Dr Sylvian Patrick Jesudoss

I am a Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Leicester School of Business, where I am also Programme Leader for the BA Marketing degree. I joined the School in September 2022, in the final stages of my PhD at Henley Business School, University of Reading, which was awarded in May 2023. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and hold a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic and Professional Practice, awarded with Distinction.

During my doctoral studies I taught part time at Henley Business School, where I led Marketing Communications: Digital, Social and Integrated on the Master's programme. Before starting my PhD I spent eleven years in digital marketing in India, working across several companies and a range of roles, and building strategy for both B2B and B2C organisations. That period still shapes how I teach and what I consider worth researching.

My doctoral thesis drew on affordance theory and De Certeau's tactics of the weak to examine how consumers use self-quantification as a form of resistance to neoliberalism. My current work carries that interest in the relationship between people and digital technology towards questions of social hierarchy, identity and embodiment. My most recent publication, in Consumption Markets and Culture, revisits Huxley's Brave New World ahead of its centenary and asks what has happened to the consumer as an object of critical attention.

My research sits within Consumer Culture Theory and Critical Marketing. I study how markets and digital platforms shape social hierarchy, identity and embodied experience, and what happens when the technologies people use become the infrastructure through which social difference is organised and sustained.

A current strand examines the architecture of digital platforms, meaning the categories, filters and defaults built into their interfaces, and how these carry social distinctions that are rarely stated openly and rarely visible to regulation. A related interest is in how consumption sustains hierarchies that participants may not recognise as hierarchical, and in how those hierarchies are contested. My recent work in Consumption Markets & Culture, with James Fitchett, returns to Huxley ahead of the centenary of Brave New World to ask why the consumer has receded as a figure of critical attention.

A second strand concerns consumers and the technologies they live with. My doctoral research theorised everyday self-quantification as a habitual form of resistance to neoliberal demands, drawing on affordance theory and De Certeau. I am now interested in what happens when consumers delegate judgement to artificial intelligence, and in how people decide what such systems can be trusted with.

I work within an interpretive, qualitative paradigm, primarily through phenomenologically informed depth interviews and netnography, drawing on phenomenology, postphenomenology, postcolonial theory and critical social theory. I have also published on corporate social responsibility and on digital consumption.

Journal Articles

1. Jesudoss, S. P., & Fitchett, J. (2026). Let us not burden our remembrances with a heaviness that's gone: Approaching the centenary of Huxley's Brave New World and the eclipse of consumers. Consumption Markets & Culture. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2026.2704653
2. Truong, H.-B., Jesudoss, S. P., & Molesworth, M. (2022). Consumer mischief as playful resistance to marketing in Twitter hashtag hijacking. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 21(4), 828–841. https://doi.org/10.1002/cb.2040
3. Grigore, G., Molesworth, M., Vonțea, A., Basnawi, A. H., Celep, O., & Jesudoss, S. P. (2021a). Corporate social responsibility in liquid times: The case of Romania. Journal of Business Ethics, 174(4), 763–782. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04926-w
4. Grigore, G., Molesworth, M., Vonțea, A., Basnawi, A. H., Celep, O., & Jesudoss, S. P. (2021b). Drama and discounting in the relational dynamics of corporate social responsibility. Journal of Business Ethics, 174(1), 65–88. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04591-5

Current doctoral supervision

I currently supervise a doctoral project on consumers' lived experiences and practices within resistant communities, based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with intentional communities in the UK.

Areas of interest

I welcome enquiries from prospective doctoral students working in the following areas:

• Digital platforms and their architecture, including how platform design organises social difference and hierarchy
• Consumer culture and critical marketing, particularly identity, embodiment and social hierarchy
• Human relationships with technology, including self-tracking, quantification and consumer uses of artificial intelligence
• Ethical and political commitment as it is lived through consumption, including communities organised around refusal or alternative practice
• Digital sociology, digital privacy and ethics

I am particularly interested in supervising interpretive, qualitative projects and work well with students using ethnography, netnography and phenomenologically informed interviewing.

I am Programme Leader for the BA Marketing degree at the School of Business. I teach across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and supervise dissertation students. My teaching asks students to examine marketing critically as well as practise it, looking at how marketing shapes society and at the responsibilities that come with the work, rather than treating it only as a set of techniques.

I am Programme Leader for the BA Marketing degree at the School of Business. I teach across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and supervise dissertation students.

Undergraduate

• MK2001 Marketing Theory
• MK3171 Responsible Marketing
• MK3204 Dissertation (Marketing)
• MK7020/MK7029 Dissertation (MSc., Marketing)

I have also taught MK7056 Responsible International Business and Strategic Risk Management at postgraduate level.

Before joining Leicester I taught MSc., Digital Marketing, Henley Business School, University of Reading, where I led Marketing Communications: Digital, Social and Integrated on the Master's programme.