Critiques of Everyday Life: An Introduction

By: Michael Gardiner

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Synopsis: Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning interest in the study of everyday life within the social sciences and humanities. In Critiques of Everyday Life Michael Gardiner proposes that there exists a counter-tradition within everyday life theorising. This counter-tradition has sought not merely to describe lived experience, but to transform it by elevating our understanding of the everyday to the status of a critical knowledge.In his analysis Gardiner engages with the work of a number of significant theorists and approaches that have been marginalized by mainstream academe, including:*The French tradition of everyday life theorising, from the surrealists to Henri Lefebvre, and from the Situationist International to Michel de Certeau*Agnes Heller and the relationship between the everyday, rationality and ethics*Carnival, prosaics and intersubjectivity in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin*Dorothy E. Smith's feminist perspective on everyday life.Critiques of Everyday Life demonstrates the importance of an alternative, multidisciplinary everyday life paradigm and offers a myriad of new possibilities for critical social and cultural theorising and empirical research.