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Popular Culture as Everyday Life
In Popular Culture and Everyday Life Phillip Vannini and Dennis Waskul have brought together a variety of short essays that illustrate the many ways that popular culture intersects with mundane experiences of everyday life. Most essays are written in a reflexive ethnographic style, primarily through observation and personal narrative, to convey insights at an intimate level that will resonate with most readers. Some of the topics are so mundane they are legitimately universal (sleeping, getting dressed, going to the bathroom, etc.), others are common enough that most readers will directly identify in some way (watching television, using mobile phones, playing video games, etc.), while some t...
Encountering the Everyday
Everyday life is something we tend to take for granted, something that just is, something unnoticed. But everyday life is perhaps the most important dimension of society – it's where we live most parts of our lives with each other. This book provides a clear, contemporary and comprehensive overview of the sociologies of everyday life. Looking at everyday activities and experiences, from language and emotions to popular culture and leisure, Encountering the Everyday explores what social structures, orders and processes mean to us on a daily basis. The book carefully leads the reader through historical developments in the field, beginning at the earlier Chicago school and finishing with up-to-date ideas of postmodernism and interactionism. Each chapter relates theoretical ideas directly to case studies and real empirical research to make complex concepts and core issues accessible, relevant and engaging. Written by leading international scholars in the field, this truly global book will inspire and inform all students and scholars of everyday life sociology.
Gendered Bodies and Leisure
With its roots in Middle Eastern and North African dance, belly dance is a popular leisure activity in the West with women (and some men) of all ages and body types pursing the activity for diverse reasons. Drawing on empirical research, fieldwork, and interviews with participants, this book investigates the social world and small group cultures of American belly dance, examining the various ways in which people use leisure to construct the self and social relationships. With attention to gender expectations, body image, sexuality, community, spiritual experiences, and the process of identifying with a leisure activity, this book shows how people engage in the same pursuit in a variety of wa...
Ghostly Encounters
Dennis Waskul writes these lines about his first-hand experience with the supernatural in the introduction to his beguiling book Ghostly Encounters. Based on two years of fieldwork and interviews with 71 midwestern Americans, the Waskuls book is a reflexive ethnography that examines how people experience ghosts and hauntings in everyday life. The authors explore how uncanny happenings become ghosts, and the reasons people struggle with or against a will to believe. They present the variety and character of hauntings and ghostly encounters, outcomes of people telling haunted legends, and the nested consequences of ghostly experiences. Through these stories, Ghostly Encounters seeks to understand the persistence of uncanny experiences and beliefs in ghosts in an age of reason, science, education, and technology as well as how those beliefs and experiences.
The Tender Cut
Cutting, burning, branding, and bone-breaking are all types of self-injury, or the deliberate, non-suicidal destruction of oneOCOs own body tissue, a practice that emerged from obscurity in the 1990s and spread dramatically as a typical behavior among adolescents. Long considered a suicidal gesture, The Tender Cut argues instead that self-injury is often a coping mechanism, a form of teenage angst, an expression of group membership, and a type of rebellion, converting unbearable emotional pain into manageable physical pain. Based on the largest, qualitative, non-clinical population of self-injurers ever gathered, noted ethnographers Patricia and Peter Adler draw on 150 interviews with self-i...
Gaming as Culture
"This book presents the most current research in fantasy games and examines the cultural and constructionist dimensions of fantasy gaming as a leisure activity. Each chapter investigates some social or behavioral aspect of fantasy gaming and provides insight into the cultural, linguistic, sociological, and psychological impact of games on both the individual and society"--Provided by publisher.
Self-games and Body-play
One of the most fascinating dimensions of online chat and cybersex are the ways that their medium, the Internet, allows people to reconfigure relationships between self, body, and social interaction. Online chat participants discursively write a self into existence in a disembodied medium that allows for extreme fluidity and multiplicity; cybersex participants evoke bodies in words and images, manipulating relationships between selfhood and the corporeal body. Perhaps never before have so many people been actively involved in social psychological experiments in which they redefine themselves in ways that are so distinctively at the cutting edge of important social and cultural transformations. Based on over 150 interviews with online chat and cybersex participants, Self-Games and Body-Play is an empirically grounded analysis of how these unique experiences provide a lens for better understanding the nature of personhood in everyday life.
Media Q
Media Queered is a groundbreaking assessment of minorities and the media. Authorities including Larry Gross, Edward Alwood, Lisa Henderson, and Marguerite Moritz join several new scholars to examine four aspects of visibility: history, expertise, popularity, and technology. To supplement this research, media practitioners including journalists working in the gay and mainstream press contribute a unique series of interludes. The first is by Studs Terkel, who interviewed founders of the U.S. homophile movement. Written for scholars, students, and instructors of media and gender studies, Media Queered is also accessible for general readers intrigued by the recent flowering of queer characters, themes, and images in popular culture.
Forthcoming Books
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