ACR 2026 in the City of Big Shoulders

Steven Tadlock

12 hours ago

5 min read

A field report from ACR 2026 in Chicago

Written by Steven Tadlock, Ph.D. candidate at Toulouse School of Management (France)

I expected my first Association for Consumer Research (ACR) conference to be immense, and it was. ACR 2026 was my first major American conference, and one in which I had the good fortune to present a competitive paper. More than 1,300 attendees gathered under the theme "Elevation" at the Palmer House Hilton in downtown Chicago, a spectacular historic hotel dating back to the 1920s. Its gilded interiors and labyrinthine layout seemed an appropriately grand home for a conference of this magnitude.

Chicago, our host city, is equally grand. There's a certain charm to old American cities, though I admit “old” is a relative term when one lives in Europe. It was my first time in America’s Second City, but the atmosphere was exactly what I expected from a city that has left its mark on both American culture and thought, from improvisation and art to sociology and economics. In a city so steeped in cultural and intellectual experimentation, the conference itself began to feel like another kind of Chicago social experiment: a roomful of scholars improvising new ways to understand consumption, identity, and everyday life.

“Yes, and” in the Second City

In improvisation, “yes, and” means accepting what is already there and building on it. A fitting choice in a city so closely associated with improvisational comedy, the conference seemed to follow a similar logic, building outward from the competitive papers that formed its core. The opening day was devoted to professional development and community building, including the ACR-Sheth Doctoral Symposium, early- and mid-career workshops, paper-development workshops, the Fellows’ Address, and an opening reception. Once the main conference began, the individual sessions became as diverse as the host city. Competitive paper presentations and special sessions ran alongside workshops, an Arts Festival, a Film Festival, invited panels, “Meet the Editors” sessions and roundtable discussions such as “Take a Hike with Gerald Zaltman,” a discussion inviting consumer researchers to think differently, a hallmark of Zaltman’s career. The conference created an environment that encouraged developing ideas, experimenting with form, building professional relationships, and reflecting on what consumer research might contribute beyond academia.

Elevating the conversation

Across the sessions I attended, conversations moved through AI and automation, identity and belonging, corporate activism and political ideology, inequality and inclusion, morality, and consumer well-being. The role of AI in the lives of both consumers and researchers was an ever-present topic, both in discussions of methodology, data collection, writing, and the changing relationship between people and technology. Yet the broader concerns of the conference extended well beyond AI. Many conversations asked how consumer research might expand its public impact, improve societal discourse, or address problems such as social isolation, sustainability, and the erosion of consumer dignity and agency. One idea came up repeatedly across the methodological discussions: AI is not the data. AI can be a useful tool to help researchers identify patterns and manage datasets, but that is different from treating its outputs as evidence about consumers themselves. The caution towards AI tools also extends to the research process itself. The more we delegate a task to an AI tool, the more we risk degrading our own capacity to perform that task. So, we should not ask AI to do more than we are willing to stop knowing how to do ourselves.

One session that stayed with me was “How Speech, Action, and Recognition Reinforce Consumer Identity”, chaired by Rohan Garg with Americus Reed as discussant. What struck me most was the discussion sparked by this session. Person-first language is often treated as respectful by default, but not every community sees it that way. The autistic community, for example, was cited as preferring condition-first language because autism is part of who someone is rather than something that happens to them. By contrast, "a person experiencing homelessness" describes a circumstance, not an identity. The ways identities are spoken about and recognized by others shape whether people are motivated or alienated in the marketplace. It is a useful reminder that the language we use does as much to signal how we understand people as it does to describe them.

Hot times in the old town

The social dimensions of the conference added another layer to our time in Chicago. Academic life produces plenty of ephemeral relationships that exist mostly through emails or digital networks. Conferences like ACR make those connections tangible, giving us the chance to know the people behind the work. This year’s social program included an improv session for researchers, bringing “yes, and” quite literally into the conference while helping us think differently about collaborative projects. Additionally, morning and afternoon yoga sessions, a mixed-methods mixer, and the working-paper reception offered chances to meet people outside the session rooms, while conversations from panels and workshops spilled over into meals and coffee breaks. On the final evening, ACR moved out of the Palmer House and into Untitled Supper Club, a speakeasy-style venue whose Prohibition-era aesthetic felt especially at home in a city with a storied history from the 1920s. Crowded conference rooms gave way to food, music, dancing, and conversation. By then, many of the unfamiliar faces from the beginning of the conference felt familiar.

Too big to do it all

There was an interesting parallel between the conference and Chicago. More than 1,300 attendees can easily become an abstraction, yet attendees experienced the conference through smaller circles of colleagues, subfields, shared interests, and chance encounters. Likewise, Chicago feels less like a single city than a tapestry of smaller communities, each with its own history, cultural rhythms, and points of reference that continually overlap. This gives the city much of its character just as this conference becomes more than the sum of its parts. I was told before the conference that a conference like ACR is “too big to experience everything,” and on that point I agree.

In fact, one of challenges of ACR was deciding what to miss. Sometimes the choice is made for us. For instance, one talk on morality in consumption I wanted to attend was scheduled directly opposite my own presentation. With so many parallel sessions, there was rarely an obvious choice, and attending one conversation inevitably meant giving up another. That can be frustrating, but it is also part of the experience. The program rewarded wandering, choosing something outside your immediate interest area, or following a recommendation from a chance encounter. For example, I went to hear Lena Cavusoglu, Russ Belk, and Robert Kozinets present their work, “Beyond Pretty, Pink, Plastic: Facially Different Barbie Dolls” because of the presenters more than the subject itself. Their work examined a line of Barbie dolls that depict vitiligo, an autoimmune disorder that causes skin to lose pigmentation. I had not necessarily thought of Barbie as a context for understanding the experiences of underrepresented consumers. The presentation showed how strongly people can connect with an object like Barbie, and how much it can mean to see oneself represented in something so culturally familiar.

ACR, much like Chicago and even something as culturally ubiquitous as Barbie, can appear comprehensible from a distance only to become more complex the closer one looks. But in the end, the scale of it is part of what makes the experience meaningful. Familiarity can make the whole seem knowable, even when our view of it remains partial. Perhaps that is fitting for a gathering of researchers: each arrives with a small part of the larger whole and leaves having seen a little more, though never all of it, and never all at once.

The Association for Consumer Research meets annually, with its 2027 conference scheduled for Anaheim, California. You can join ACR at https://acrwebsite.org/.

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