1,721,238 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
The invention of the modern cultural fact: toward a critique of the critique of everyday life
No full textAt the beginning of the twenty-first century the everyday lives of people in the industrialized western world are being changed by shifts in traditional assumptions about gender roles, power dynamics, sexualities, styles of work, personal relationships and life trajectories. The circumstances of individuals in their homes, communities and work are being transformed through the development of increasingly flexible arrangements, personal wants, and new ways of talking about these. The boundaries of 'right' and 'wrong' have been debated in new experiments of daily living, while a unique degree of choice is exerted. But the complexity of these changes is often masked in the normal daily routines of the everyday. As a result, the category of everyday life is enjoying something of a renaissance in contemporary social thought, and the theme of the everyday provides a particularly useful 'contact zone' between feminist perspectives, sociology and cultural studies. Drawing on these strands of inquiry, this book focuses on the changing practices and meanings of daily living, particularly in order to understand how the current fluidity of everyday life practices relates to performing gender, sexuality, caring, 'racializing', ageing, work and other significant axes of everyday situations. The chapters consider these issues in the context of the intermeshing of technologies with daily life, the unstable and globalizing nature of work, and the shifting meanings of identity and place. Are there new 'everyday cultures' emerging? Social theory has talked about a new culture of intimacy, of work, of caring, or of gender. What are these new cultures and what is 'contemporary culture'? Contemporary Culture and Everyday Life contributes a range of rich and detailed studies, focused on specific aspects of the everyday, which address these emerging cultures and consider the significance of the category of the everyday in both earlier and contemporary social theory
Recommended from our members
Everyday life and contemporary culture
No full textAbout the book: At the beginning of the twenty-first century the everyday lives of people in the industrialized western world are being changed by shifts in traditional assumptions about gender roles, power dynamics, sexualities, styles of work, personal relationships and life trajectories. The circumstances of individuals in their homes, communities and work are being transformed through the development of increasingly flexible arrangements, personal wants, and new ways of talking about these.
The boundaries of 'right' and 'wrong' have been debated in new experiments of daily living, while a unique degree of choice is exerted. But the complexity of these changes is often masked in the normal daily routines of the everyday. As a result, the category of everyday life is enjoying something of a renaissance in contemporary social thought, and the theme of the everyday provides a particularly useful 'contact zone' between feminist perspectives, sociology and cultural studies. Drawing on these strands of inquiry, this book focuses on the changing practices and meanings of daily living, particularly in order to understand how the current fluidity of everyday life practices relates to performing gender, sexuality, caring, 'racializing', ageing, work and other significant axes of everyday situations.
The chapters consider these issues in the context of the intermeshing of technologies with daily life, the unstable and globalizing nature of work, and the shifting meanings of identity and place. Are there new 'everyday cultures' emerging? Social theory has talked about a new culture of intimacy, of work, of caring, or of gender. What are these new cultures and what is 'contemporary culture'? Contemporary Culture and Everyday Life contributes a range of rich and detailed studies, focused on specific aspects of the everyday, which address these emerging cultures and consider the significance of the category of the everyday in both earlier and contemporary social theory
Review: Bennett, Tony and Carter, David, ed., Culture in Australia: policies, publics and programs
No full textA review of Bennett, Tony and Carter, David (eds), Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs, Cambridge
University Press, Oakleigh and Cambridge, 2001, ISBN 0 5210 0403
Habit, Attention, Governance
No full textIn this chapter, the author takes the relations between habit and attention as his point of entry into a broader set of questions concerning how we should write habit’s political histories and the lessons that we should derive from such histories regarding habit’s role in governing practices. The role of habit in the governance of conduct is thus inseparable from its role in this broader set of relations, requiring its redefinition as ‘an engineering issue’ involving ‘the establishment of arts of education and social guidance’. The author focuses on the work of Sara Ahmed in developing an 'archival perspective' as a means of engaging with the complex sets of such relations in which habit’s varied political uses are inscribed. If habit thus forms a part of the mental states that have to be eliminated if voluntary attention is to be produced, it also plays a positive role in the processes through which such attention is produced and sustained
Recommended from our members
Cultural Trends: Culture, Taste and Social Divisions in Contemporary Britain
No full textFrom the editorial:
This special issue of Cultural Trends follows on from a previous special issue, Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (Cultural Trends 50, 2004). Like Cultural Trends 50, it is dedicated to the project Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion: A Critical Investigation, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) between March 2003 and February 2006. This was a large-scale research inquiry which considered cultural tastes, knowledge and forms of cultural participation in contemporary Britain in relation to some of the key indicators of social divisions and differences: class, gender, ethnicity, education, residence, income etc.
...
