The everyday skills that get us by: Non-representational theories for a linealogy of quotidian cultures

2020 ◽  
pp. 136754942091986
Author(s):  
Shaun Moores
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
New Media ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Geographic Thought ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Classic Essay ◽  
Selection Of

In this article, I have three key aims. Firstly, I want to offer a particular definition and a bold defence of ‘non-representational theories’, indicating the importance of their anti-rationalist and anti-structuralist tendencies, and also pointing to their positive assertion of the primacy of practices or movement. Although a non-representational theoretical approach is closely associated today with contemporary geographic thought, I make a case here for an understanding of non-representational theories as a far broader cross-disciplinary project. Secondly, in the light of non-representational theories, I will be revisiting an old debate between culturalists and structuralists on matters of experience and representation. I consider, in a spirit of re-evaluation, Stuart Hall’s now classic essay on two paradigms in the development of cultural studies, as well as a selection of related interventions made by Hall. Thirdly, I will look to potential future directions for empirical research that is informed by a non-representational theoretical approach, in an area which I call ‘quotidian cultural studies’. My recommendations are for work that might explore, for example, acquired habits or ways of the hand in the uses of new media technologies (among other skills of tool use), and paths that are trodden along the ground on foot and through narrative or other media settings. A critical appropriation of Tim Ingold’s writings in anthropology leads me to describe such work as ‘linealogical’ investigations of everyday life.

Freedom to Work: The Impact off Wireless on Labour Politics

2007 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-70
Author(s):  
Melissa Gregg
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
New Media ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Workplace Culture ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Labour Practice ◽  
Information Work ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Near Future

As the use of wireless communication technologies begins to settle into particular patterns, this essay considers the impact of such devices on workplace culture — particularly that of the professional middle class engaged in information work. While the study of workplace culture is usually the domain of sociology, management theory or organisational behaviour, media and cultural studies methods such as semiotic and discourse analysis, media consumption and theories of everyday life have a useful role to play in understanding how technology is marketed and subsequently used in and outside work contexts. As a starting point for this kind of approach, the paper combines an account of recent wireless advertising in Australia with research that is developing in ‘production-side cultural studies’ (Liu, 2004; Du Gay, 1997). In recognising the significance of new media technologies in contemporary labour practice and politics, it aims to move discussions beyond the notion of ‘work-life balance’ as a research endpoint to allow more variegated notions of freedom and flexibility for the workplaces of the present and near future.

The Everyday Life of Cultural Studies

1996 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-403
Author(s):  
David Cuthbert
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Everyday

Freedom to Work: The Impact of Wireless on Labour Politics

2007 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-70
Author(s):  
Melissa Gregg
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
New Media ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Workplace Culture ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Labour Practice ◽  
Information Work ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Near Future

As the use of wireless communication technologies begins to settle into particular patterns, this essay considers the impact of such devices on workplace culture — particularly that of the professional middle class engaged in information work. While the study of workplace culture is usually the domain of sociology, management theory or organisational behaviour, media and cultural studies methods such as semiotic and discourse analysis, media consumption and theories of everyday life have a useful role to play in understanding how technology is marketed and subsequently used in and outside work contexts. As a starting point for this kind of approach, the paper combines an account of recent wireless advertising in Australia with research that is developing in ‘production-side cultural studies’ (Liu, 2004; Du Gay, 1997). In recognising the significance of new media technologies in contemporary labour practice and politics, it aims to move discussions beyond the notion of ‘work–life balance’ as a research endpoint to allow more variegated notions of freedom and flexibility for the workplaces of the present and near future. We feel free only because we lack the language to describe our unfreedom. — Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real

scholarly journals Accounting the ‘self’: From diarization to life vlogs

2020 ◽  
pp. 135485652094761
Author(s):  
Yasmin Ibrahim
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
The Self ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
New Media Technologies

