Ordinary Lives

Ordinary Lives PDF Author: Ben Highmore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136905235
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 461

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Ordinary Lives

Ordinary Lives PDF Author: Ben Highmore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136905235
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 461

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Ordinary Lives

Ordinary Lives PDF Author: Rania Matar
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781593720377
Category : Children
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Rania Matar photographs the ordinary activity of life in a culture often misunderstood in the West, at a time of social and political conflict.-publisher's description.

Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes

Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes PDF Author: Samuli Schielke
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857455079
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 174

Get Book Here

Book Description
Everyday practice of religion is complex in its nature, ambivalent and at times contradictory. The task of an anthropology of religious practice is therefore precisely to see how people navigate and make sense of that complexity, and what the significance of religious beliefs and practices in a given setting can be. Rather than putting everyday practice and normative doctrine on different analytical planes, the authors argue that the articulation of religious doctrine is also an everyday practice and must be understood as such.

Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean

Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean PDF Author: Kristen Block
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820343757
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
Kristen Block examines the entangled histories of Spain and England in the Caribbean during the long seventeenth century, focusing on colonialism’s two main goals: the search for profit and the call to Christian dominance. Using the stories of ordinary people, Block illustrates how engaging with the powerful rhetoric and rituals of Christianity was central to survival. Isobel Criolla was a runaway slave in Cartagena who successfully lobbied the Spanish governor not to return her to an abusive mistress. Nicolas Burundel was a French Calvinist who served as henchman to the Spanish governor of Jamaica before his arrest by the Inquisition for heresy. Henry Whistler was an English sailor sent to the Caribbean under Oliver Cromwell’s plan for holy war against Catholic Spain. Yaff and Nell were slaves who served a Quaker plantation owner, Lewis Morris, in Barbados. Seen from their on-the-ground perspective, the development of modern capitalism, race, and Christianity emerges as a story of negotiation, contingency, humanity, and the quest for community. Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean works in both a comparative and an integrative Atlantic world frame, drawing on archival sources from Spain, England, Barbados, Colombia, and the United States. It pushes the boundaries of how historians read silences in the archive, asking difficult questions about how self-censorship, anxiety, and shame have shaped the historical record. The book also encourages readers to expand their concept of religious history beyond a focus on theology, ideals, and pious exemplars to examine the communal efforts of pirates, smugglers, slaves, and adventurers who together shaped the Caribbean’s emerging moral economy.

Ordinary Lives

Ordinary Lives PDF Author: Josef Škvorecký
Publisher: Key Porter Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
Set against the backdrop of two class reunions — one in 1963, and the next in 1993, 30 years later —Ordinary Livesresurrects Skvorecky’s former narrator and alter ego, Danny Smiricky. As the reunions force Danny to reconcile himself to his past, he is plagued by a “torrent of ungovernable thoughts.” And as his former classmates begin to understand how he’s spent the intervening years, the reader is guided through a history of the major ideologies of the 20th century: from Nazism, to Communism, to capitalism. Skvorecky juxtaposes the defining moments of the modern era with the ordinary lives of his recurring characters. Beautifully written, slim but powerful, this novel is an apt culmination of a literary master’s extraordinary career.

Ordinary Lives

Ordinary Lives PDF Author: William Daniel Ehrhart
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 9781566396745
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1993, Ehrhart began what became a five-year search for the men of his platoon. Who were these men alongside whom he trained? Why had they joined the Marines at a time when being sent to war was almost a certainty? What do they think of the war and of the country that sent them to fight it? What does the Corps mean to them? What Ehrhart learned offers an extraordinary window into the complexities of the Vietnam Generation and the United States of America then and now.

PostSecret

PostSecret PDF Author: Frank Warren
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060899190
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book Here

Book Description
The project that captured a nation's imagination. The instructions were simple, but the results were extraordinary. "You are invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project. Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything -- as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before. Be brief. Be legible. Be creative." It all began with an idea Frank Warren had for a community art project. He began handing out postcards to strangers and leaving them in public places -- asking people to write down a secret they had never told anyone and mail it to him, anonymously. The response was overwhelming. The secrets were both provocative and profound, and the cards themselves were works of art -- carefully and creatively constructed by hand. Addictively compelling, the cards reveal our deepest fears, desires, regrets, and obsessions. Frank calls them "graphic haiku," beautiful, elegant, and small in structure but powerfully emotional. As Frank began posting the cards on his website, PostSecret took on a life of its own, becoming much more than a simple art project. It has grown into a global phenomenon, exposing our individual aspirations, fantasies, and frailties -- our common humanity. Every day dozens of postcards still make their way to Frank, with postmarks from around the world, touching on every aspect of human experience. This extraordinary collection brings together the most powerful, personal, and beautifully intimate secrets Frank Warren has received -- and brilliantly illuminates that human emotions can be unique and universal at the same time.

The Life Project

The Life Project PDF Author: Helen Pearson
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619028107
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book Here

Book Description
A fascinating account of a scientific project that tracked 5 generations of children—the longest-ever-running study of human development. The lives of 70,000 people reveal the importance of our beginnings on the greater trajectory of our lives. In March 1946, scientists began to track thousands of children born in one cold week as part of a birth cohort study. No one imagined that this would become the longest-running study of human development in the world, growing to encompass 5 generations of children. Today, they are some of the best-studied people on the planet, and the simple act of observing human life has changed the way we are born, schooled, parented, and die. This is the tale of these studies and the remarkable discoveries that have come from them. Touching people across the globe, they are one of the world’s best-kept secrets.

No Ordinary Lives

No Ordinary Lives PDF Author: David Johnson
Publisher: Grand Central Pub
ISBN: 9780446526395
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Collects the stories of Americans who were profiled in the author's "Everybody Has a Story" column, tracing his two decades of encounters with more than eight hundred individuals, many of whose perspectives changed his life.

Quantum Change

Quantum Change PDF Author: William R. Miller
Publisher: Guilford Press
ISBN: 1462504361
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
Most of us walk through each day expecting few surprises. If we want to better ourselves or our lives, we map out a path of gradual change, perhaps in counseling or psychotherapy. Psychologists William Miller and Janet C'de Baca were longtime scholars and teachers of traditional approaches to self-improvement when they became intrigued by a different sort of change that was sometimes experienced by people they encountered--something often described as "a bolt from the blue" or "seeing the light." And when they placed a request in a local newspaper for people's stories of unexpected personal transformation, the deluge of responses was astounding. These compelling stories of epiphanies and sudden insights inspired Miller and C'de Baca to examine the experience of "quantum change" through the lens of scientific psychology. Where does quantum change come from? Why do some of us experience it, and what kind of people do we become as a result? The answers that this book arrives at yield remarkable insights into how human beings achieve lasting change--sometimes even in spite of ourselves.