Ben Highmore – författare

The city is the most distinctive product of modernity, but it is also its most unruly. How do we approach a culture that is both physical and imaginary, that has moulded concrete and asphalt as well as movies and novels? Cityscapes provides an innovative approach to the modern city. By arguing that the most distinctive aspect of urban life is the varied, and often conflicting, rhythms of the city, this book sets out to find ways of registering the dynamic complexity of the city. Using a range of cultural forms Cityscapes spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, finding vivid examples of urban movements in Edgar Allan Poe's London, in Parisian departments stores, in colonial and anti-colonial Algiers, in the North American cities of recent detective fiction, and in the virtual city of The Matrix.

The city is the most distinctive product of modernity, but it is also its most unruly. How do we approach a culture that is both physical and imaginary, that has moulded concrete and asphalt as well as movies and novels? Cityscapes provides an innovative approach to the modern city. By arguing that the most distinctive aspect of urban life is the varied, and often conflicting, rhythms of the city, this book sets out to find ways of registering the dynamic complexity of the city. Using a range of cultural forms Cityscapes spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, finding vivid examples of urban movements in Edgar Allan Poe's London, in Parisian departments stores, in colonial and anti-colonial Algiers, in the North American cities of recent detective fiction, and in the virtual city of The Matrix.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 chair allows him to consider the history of flat-pack furniture as well as the lively presence of inorganic ‘stuff’ in our daily lives. Distracted television watching and radio listening becomes one of the preconditions for experiencing wonder through the media. Ordinary Lives links the concrete study of routine existence to theoretical reflection on everyday life. The book discusses philosophers such as Jacques Rancière, William James and David Hume and combines them with autobiographical testimonies, historical research and the analysis of popular culture to investigate the minutiae of day-to-day life. Highmore argues that aesthetic experience is embedded in the mundane sensory world of everyday life. He asks the reader to reconsider the negative associations of habit and routine, focusing specifically on the intrinsic ambiguity of habit (habit, we find out, is both rigid and adaptive). Rather than ask ‘what does everyday life mean?’ this book asks ‘what does everyday life feel like and how do our sensual, emotional and temporal experiences interconnect and intersect?’Ordinary Lives is an accessible, animated and engaging book that is ideally suited to both students and researchers working in cultural studies, media and communication and sociology.

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 chair allows him to consider the history of flat-pack furniture as well as the lively presence of inorganic ‘stuff’ in our daily lives. Distracted television watching and radio listening becomes one of the preconditions for experiencing wonder through the media. Ordinary Lives links the concrete study of routine existence to theoretical reflection on everyday life. The book discusses philosophers such as Jacques Rancière, William James and David Hume and combines them with autobiographical testimonies, historical research and the analysis of popular culture to investigate the minutiae of day-to-day life. Highmore argues that aesthetic experience is embedded in the mundane sensory world of everyday life. He asks the reader to reconsider the negative associations of habit and routine, focusing specifically on the intrinsic ambiguity of habit (habit, we find out, is both rigid and adaptive). Rather than ask ‘what does everyday life mean?’ this book asks ‘what does everyday life feel like and how do our sensual, emotional and temporal experiences interconnect and intersect?’Ordinary Lives is an accessible, animated and engaging book that is ideally suited to both students and researchers working in cultural studies, media and communication and sociology.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The culture that infiltrates our lives can provoke a range of feelings and afflictions – culture can move you, get under your skin and stir up your emotions. Ben Highmore uses these feelings, or 'passions', to explore the culture that surrounds us and uses it as a basis to introduce and explain the key ideas, debates and theories that are central to cultural studies.Impressively accessible and packed with absorbing examples from everyday life, this compact book is the ideal entry-point into cultural studies. The chapters examine problematic and complex issues that are core to cultural studies, looking at the experience of migration, the nature of the media, the lure of commodities, the world of taste and the culture of love. Cleverly written in a way that's easy to follow and enjoyable to read, the text gives a sense of the discipline as a way of thinking rather than an amalgamation of theories, and whets the appetite of all those interested in cultural studies.Whether you're a student who's new to the field, or a seasoned scholar seeking a fresh idea about what cultural studies can do, this clear and concise text encourages you to become truly passionate about cultural studies.

The culture that infiltrates our lives can provoke a range of feelings and afflictions – culture can move you, get under your skin and stir up your emotions. Ben Highmore uses these feelings, or 'passions', to explore the culture that surrounds us and uses it as a basis to introduce and explain the key ideas, debates and theories that are central to cultural studies.Impressively accessible and packed with absorbing examples from everyday life, this compact book is the ideal entry-point into cultural studies. The chapters examine problematic and complex issues that are core to cultural studies, looking at the experience of migration, the nature of the media, the lure of commodities, the world of taste and the culture of love. Cleverly written in a way that's easy to follow and enjoyable to read, the text gives a sense of the discipline as a way of thinking rather than an amalgamation of theories, and whets the appetite of all those interested in cultural studies.Whether you're a student who's new to the field, or a seasoned scholar seeking a fresh idea about what cultural studies can do, this clear and concise text encourages you to become truly passionate about 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.