Precious Akponah

I joined Royal Holloway, University of London, School of Management in 2021 as a Lecturer in Marketing (TF) after working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Teaching Fellow at the University of Leicester eight years prior. I hold an MSc in Marketing (with distinction) and a PhD in Marketing from the University of Leicester, School of Business. I am also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK.

I am committed to engaging with a methodology that demands the use of innovative methods (building upon visual, sensory and auto form of ethnography with rhythmanalysis perspective) for capturing the taken-for-granted aspects of practices. Ultimately I work to make an original contribution to consumer research by exposing a new lens for capturing the nonrepresentational elements of practices, particularly those that relate to everyday life. 

When we think of ‘rubbish and waste disposal’ we usually relegate it to the final stage of consumption. That is, we buy stuff, consume and dispose of them. The problem with this approach is that it fails to capture the social processes that are involved in wasting and how these processes are mired in social, cultural, economic and political entanglements. My work explores these processes, specifically the practices that are enacted and performed during the organisation of rubbish. I call it organisation rather than management because the latter presents rubbish as something that should be kept away, out of sight. However, my approach exposes how millions of the world poorest make a living by organising, collecting, sorting and recycling rubbish. It exposes the struggles and successes about the people participating in this work, the conditions and the contexts’ in which this occurs. My research shows that waste disposal follows a recursive process and that wasting does not represent ‘a final act of closure’. Instead, it charts the transformative potential of rubbish, whereas a category of emptied values is capable of being ‘reinstated’ to a valuable material through processes of re-use, upcycling, and transformations. In this way, my research agenda aims to generate specific impact relating to the manner in which rubbish sustains livelihoods, often of those facing social exclusion, as well as enabling the regeneration of societies, particularly in the African context, in particular, in consultation with policymakers determining the contributions of the informal waste economy to the development of the formal economy.

I am a co-module leader on a final-year undergraduate module titled: Consumer Behaviour. I am also the co-module leader for a postgraduate module titled Applied Digital Marketing Research and the module leader for Markets and Consumption (Coursera).

Other modules I am contributing to at RHUL includes:

Dissertation Supervision (Marketing)

Markets and Consumption 

Consumption, Markets and Culture

Digital Consumer in Online Culture

Consumer Behaviour and Global Marketing

Modules led in previous appointments include: 

Principles of Marketing

Business-to-Business Marketing

Doing Qualitative Research: Collection and Analysing Qualitative Data

Consumer Research 

Marketing Management

Managing International Marketing Communication, Brand and Relationship

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA)