Download or read book Temporal Politics and Banal Culture written by Peter Conlin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-01-16 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the absence of a strong alignment with the future in contemporary social life and explores anomalous temporal experience as a way to expand political imaginations. In the aftermath of the modern myth of progress, it argues we have entered into a kind of dystopia—brutal or seemingly benign—of the continual present that is resistant to systemic change but is nevertheless animated through cycles of novelty and obsolescence. Exploring a condition in which we are out of ideas and facing a ‘non-future’ of blind technical improvement and fear, the author examines the heterochronia of eerie atmospheres and temporal suspensions. Rather than a reinstatement of the great dream of The Future, a temporality of possibility is explored in strange dimensions of otherwise mundane sites: logistic spaces and ex-urban landscapes; boredom connected to digital media; and the material culture of a recently abandoned town. Drawing on contemporary social and cultural theory, as well as urban geography and media studies, the book develops its conceptual position through a series of vignettes of key sites and experiences. Through an elliptical and generative approach, it analyses zones where novelty collapses and where figures of defiance and possibility might emerge. A rigorous theoretical examination of contemporary life and culture grounded in a close examination of sites and material examples, Temporal Politics and Banal Culture: Before the Future will appeal to scholars of social theory, sociology, cultural geography, cultural studies and social philosophy.
Download or read book In the Meantime written by Sarah Sharma and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-07 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world is getting faster. This sentiment is proclaimed so often that it is taken for granted, rarely questioned or examined by those who celebrate the notion of an accelerated culture or by those who decry it. Sarah Sharma engages with that assumption in this sophisticated critical inquiry into the temporalities of everyday life. Sharma conducted ethnographic research among individuals whose jobs or avocations involve a persistent focus on time: taxi drivers, frequent-flyer business travelers, corporate yoga instructors, devotees of the slow-food and slow-living movements. Based on that research, she develops the concept of "power-chronography" to make visible the entangled and uneven politics of temporality. Focusing on how people's different relationships to labor configures their experience of time, she argues that both "speed-up" and "slow-down" often function as a form of biopolitical social control necessary to contemporary global capitalism.
Download or read book Temporal Regimes written by Felipe Torres and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-05 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Temporal Regimes provides a theoretical framework for understanding the temporal structures of society; a conceptually rich, empirically nuanced and culturally embodied account of temporal phenomena in contemporary world. What does it imply temporal regimes? How the everyday life as well as the global mobilities coordination requires temporal underpinnings? The answers to these questions mean more than simply understanding the general thesis on acceleration or space-time compression on the one hand; but also, a micro-multiple-localised time experience by gender, class or age, on the other. They also mean understanding in an integrative way the very structural temporalities within the everyday lived, embodied and situated ones. They require both a robust and flexible epistemic analysis considering their material bedrock through political and technological forefront dimensions. Advancing a rigorous, well-grounded theoretical understanding, and offering a useful way to analytically conceptualise the temporal dynamics on our societies, this book will be of interest to advanced students and scholars enquiring a rich set of topics ranging from time and politics, new materialism, conceptual history as well as technology, collective action and social change.
Download or read book Emotions in Culture and Everyday Life written by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume describes and analyses a series of emotions prevalent in everyday life and culture, with each chapter exploring the main facets of a particular emotion and considering the ways in which it manifests itself in and informs our culture and lives. Considering our expression, conception, management and sanctioning of emotions, and the ways in which these have changed over time, as well as the ways in which we can theorise particular emotional states, authors ask how certain emotions are linked to culture and society and what roles they play in politics and contemporary life. With examples and case studies taken from research into media, culture and social life, Emotions in Culture and Everyday Life will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, psychology, media and cultural studies and philosophy with interests in the emotions.
Download or read book Cultures of Mass Tourism written by Pau Obrador Pons and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With more than 230 million international tourists a year, the Mediterranean region is the largest tourist destination in the world. This book outlines that its economic importance is matched by its significance as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon. Through a series of ethnographic insights into some of the key sites of mass Mediterranean tourism, it focuses on package tourists' experiences of the serial, banal and depthless spaces that are mushrooming along the coast and the enchantments, dissolutions and dreams that saturate them. Moving away from the notion of authentic places corrupted by mass tourism, the book shows how new forms and spaces are made and remade by the mobilities and performances of locals, workers and tourists. Finally, the book looks at the complex materialities of mass tourism and the many networks that make it possible.