The diarization of the self emerged through historically contingent social and economic relations and the practice of accounting as an integral aspect of industrialization and capitalism. From the journal to new media technologies, the recording of everyday life is about the governance and construction of the self, illuminating the ‘everyday’ as a salient dimension of sense-making in relation to the wider world. Accounting the self today has gained renewed prominence through new media technologies and social media platforms and its increasing incorporation into everyday life, inviting a public interface. The teleology of older forms of accounting the self (i.e. the journal) to new media technologies needs to be seen through a continuum in which sociocultural and economic forces enmesh with the medium of communication as a tool of self-expression to capture the self in its diurnal mode. This article utilizes Raymond Williams’ notion of cultural materialism, in linking the diary as a modern technology of self-expression with vlogs in the post-digital terrain wherein material practices shed light onto our lifeworlds construed through the resources available within material and immaterial infrastructures, offering both agency and abstraction by capital. As such, the manifest cultural form is intimately mediated by cultural technologies.

scholarly journals Historicizing media, globalizing media research: infrastructures, publics, and everyday life

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Research ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractVisions of media spanning the globe and connecting cultures have been around at least since the birth of telegraphy, yet they have always fallen short of realities. Nevertheless, with the internet, a global infrastructure has emerged, which, together with mobile and smartphones, has rapidly changed the media landscape. This far-reaching digital connectedness makes it increasingly clear that the main implications of media lie in the extent to which they reach into everyday life. This article puts this reach into historical context, arguing that, in the pre-modern period, geographically extensive media networks only extended to a small elite. With the modern print revolution, media reach became both more extensive and more intensive. Yet it was only in the late nineteenth century that media infrastructures penetrated more widely into everyday life. Apart from a comparative historical perspective, several social science disciplines can be brought to bear in order to understand the ever more globalizing reach of media infrastructures into everyday life, including its limits. To date, the vast bulk of media research is still concentrated on North America and Europe. Recently, however, media research has begun to track broader theoretical debates in the social sciences, and imported debates about globalization from anthropology, sociology, political science, and international relations. These globalizing processes of the media research agenda have been shaped by both political developments and changes in media, including the Cold War, decolonization, the development of the internet and other new media technologies, and the rise of populist leaders.

Ubiquitous Food Imaging

2017 ◽  
pp. 141-152
Author(s):  
Yasmin Ibrahim
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
Everyday Objects ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Digital World ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Everyday Experiences

In our digital world, our notions of intimacy, communion and sharing are increasingly enacted through new media technologies and social practices which emerge around them. These technologies with the ability to upload, download and disseminate content to select audiences or to a wider public provide opportunities for the creation of new forms of rituals which authenticate and diarise everyday experiences. Our consumption cultures in many ways celebrate the notion of the exhibit and the spectacle, inviting gaze, through everyday objects and rituals. Food as a vital part of culture, identity, belonging, and meaning making celebrates both the everyday and the invitation to renew connections through food as a universal subject of appeal.

Smile or Die

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
René Boomkens
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
New Media ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Positive Thinking ◽  
Aesthetic Quality ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences ◽  
Cultural Turn

