Popular Culture and Everyday Life

Popular Culture and Everyday Life offers a broad-randing survey of social and cultural theory, while also issuing an audacious challenge to contemporary cultural studies with its emphasis on speculation, rather than observation-the spectacular, at the expense of the routine. Combining an analysis of power and subjectivity drawn from cultural studies with perspectives on the everyday provided by ethnography, textual reading, ethnomethodology, and discourse analysis, Toby Miller and Alec McHoul invite us to question our participation in both dominant and subcultural practices. To achieve this end, each chapter focuses on a routine practice, such as eating or listening. Each opens with a summary of key ideas on the relevant subject, considers the discourses that construct these practices, and concludes with one or more empirical investigations. By acknowledging the historical specificity and mundane character of popular culture and everyday life by looking at everyday practices in their own right rather than merely as representations of something else, the authors open up the possibility of a significant departure in cultural studies.