Download or read book History and Speculative Fiction written by John L. Hennessey and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-12-14 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book demonstrates that despite different epistemological starting points, history and speculative fiction perform similar work in “making the strange familiar” and “making the familiar strange” by taking their readers on journeys through space and time. Excellent history, like excellent speculative fiction, should cause readers to reconsider crucial aspects of their society that they normally overlook or lead them to reflect on radically different forms of social organization. Drawing on Gunlög Fur’s postcolonial concept of concurrences, and with contributions that explore diverse examples of speculative fiction and historical encounters using a variety of disciplinary approaches, this volume provides new perspectives on colonialism, ecological destruction, the nature of humanity, and how to envision a better future.
Download or read book The Civilizing Process and the Past We Now Abhor written by Bruce Fleming and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the thought of Norbert Elias and using as a thread a purposely apolitical example of cruelty to animals to focus on changes in attitudes, this book explores the ways in which we deal with a past that we now abhor. As we struggle to deal with the fact that our past shapes us—indeed is us, but is not us—and cannot be changed, the modern tendency is to demand merely cosmetic rather than real changes to the world and to judge harshly the individuals with whom the past is populated, pulling down statues or re-naming institutions. An examination of our modern colonialism of time rather than place, which refuses to consider or accept the fact that without our past, we wouldn’t be here at all, let alone in a position to judge, The Civilizing Process and the Past We Now Abhor will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, cultural studies, and literature with interests in contemporary questions of race, morality, and efforts to correct the wrongs of our past.
Download or read book Cultural Legal Studies of Science Fiction written by Alex Green and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents and engages the world-building capacity of legal theory through cultural legal studies of science and speculative fictions. In these studies, the contributors take seriously the legal world building of science and speculative fiction to reveal, animate and critique legal wisdom: juris-prudence. Following a common approach in cultural legal studies, the contributors engage directly, and in detail, with specific cultural ‘texts’, novels, television, films and video games in order to explore a range of possible legal futures. The book is organized in three parts: first, the contextualisation of science and speculative fiction as jurisprudence; second, the temporality of law and legal theory and third, the analysis of specific science and speculative fictions. Throughout, the contributors reveal the way in which law as nomos builds normative universes through the narration of a future. This book will appeal to scholars and students with interests in legal theory, cultural legal studies, law and the humanities and law and literature.
Download or read book A Moment s Notice written by Carol J. Greenhouse and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the problem of time—the paradox of time's apparent universality and cultural relativity—Carol J. Greenhouse develops an original ethnographic account of our present moment, the much-heralded postmodern condition, which is at the same time a reflexive analysis of ethnography itself. She argues that time is about agency and accountability, and that representations of time are used by institutions of law, politics, and scholarship to selectively refashion popular ideas of agency into paradigms of institutional legitimacy. A Moment's Notice suggests that the problem of time in theory is the corollary of problems of power in practice.Greenhouse develops her theory in examinations of three moments of cultural and political crisis: the resistance of the Aztecs against Cortes, the consolidation of China's First Empire, and the recent partisan political contests over Supreme Court nominees in the United States. In each of these cases, temporal innovation is integral to political improvisation, as traditions of sovereignty confront new cultural challenges. These cases return the discussion to current issues of inequality, postmodernity, cultural pluralism, and ethnography.
Download or read book Researching Race and Racism written by Martin Bulmer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-07-31 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race and racism have become huge areas of study in the social sciences over the past two decades. However, whilst this has been reflected in the growing body of theoretical and empirically based work, surprisingly little has been published that explores the methodological and practical issues involved in researching race. In Researching Race and Racism Martin Bulmer and John Solomos have brought together contributions from some of the leading researchers in the field, using the benefit of their experience to explore the practical and ethical issues involved in doing research in this sometimes controversial, often heavily politicised field. This book will provide students and researchers - both new to the field and experienced alike - with an invaluable tool to help them find their way.
Download or read book The End of the Modernist Era in Arts and Academia written by Bruce Fleming and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-28 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book identifies the—now moribund—Modernist spirit of the twentieth century, with its "make it new" attitude in the arts, and its tendency towards abstraction and the scientific process, as the impetus behind the academic structures of universities and museums, together with the development of discrete scholarly disciplines such as literary theory, sociology, and art history based on quasi-scientific principles. Arguing that the Modernist project is approaching exhaustion and that the insights that it has left to yield are approaching triviality, it explores the Modernist links between the arts and academic pursuits of the West—and their relationship with street protests—in the long twentieth century, considering what might follow this Modernist era. An examination of the broad cultural and intellectual—and now political—trends of our age, and their decline, The End of the Modernist Era in Arts and Academia will appeal to scholars and students of social theory, philosophy, literary studies, and cultural studies.
