Critiques of Everyday Life - An Introduction (Hardcover)

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; and Dorothy E. Smith's feminist perspective on everyday life. It 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.