy, which builds on the core insight and these responses have historically been predicated on temporally sensitive associations between self-construction and intimacy.