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.

'House' has long been synonymous with 'home': the significance of four walls and a roof lies far deeper than simply shelter from the elements. A house stands for sanctuary, family, belonging, privacy and our pasts: even when standardised as a 'Barratt Home' or modern housing estate, every house bears the stamp of the people who live in it, remaining a bastion of quirky individualism.The Great Indoors is the first cultural history of the family home in the twentieth century...

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...

In the decades following 1945 a new kind of playground emerged in Northern Europe and North America. Rather than slides, swings and roundabouts, the new playgrounds encouraged children to build shacks and invent their own entertainment. This book tells the story of how bombsites and waste ground were transformed into hives of activity by children and progressive educationalists. It shows how a belief in the imaginative capacity of children shaped a new kind of playground, and how designers...

This new study from Ben Highmore looks at the seemingly banal world of objects, work, daily media, and food, and finds there a scintillating array of passionate experience. Through a series of case studies, and building on his previous work on the everyday, Highmore examines our relationship to familiar objects (a favourite chair), repetitive work (housework, typing), media (distracted television viewing and radio listening) and food (specifically the food of multicultural Britain). A chai...

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 cult...

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-cen...

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 qualifyi...

Landscape architecture plays an important role in shaping the places in which we live and work. But what is it? Landscape architects are involved, amongst other things, in the layout of business parks, the reclamation of derelict industrial sites, the restoration of historic city parks, and the siting and design of major pieces of infrastructure such as motorways, dams, power stations, and flood defences, as well as the planning of parks and gardens. Taking a historical perspective, Ian Th...

Fashion is a dynamic global industry that plays an important role in the economic, political, cultural, and social lives of an international audience. It spans high art and popular culture, and plays a significant role in material and visual culture. This book introduces fashion's myriad influences and manifestations. Fashion is explored as a creative force, a business, and a means of communication. From Karl Lagerfeld's creative reinventions of Chanel's iconic style to the multicultural r...

Set amidst the experimental ecology of practices that supports feminist thinking and doing in architecture, this small book outlines an instruc- tion guide that presents six provocative steps toward the invention of productive concept-tools. It invites readers to explore creative and messy methodologies that combine an aesthetics with a practical ethics. Frichot encourages us to think and do architecture in ways that challenge a dog- matic status quo that celebrates major gures, while over...

‘Harry Wallop is one of the sharpest and funniest journalists writing in Britain today. He has an instinct for the killer detail that truly brings a story to life.' – Jay RaynerThis is the story of how we became defined by what we consume.Discover what the thickness of froth on your morning coffee or where you buy your jeans really says about you, and the role of retailers and big business in this new class system.In this revealing account, award-winning journalist ...