Current Research Project: Consuming Pleasure. The London Pleasure Fairs in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

Naama Amir's Project examines the social and cultural role of the London pleasure fairs in the construction of self- and class-identity of Londoners, in the first half of the nineteenth century. She analyzes the changing nature of the fairs – a class and gender heterogenous space – in the period and the newly emerging forms of spectacle and consumption in it. Amir emphasizes and analyzes the consumption of cheap, 'un-durable' goods – "ephemeral goods" – and its reliance on the consumption act and experience and claim that it has played a significant part in the construction of working-class Londoners' self.

Amir then continues to examine the way the fairs were perceived by the middle-class. Her analysis traces both the ways in which the middle-class sought to abolish this allegedly lower-class phenomenon, a largely successful endeavor, and the ways they incorporated and appropriated the practices of the fair into their own newly emerging institutions – and class identity. This dialectical process of formation of lower and middle classes perceptions exposes the mutual and inter-dependent dynamic of these classes identity formation.