Suchergebnisse

Time is the medium in which history and politics evolve, yet historians and political scientists have devoted limited efforts to understanding it. The familiar notion that time flows regularly, objectively and in a clear direction has severe limitations. Above all, it makes it difficult to understand the huge differences in perceptions of time in different cultural contexts. Norbert Elias argued that time, like money, can be understood as a social convention; it arises from the activity of "timing" or "scheduling". All living organisms have to align their actions to the rhythms of a real world, so natural selection has built into them the ability to detect and react to significant rhythms. Humans are unique because they relate to the world's rhythms in diverse ways, so different communities may experience time differently. Elias argued that as societies became larger and more complex, schedules became more inter‐twined, creating the illusion of a single, unified temporal dimension. Meanwhile, the increasing pace of social change generated a growing awareness of time as history. These changes are the foundations for our distinctively modern sense of time.

In recent years, children have become an increasingly important consumer market, and there is growing concern about the 'commercialization' of childhood. This book sheds fresh light on these debates, offering new empirical data and challenging critical perspectives on children's engagement with consumer culture from a wide range of international settings. The contributions are written both by well-known scholars and emerging researchers, and include studies of the history of children's consumption in the US and in Europe; discussions of new theoretical and methodological approaches to studying children's consumer culture; critical analyses of the practices and strategies of contemporary marketers; sociological accounts of the contexts of children's consumption in the family and the peer group; and culturally-informed analyses of the role of consumption in children's identity formation. Taken together, these studies outline a productive new agenda for research in this field, and provide ways of moving beyond established theories and approaches.

"This study examines the domains of public and private space--and the interstices between them--with a focus how women advance in the public arena drawing on the domestic politics of private in their drive for social justice and equality. The author examines the visual culture of first-wave feminists in Edwardian England and feminist developments in France." "--

From couture fashion to opulent perfumes and decadent food, the luxury goods and services industry has grown at an unprecedented rate even in the context of a global recession. But in contemporary digital culture does luxury still reside in material things, or rather the look of things? In this first study of luxury through the lens of visual culture, Armitage argues that luxury is undergoing a shift from material culture to the immaterial culture of the visual, offering new forms of luxury engagement and unparalleled levels of pleasure never before offered to the senses. Calling for a new understanding of luxury in the changing visual landscape of contemporary society, Luxury and Visual Culture embraces an extraordinary range of cultural forms, including fashion, photography, social media, television, and art. From the masterpieces of Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, to Richard Avedon's photography and Louis Vuitton's Flagship stores, the book explores key issues of globalization, digitization, consumer identity, "mass" luxury, and the role of art. This text is ideal for all students of contemporary luxury studies, as well as scholars and researchers in the field of visual culture