Download or read book The Privilege of Being Banal written by Elayne Oliphant and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-06-14 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: France, officially, is a secular nation. Yet Catholicism is undeniably a monumental presence, defining the temporal and spatial rhythms of Paris. At the same time, it often fades into the background as nothing more than “heritage.” In a creative inversion, Elayne Oliphant asks in The Privilege of Being Banal what, exactly, is hiding in plain sight? Could the banality of Catholicism actually be a kind of hidden power? Exploring the violent histories and alternate trajectories effaced through this banal backgrounding of a crucial aspect of French history and culture, this richly textured ethnography lays bare the profound nostalgia that undergirds Catholicism’s circulation in nonreligious sites such as museums, corporate spaces, and political debates. Oliphant’s aim is to unravel the contradictions of religion and secularism and, in the process, show how aesthetics and politics come together in contemporary France to foster the kind of banality that Hannah Arendt warned against: the incapacity to take on another person’s experience of the world. A creative meditation on the power of the taken-for-granted, The Privilege of Being Banal is a landmark study of religion, aesthetics, and public space.
Download or read book Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust written by Jack Palmer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-18 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust is a decisive text of intellectual reflection after Auschwitz, in which Bauman rejected the idea that the Holocaust represented the polar opposite of modernity and saw it instead as its dark potentiality. Bringing together leading scholars from across disciplines, this volume offers the first set of focused and critical commentaries on this classic work of social theory, evaluating its ongoing contribution to scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. Addressing the core messages of Modernity and the Holocaust that continue to sound amidst the convulsions of the present, the chapters situate Bauman’s volume in the social, cultural and academic context of its genesis, and considers its role in the complex processes of Holocaust memorialisation. Offering extensions of Bauman’s thesis to lesser-known and undertheorised events of mass violence, and also considering the significance of Janina Bauman’s writings in their own right, this volume will appeal to scholars of sociology, intellectual history, Holocaust and genocide studies, moral philosophy, memory studies and cultural theory.
Download or read book Everyday Nationhood written by Michael Skey and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection explores the continuing appeal of nationalism around the world. The authors’ ground-breaking research demonstrates the ways in which national priorities and sensibilities frame an extraordinary array of activities, from classroom discussions and social media posts to global policy-making, as well as identifying the value that can come from feeling part of a national community, especially during times of economic uncertainty and social change. They also note how attachments to nation can often generate powerful emotions, happiness and pride as well as anger and frustration, which can be used to mobilize substantial numbers of people into action. Featuring contributions from leading social scientists across a range of disciplines, including sociology, geography, political science, social psychology, media and cultural studies, the book presents a number of case studies covering a range of countries including Russia, Germany, New Zealand, Serbia, Japan, Azerbaijan, Greece and the USA. Everyday Nationhood will appeal to students and scholars of nationalism, globalization and identity across the social sciences as well as those with an interest in understanding the role of nationalism in shaping some of the most pressing political crises- migration, economic protectionism, populism - of the contemporary era.
Download or read book Street Naming and the Politics of Greek Cypriot Identity written by Stella Theocharous and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Popular Culture and Political Identity in the Arab Gulf States written by Alanoud Alsharekh and published by Saqi. This book was released on 2012-07-15 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Gulf assumes an ever more important identity in the global political economy, we see the emergence of a new popular and political culture underpinning its increasingly self-confident national identities. This volume explores the new dynamism of the Gulf, reflected not just in high-rise buildings and booming stock markets, but also manifested in the realms of art, ideas and expression, and their relationships with political authority. Contributors include figures instrumental to the emergence of these new identities, including artists, broadcasters and cultural commentators.
Download or read book The Digital Banal written by Zara Dinnen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary culture is haunted by its media. Yet in their ubiquity, digital media have become increasingly banal, making it harder for us to register their novelty or the scope of the social changes they have wrought. What do we learn about our media environment when we look closely at the ways novelists and filmmakers narrate and depict banal use of everyday technologies? How do we encounter our own media use in scenes of waiting for e-mail, watching eBay bids, programming as work, and worrying about numbers of social media likes, friends, and followers? Zara Dinnen analyzes a range of prominent contemporary novels, films, and artworks to contend that we live in the condition of the “digital banal,” not noticing the affective and political novelty of our relationship to digital media. Authors like Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Sheila Heti, Jonathan Lethem, Gary Shteyngart, Colson Whitehead, Mark Amerika, Ellen Ullman, and Danica Novgorodoff and films such as The Social Network and Catfish critique and reveal the ways in which digital labor isolates the individual; how the work of programming has become an operation of power; and the continuation of the “Californian ideology,” which has folded the radical into the rote and the imaginary into the mundane. The works of these writers and artists, Dinnen argues, also offer ways of resisting the more troubling aspects of the effects of new technologies, as well as timely methods for seeing the digital banal as a politics of suppression. Bridging the gap between literary studies and media studies, The Digital Banal recovers the shrouded disturbances that can help us recognize and antagonize our media environment.
