Jack Trachuk
PhD Candidate
- Honours Bachelor of Arts, major in Religious Studies, minor in Political (Queens University), Master of Science in Digital Economy (Kings College, University of London), MBA, (Sprott School of Business, Carleton University)
- Email Jack Trachuk
Area of Research: International Business, Management and Strategy, Marketing.
Jack’s research sits at the intersection of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) and the sociology of religion, with a particular focus on how Western consumer subjects construct meaning, identity, and ritual within digital economies. His master’s research examined online gambling as a site of digital consumption, interrogating how platform architectures and gamified exchange structures produce consumer subjectivities that mirror devotional and sacrificial logics historically associated with religious practice.
At the doctoral level, his work extends this inquiry into the broader digital economy, asking how consumption in dematerialized, algorithmically mediated spaces reconstitutes sacred/profane boundaries that classical secularization theory declared obsolete. Drawing on post-structuralist and Nietzschean/Durkheim/Zizek’s frameworks, Trachuk resists the flattening tendency of globalist consumer research and centers his analysis on Western cultural formations, arguing that the crisis of meaning endemic to late-capitalist consumer culture demands a renewed, critically grounded neo-traditionalist reading rather than a pluralist diffusion model.
His work cuts across organizational ethics and management theory, examining how firms operating in digital economies institutionalize and commodify meaning-making processes, and what ethical obligations emerge when consumption itself functions as surrogate religion.
Supervisor: Dr. Leighann Neilson