Everyday Life and Cultural Theory provides a unique critical and historical introduction to theories of everyday life. Ben Highmore traces the development of conceptions of everyday life, from the cultural sociology of Georg Simmel, through the Mass-Observation project of the 1930s to contemporary theorists such as Michel de Certeau.
Individual chapters examine:
* Modernity and everyday life
* Georg Simmel and fragments of everyday life
* Surrealism and the marvellous in everyday life
* Walter Benjamin's trash aesthetics
* Mass-Observation and the science of everyday life
* Henri Lefebvre's dialectics of everyday life
* Michel de Certeau's poetics of everyday life
* Everyday life and the future of cultural studies

Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation and Cultural Politics sets out to examine the role of feelings and mood in the production of social and cultural experience. By returning to the work of Raymond Williams, and informed by recent 'affect theory', it treats feeling as a foundational term for cultural studies. Ben Highmore argues that feelings are political and cultural forms that orchestrate our encounters with the world. He utilises a range of case studies from twentieth-century British culture, focusing in particular on Home Front morale during the Blitz, the experiences of Caribbean migration in the post-war decades, the music of post-punk bands in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and more recent 'state of the nation' film and television, including Our Friends in the North and This is England. He finds evidence in oral history, in films, photographs, television, novels, music, policy documents, and journalism. Through these sources, this book tells a vivid and compelling story of our most recent history and argues that the urgent task for a progressive cultural politics will require the changing of moods as well as minds. Cultural Feelings is essential reading for students and researchers with an interest in affect theory, emotion and culture.

What are the qualities and properties that make something cultural? What does claiming something as cultural allow us to do? Culture offers students a workable understanding of the category 'culture' and explores how the realm of the 'cultural' can be practically explored as a way of understanding the world. Ben Highmore provides a clear and robust defence of the productivity of cultural analysis in a media saturated world, while also instilling a sense of modesty in qualifying what can and can't be accomplished in the name of cultural analysis. With extensive examples and case studies throughout, the book demonstrates both the productivity and the limitations in orientating analysis to the cultural. A thought-provoking and engaging examination, Culture is an ideal introductory text for students of media and cultural studies.

Design is part of ordinary, everyday life, to be found in every room in every building in the world. While we may tend to think of design in terms of highly desirable objects, this book encourages us to think about design as ubiquitous (from plumbing to television) and as an agent of social change (from telephones to weapon systems). The Design Culture Reader brings together an international array of writers whose work is of central importance for thinking about design culture in the past, present and future. Essays from philosophers, media and cultural theorists, historians of design, anthropologists, cultural historians, artists and literary critics all demonstrate the enormous potential of design studies for understanding the modern world. Organised in thematic sections, The Design Culture Reader explores the social role of design by looking at the impact it has in a number of areas - especially globalisation, ecology, and the changing experiences of modern life. Particular essays focus on topics such as design and the senses, design and war and design and technology, while the editor's introduction to the collection provides a compelling argument for situating design studies at the very forefront of contemporary thought.

Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation and Cultural Politics sets out to examine the role of feelings and mood in the production of social and cultural experience. By returning to the work of Raymond Williams, and informed by recent 'affect theory', it treats feeling as a foundational term for cultural studies. Ben Highmore argues that feelings are political and cultural forms that orchestrate our encounters with the world. He utilises a range of case studies from twentieth-century British culture, focusing in particular on Home Front morale during the Blitz, the experiences of Caribbean migration in the post-war decades, the music of post-punk bands in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and more recent 'state of the nation' film and television, including Our Friends in the North and This is England. He finds evidence in oral history, in films, photographs, television, novels, music, policy documents, and journalism. Through these sources, this book tells a vivid and compelling story of our most recent history and argues that the urgent task for a progressive cultural politics will require the changing of moods as well as minds. Cultural Feelings is essential reading for students and researchers with an interest in affect theory, emotion and culture.

Contents:
Part I - Situating the Everyday 1. Parapraxes Sigmund Freud 2. Preface to The Mediterranean Fernand Braudel 3. Front and Back Regions of Everyday Life Erving Goffmann 4.'The Problem that has No Name'Betty Friedan 5. General Introduction from The Practice of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau 6. A Feminist Methodology Dorothy Smith 7.Introduction fromEveryday Life: Yale French Studies Part II - Everyday Life and 'National Culture' Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross 8. Habit and Custom Leon Trotsky 9. From The Road to Wigan Pier Diary George Orwell 10. Whose Imagined Community? Partha Chatterjee 11. Nixon in Moscow Karal Ann Marling 12. Introduction to Fast Cars, Clean Bodies Kristin Ross 13. The Promise of 'Modern Life' Harry Hatoonian 14. New Urban Culture and the Anxiety of Everyday Life in Late-Twentieth-Century China Part III - Ethnography Near and Far Xiaobing Tang 15. Proper Conditions for Ethnographic Work Bronislaw Malinowski 16. Mass-Observation: 'Two Letters and 'They Speak for Themselves' Mass Observation 17. The Kabyle House or the World Reversed Pierre Bourdieu 18. Approaches to What? George Perec 19. Documentation VI: Pre-writing alphabet, exerque and diary Mary Kelly 20. France/Tour/Detour/Two/Children Jean-Luc Godard and Ann Marie Mi'eville 21. Reassemblage Part IV - Reclamation Work Trinh T Minh-Ha 22. Work and Leisure in Everyday Life Henri Lefebrve 23. Perspectives for Conscious Alternations in Everyday Life Guy Debord 24. History from Below E P Thompson 25.Landscape for a Good Woman Caroline Steedman 26. Symbolic Creativity Part V - Everyday Things Paul Willis 27. Boredom Siegfried Kracauer 28. Plastic Roland Barthes 29. Structures of Interior Design Jean Baudrillard 30. Doing Cooking Luce Giard 31.Installing the Television Set Lynn Spiegel 32.Making Love in Supermarkets Daniel Miller 33 Rough Magic: Bags Steven Connor