The papers collected together in this issue of Cultural Trends reveal the inequalities that characterize the British population’s relationships with culture as being strongly connected to some of the main drivers of social stratification. They leave little doubt about the interconnections between cultural, social and economic inequalities.
As a matter of political convenience, certain sections of the population’s degree of cultural disengagement have tended to be described in terms of social exclusion or cultural deprivation. However, the research reported here suggests that such exclusions manifest the ways in which cultural and economic capital—education and occupational class—work to produce cultural inequalities within the mainstream
Material powers : introduction
No full textThis edited collection is a major contribution to the current development of a ‘material turn’ in the social sciences and humanities. It does so by exploring new understandings of how power is made up and exercised by examining the role of material infrastructures in the organisation of state power and the role of material cultural practices in the organisation of colonial forms of governance. A diverse range of historical examples is drawn on in illustrating these concerns –from the role of territorial engineering projects in seventeenth-century France through the development of the postal system in nineteenth-century Britain to the relations between the state and road-building in contemporary Peru, for example. The colonial contexts examined are similarly varied, ranging from the role of photographic practices in the constitution of colonial power in India and the measurement of the bodies of the colonised in French colonial practices to the part played my the relations between museums and expeditions in the organisation of Australian forms of colonial rule. These specific concerns are connected to major critical re-examination of the limits of the earlier formulations of cultural materialism and the logic of the ‘cultural turn’. The collection brings together a group of key international scholars whose work has played a leading role in debates in and across the fields of history, visual culture studies, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, museum studies, and literary studies
Sociology and culture
No full textTwo general questions need to be answered in order to define a manageable way of addressing a topic as forbiddingly large as the relations between sociology and cultural analysis. The first is whether to define these relations as the province of a particular and specialized area of work within sociology, or whether to consider them as pointing to a more general field of problems and issues that have broader implications for the pursuit of sociology more generally. In the second conception, attention focuses on the role of cultural factors in organizing social life
Making and mobilising worlds : assembling and governing the other
No full textThis edited collection is a major contribution to the current development of a 'material turn' in the social sciences and humanities. It does so by exploring new understandings of how power is made up and exercised by examining the role of material infrastructures in the organisation of state power and the role of material cultural practices in the organisation of colonial forms of governance. A diverse range of historical examples is drawn on in illustrating these concerns --from the role of territorial engineering projects in seventeenth-century France through the development of the postal system in nineteenth-century Britain to the relations between the state and road-building in contemporary Peru, for example. The colonial contexts examined are similarly varied, ranging from the role of photographic practices in the constitution of colonial power in India and the measurement of the bodies of the colonised in French colonial practices to the part played my the relations between museums and expeditions in the organisation of Australian forms of colonial rule. These specific concerns are connected to major critical re-examination of the limits of the earlier formulations of cultural materialism and the logic of the 'cultural turn'. The collection brings together a group of key international scholars whose work has played a leading role in debates in and across the fields of history, visual culture studies, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, museum studies, and literary studies
Introduction : challenging (the) humanities
No full textI hesitated, when first considering how to approach rhe topic for the Academy's
2012 symposium, beMeen two interpretations of the title I had in mind. The first-and my initial intention-was to focus on the challenges presented by the rapidly changing institutional, funding and policy environments in which humanities scholars work. Changing fee structures; volatile patterns of student enrolment; research assessment procedures; and, as a relatively new kid on the governmental block, the looming horizons of research impact assessment: these questions were very much on the Academy's agenda during the lead up to the symposium and irs immediate aftermath. They informed a joint workshop with the British Academy, that was convened in Melbourne shortly before the symposium, to consider how best to engage creatively with research impact agendas, and they informed a public forum the Academy held at the National Library in Canberra in early 2013 to discuss the relations between research impact and research assessment regimes. 1 They are also issues that would have lent themselves to the double register-of the challenges both being faced, and being issued by, the humanities-that I wanted to catch in my title
Class and cultural capital in Australia
No full textThis chapter presents an overview of the findings of the Australian Cultural Fields project regarding the role of class in shaping Australian cultural consumption practices. There are three main stages to the argument. First, the chapter brings together the patterns of class structuration associated with the project’s six cultural fields – art, literary, music, heritage, television and sport – in order to examine how these interact in the Australian ‘space of lifestyles’. This involves a consideration of the relations between economic and cultural capital in the composition of different classes. Second, the chapter examines the respects in which the composition of these classes is ‘infiltrated’ by other aspects of social position: age, education, gender and so on. The chapter then proposes a distinctive methodological innovation by using the Cluster Analysis of the Australian Cultural Fields survey data to consider the light that the relations between the resulting clusters and ‘cultural capital profiles’ throws on the social trajectories and logics of inheritance of different class fractions. These questions are pursued in the context of recent debates concerning the relations between class and culture in Australia and internationally
- …
