Situating Everyday Life

"The study of everyday life is fundamental to our understanding of modern society. This agenda-setting book provides a coherent, interdisciplinary way to engage with everyday activities and environments. Arguing for an innovative, ethnographic approach, it uses detailed examples, based in real world and digital research, to bring its theories to life. The book focuses on the sensory, embodied, mobile and mediated elements of practice and place as a route to understanding wider issues. By doing so, it convincingly outlines a robust theoretical and methodological approach to understanding contemporary everyday life and activism. A fresh, timely book, this is an excellent resource for students and researchers of everyday life, activism and sustainability across the social sciences"--Provided by publisher.

The study of everyday life is fundamental to our understanding of modern society. This agenda-setting book provides a coherent, interdisciplinary way to engage with everyday activities and environments. Arguing for an innovative, ethnographic approach, it uses detailed examples, based in real world and digital research, to bring its theories to life. The book focuses on the sensory, embodied, mobile and mediated elements of practice and place as a route to understanding wider issues. By doing so, it convincingly outlines a robust theoretical and methodological approach to understanding contemporary everyday life and activism. A fresh, timely book, this is an excellent resource for students and researchers of everyday life, activism and sustainability across the social sciences.

The study of everyday life is fundamental to our understanding of modern society. This book provides a coherent, interdisciplinary way to engage with everyday activities and environments. Arguing for an innovative, ethnographic approach, it uses detailed examples, based in real world and digital research, to bring its theories to life. Sarah Pink focuses on the sensory, embodied, mobile, and mediated elements of practice and place as a route to understanding wider issues. By doing so, she convincingly outlines a robust theoretical and methodological approach to understanding contemporary everyday life and activism.

Everyday life is defined and characterised by the rise, transformation and fall of social practices. Using terminology that is both accessible and sophisticated, this essential book guides the reader through a multi-level analysis of this dynamic. In working through core propositions about social practices and how they change the book is clear and accessible; real world examples, including the history of car driving, the emergence of frozen food, and the fate of hula hooping, bring abstract concepts to life and firmly ground them in empirical case-studies and new research. Demonstrating the relevance of social theory for public policy problems, the authors show that the everyday is the basis of social transformation addressing questions such as: how do practices emerge, exist and die? what are the elements from which practices are made? how do practices recruit practitioners? how are elements, practices and the links between them generated, renewed and reproduced? Precise, relevant and persuasive this book will inspire students and researchers from across the social sciences. Elizabeth Shove is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. Mika Pantzar is Research Professor at the National Consumer Research Centre, Helsinki. Matt Watson is Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at University of Sheffield.

′Bennett provides a well organized, very readable and interesting discussion of a number of significant everyday cultural forms and I am confident student readers will find the book very valuable′ - Barry Smart, University of Portsmouth Culture and Everyday Life provides students with a comprehensive overview of theoretical models, issues and examples of contemporary cultural practice. Bennett begins by summarising and situating - in everyday settings - the key theoretical models applied in the study of existing cultural practices. This entails a systematic study of how academic thinking about mass culture has changed, from critical accounts of early mass cultural theorists to radical postmodernist critiques of mass cultural accounts and to ′the cultural turn′, which explored how various social identities are culturally constructed. Following this are themed chapters that cover a particular aspect of late modern culture, such as media, music, fashion, tourism and counter-cultural ideologies and movements. In each case a comprehensive literature review is provided and its theoretical and empirical relevance to our understanding of the relationship between culture and everyday life in contemporary society is explained. Lucid, meticulous and illustrated with a host of examples, this is a superb text for teaching and research in the Sociology of Culture and Cultural Studies.

′[T]hose already proficient in ethnographic methods will find Doing Visual Ethnography a foray into what should be an increasingly normative terrain and what is certainly a much-needed addition to the literature. They will be challenged to simultaneously take on new methodological conceits and their application beyond traditional boundaries′ - Library & Information Science Research Following on from the success of Doing Visual Ethnography, this fully revised and updated second edition explores the use and potential of photography, video and hypermedia in ethnographic and social research. It offers a reflexive approach to theoretical, methodological, practical and ethical issues of using these media now that they are increasingly being incorporated into field research. Sarah Pink adopts the viewpoint that visual research methods should be rooted in a critical understanding of local and academic visual cultures, the visual media and technologies being used and the ethical issues they raise. The book demonstrates that these new challenges that shape ethnographic knowledge can be met by understanding the reflexivity and experience through which visual and ethnographic materials are produced and interpreted. New to the Second Edition: - General updating of figures, terminology and literature to bring the book up-to-date with recent innovations in theory, practice and technology - Annotated reading lists added to each chapter to guide the reader to further literature - Completely rewritten chapter on digital technology to ensure the text is in line with the latest developments in technology and methodological thinking Drawing from her own experiences of using photography, video and hypermedia in research, as well as the work of others, the author follows the research process from project design, planning and implementing and practising fieldwork to analysis and representation, suggesting how visual images and technologies can be combined to form an integrated process throughout the different stages of research. The Second Edition of Doing Visual Ethnography is an excellent resource for students of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, media studies, and those doing ethnographic and qualitative research. It also provides valuable reading for researchers and postgraduates.

The Everyday Life of Urban Inequality explores how steadily increasing inequality and the spectacular pace of urbanization frame daily life for city residents around the world. Ethnographic case studies from five continents highlight the impact of place, the tools of memory, and the power of collective action as communities interact with centralized processes of policy and capital. By focusing on situated experiences of displacement, belonging, and difference, the contributors to this collection illustrate the many ways urban inequalities take shape, combine, and are perpetuated.

This book is an interdisciplinary collection shedding light on human-animal relationships and interactions around the world. The book offers a predominantly empirical look at social and cultural practices related to companion animals in Mexico, Poland, the Netherlands, Japan, China and Taiwan, Vietnam, USA, and Turkey among others. It focuses on how dogs, cats, rabbits and members of other species are perceived and treated in various cultures, highlighting commonalities and differences between them.