The Everyday Life Reader brings together thinkers ranging from Freud to Baudrillard with primary sources. It thus provides a complete and comprehensive resource on theories of everyday life.
Ben Highmore's introduction surveys the development of thought about everyday life, setting theories in their social and historical context, and each themed section opens with an essay introducing the debates. Sections include:
*Situating the Everyday
*Everyday Life and 'National Culture'
*Ethnography Near and Far
*Reclamation Work
*Everyday Things

Design is part of ordinary, everyday life, to be found in every room in every building in the world. While we may tend to think of design in terms of highly desirable objects, this book encourages us to think about design as ubiquitous (from plumbing to television) and as an agent of social change (from telephones to weapon systems). The Design Culture Reader brings together an international array of writers whose work is of central importance for thinking about design culture in the past, present and future. Essays from philosophers, media and cultural theorists, historians of design, anthropologists, cultural historians, artists and literary critics all demonstrate the enormous potential of design studies for understanding the modern world. Organised in thematic sections, The Design Culture Reader explores the social role of design by looking at the impact it has in a number of areas - especially globalisation, ecology, and the changing experiences of modern life. Particular essays focus on topics such as design and the senses, design and war and design and technology, while the editor's introduction to the collection provides a compelling argument for situating design studies at the very forefront of contemporary thought.

What are the qualities and properties that make something cultural? What does claiming something as cultural allow us to do? Culture offers students a workable understanding of the category 'culture' and explores how the realm of the 'cultural' can be practically explored as a way of understanding the world. Ben Highmore provides a clear and robust defence of the productivity of cultural analysis in a media saturated world, while also instilling a sense of modesty in qualifying what can and can't be accomplished in the name of cultural analysis. With extensive examples and case studies throughout, the book demonstrates both the productivity and the limitations in orientating analysis to the cultural. A thought-provoking and engaging examination, Culture is an ideal introductory text for students of media and cultural studies.

In postwar Britain, journalists and politicians predicted that the class system would not survive a consumer culture where everyone had TVs and washing machines, and where more and more people owned their own homes. They were to be proved hopelessly wrong. Lifestyle revolution charts how class culture, rather than being destroyed by mass consumption, was remade from flat-pack furniture, Mediterranean cuisine and lifestyle magazines. Novelists, cartoonists and playwrights satirised the tastes of the emerging middle classes, while sociologists claimed that an entire population was suffering from 'status anxiety', but underneath it all, a new order was being constructed out of duvets, quiches and mayonnaise, easy chairs from Habitat, white emulsion paint and ubiquitous pine kitchen tables. More than just a world of symbolic goods, this was an intimate environment alive with new feelings and attitudes. -- .

This landmark volume offers a major re-assessment of the art that emerged in Britain in the twenty years following the end of the Second World War: a period of anxiety, profound social change and explosive creativity. Published to coincide with the Barbican Centre's 40th anniversary, it draws together the work of fifty artists, exploring a period straddled precariously between the horror of the past and the promise of the future. Spanning painting, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and photography, Postwar Modern will explore a rich field of experiment which challenges the idea that Britain was a cultural backwater at this time. Through new texts by Jane Alison, Hilary Floe, Ben Highmore, Hammad Nassar and Greg Salter, the book looks afresh at celebrated artists such as Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Lucian Freud and Eduardo Paolozzi, shown in dialogue with lesser-known figures. These will include those, like Francis Newton Souza, Avinash Chandra and Robert Adams, who were acclaimed by contemporaries but neglected in subsequent history-making; others, like Kim Lim, Anwar Jalal Shemza and Franciszka Themerson, are only now attracting the attention they deserve. Throughout their work, vital shared preoccupations become visible: gender, class, race and nationhood; the body, the bombsite, and the home. It is a period resonating strongly with our own: as the UK emerges from more than a decade of austerity and confronts the challenges of post-pandemic reconstruction, society is asking similarly deep questions about who we want and need to be.

Michel de Certeau is becoming increasingly recognised as a cultural theorist whose methodologies could rival those of Foucault. In this engaging book, Ben Highmore provides a stimulating account of Michel de Certeau's work and its relation to the field of cultural studies. The book explores those aspects of de Certeau's work that both challenge and re-imagine cultural studies, highlighting the potential this work has for supplying a critical epistemology and a practical ethics for the study of culture within the arts and humanities more generally. Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture provides an ideal introduction to the work of this extraordinary and important thinker.

Coinciding with the massive growth of consumerism after the Second World War, everyday life has emerged as a crucial site of scholarly exploration. The critical study of quotidian routines, rules, spaces, and objects has become a central concern for scholars working in cultural studies. Furthermore, everyday life has also engaged the close attention of thinkers including philosophers, cultural geographers, historians, and sociologists from a range of other disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.

As research in and around everyday life flourishes as never before, this new four-volume collection from Routledge s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of interdisciplinary literature. Edited by a leading scholar, Everyday Life gathers foundational and canonical work, together with innovative and cutting-edge applications and interventions.

With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Everyday Life is an essential work of reference. For the novice or advanced student, the collection will be particularly useful as an essential database allowing scattered and often fugitive material to be easily located. And, for the more advanced scholar, it will be welcomed as a crucial tool permitting rapid access to less familiar and sometimes overlooked texts. For both, Everyday Life will be valued as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.