Aufstieg und Entwicklung der interdisziplinären akademischen Disziplin der Cultural Studies sind Teil eines breiteren cultural turn in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften, der für eine Verabschiedung monokausaler und reduktionistischer Methodologien steht zugunsten komplexer, holistischer und dialektischer Analysen sozialer und kultureller Prozesse. In der sogenannten Kritischen Theorie hat dies zu einem Aufmerksamkeitswechsel geführt von ökonomischen und politischen Ursachen sozialer Ungleichheit und sozialer Kämpfe zur Beharrlichkeit und irreduziblen Komplexität kultureller Differenzen oder von Andersheit, belegt durch wichtige Studien über die Rolle des Nationalismus, der Ästhetisierung des Alltagslebens und des wachsenden Einflusses der neuen Medien auf Kommunikation und Imagination. Dieser cultural turn in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften ist verbunden mit einem wachsenden Einfluss kultureller und zugleich post-politischer Formen von Macht im Alltagsleben, veranschaulicht durch die Dominanz der leistungsorientierten Kultur ›positiven Denkens‹ in verschiedenen gesellschaftlichen Bereichen, mit anderen Worten: einer neoliberalen Kultur und Ideologie. In den Kulturwissenschaften wird das historische Bewusstsein vom wachsenden Einfluss kultureller Macht kombiniert mit anthropologischer Forschung über die Besonderheiten gegenwärtiger Alltagskultur und einer starken Sensibilität für die Spannungen, Ungleichheiten und Widersprüche in dieser Kultur infolge der anwachsenden Globalisierung ihrer Bedingungen. Diese inter- oder transdisziplinäre Perspektive auf die Macht der Kultur kann schließlich nicht erfolgreich sein, ohne erneut seriös nachzudenken über die ästhetische Qualität oder Dimension der Alltagskultur und zugleich über den Bereich und die Substanz des Ästhetischen selber. <br><br>The rise and development of the interdisciplinary academic discipline of cultural studies is part of a broader cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences that represents a fare- well to mono-causal and reductionist methodologies in favor of a more complex, holistic and dialectical analysis of social and cultural processes. In so-called ‘critical theory’ this has led to a shift from economic and political sources of social inequality and struggles towards the persistence and irreducible complexity of cultural difference or otherness, evidenced by important studies of the role of nationalism, the aestheticization of everyday life or the growing influence of new media of communication and imagination. This cultural turn in humanities and social sciences is related to a growing influence of cultural and at the same time post-political forms of power in everyday life, exemplified by the dominance of a meritocratic culture of ‘positive thinking’ in different areas of society, or in other words: of a neoliberal culture and ideology. In cultural studies historical awareness of this growing influence of cultural power is combined with anthropological research into the specificities of contemporary everyday culture and with a strong sensibility for the tensions, inequalities and contradictions in that culture, due to an ever growing globalization of its conditions. This inter- or transdisciplinary perspective on the power of culture finally cannot do without a serious rethinking of the aesthetic quality or dimension of everyday culture – and at the same time a rethinking of the scope and substance of aesthetics itself.

scholarly journals Toward an ordinary ethics of mediated humanitarianism: An agenda for ethnography

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Corpus Ong
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
Production Studies ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Distant Suffering

This article takes stock of the insights and approaches advanced by the last 15 years of critical research in humanitarian communication and distant suffering while arguing for a new agenda for ethnography. Ethnography lays bare the messy and fertile terrains of human experience and disrupts idealized figures of witness and sufferer, aid worker and aid recipient, event and the everyday. Bringing into dialogue the anthropology of aid literature and media and cultural studies, this article proposes three important shifts for future research: (1) a focus on processes rather than principles in production studies of humanitarian communication, (2) a focus on ethics arising from everyday life rather than from events of distant suffering, and (3) and a focus on the lifeworlds of the poor and vulnerable rather than those of witnesses.

scholarly journals Songs of Exile: Music, Activism, and Solidarity in the Latin American Diaspora

JOMEC Journal ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 65
Author(s):  
Claudia Bucciferro
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
New Media ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Military Rule ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
Selection Of

This article addresses the connection between music and social activism in Latin America, centering on a discussion of ‘the music of exile’ as a cultural artifact of historical and conceptual significance for diasporic Latin American communities. The music produced by artists who were persecuted during the years of military rule was characterized by an engagement with social and political affairs, and often helped bring people together in the struggle for democratization. Despite censorship laws and other repressive measures enacted by the dictatorships, the music not only endured, but traveled across nations and continents, carried by the millions of people who were displaced due to State-sponsored violence. Now distributed through new media platforms such as YouTube, this music functions as a repository of memory and an emblem of solidarity that connects dispersed Latin American communities. Using Cultural Studies as a theoretical framework and employing an interpretive methodology, this study focuses on a selection of songs written between 1963 and 1992, presenting an analysis that centers on their lyrics and connects their meanings to larger social processes.  

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