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 topics will appeal more-or-less depending on a reader’s gender, interests, and recreational pastimes (putting on makeup, watching the Super Bowl, homemaking, etc.). This book will remind readers of their own similar experiences, provide opportunities to reflect upon them in new ways, as well as compare and contrast how experiences relayed in these pages relate to lived experiences. The essays will easily translate into rich and lively classroom discussions that shed new light on a familiar, taken-for-granted everyday life—both individually and collectively.
At the beginning of the book, the authors have provided a grid that shows the topics and themes that each article touches on. This book is for popular culture classes, and will also be an asset in courses on the sociology of everyday life, ethnography, and social psychology.
Table of Contents:
Foreword
Introduction: Popular Culture as Everyday Life
Phillip Vannini and Dennis D. Waskul
Essays on the Daily Life of Popular Culture
1. Watching Television
Thomas Conroy
2. Watching Reality Television
Tony E. Adams
3. Watching Drug Commercials
Charles Edgley
4. Using Mobile Phones
Christopher J. Schneider
5. Sharing and Waiting on Facebook
Staci Newmahr
6. Reading
Michael Schwalbe
7. Making Video
Phillip Vannini
8. Sharing Selfies
Uschi Klein
9. Playing Music
Simon Gottschalk
10. Seeing Live Music
Emily M. Boyd
11. Playing Games is (Not Always) Fun
J. Patrick Williams
12. Sleeping
Carolyn Ellis
13. Having Sex
Beth Montemurro
14. Going to the Bathroom
Dennis D. Waskul
15. Getting Dressed
John C. Pruit
16. Putting on Makeup
Rebecca F. Plante
17. Drinking Coffee
Pernille S. Stroeback
18. Exercising
Michael Atkinson
19. Kicking Ass
Dale C. Spencer
20. Watching the Super Bowl
Bernard D. Glowinski and Joseph A. Kotarba
21. Home-Making
Karen McCormack
22. Having Pets
Leslie Irvine
23. On Not Driving
Sherryl Kleinman
24. Snow-Gazing
David Redmon
25. Shopping
Keith Berry
26. Trick-or-Treating
William Ryan Force
27. Staying in Hotels
Orvar Löfgren
28. (Not) Smoking
Justin A. Martin
29. Consuming Craft
Michael Ian Borer
About the Author :
Phillip Vannini is Canada Research Chair in Public Ethnography and Professor of Communicationand Culture at Royal Roads University. He is the author of five books and editor of seven, as well asthe editor of two book series, including Interactionist Currents (Ashgate). All of his scholarship deals with cultural and everyday life issues. Several of his journal articles and chapters for edited books have also dealt with popular culture and everyday life issues, such as research studies on camping, eating, drinking, travelling, building, consuming, body modification, experiencing the weather, and more.
Dennis D. Waskul is a Professor of Sociology and Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Minnesota State University, Mankato. He has authored or edited six books and is editor of the book series Interactionist Currents (Ashgate). He has published many empirical studies, including various investigations of the use of new media technologies for sexual purposes, sensual sociology, and the intersections of fantasy and lived experience. Dennis serves on the editorial board for multiple journals, including Sexualities and Qualitative Sociology.
Review :
"Ultimately, this is a very rewarding text, and one that this reader will be coming back to many times."
--Will Gibson, University College London, in Symbolic Interaction
"Relevant for multiple disciplines, Popular Culture as Everyday Life offers readers a unique (and even experimental) perspective on popular culture that at times reads like a diary, at other times like a history lesson, and at still other times promises to be a time capsule or snapshot representing popular culture as it currently exists in the early twenty-first century. Whether they are embracing the culture, resisting the culture, or merely co-existing with the culture, the authors in this volume collectively document and examine the place, function, meaning, and value that the culture in question has in their everyday lives."
-- Carol Rambo, University of Memphis
"Peter Berger argued that the most important thing you can know about someone is what they take for granted, and these days, it is largely about popular culture. The gripping essays show the richness of "the mundane doings of people and their ways of life" in constructing social and moral orders, even as they celebrate the profoundly trivial. The chapters will motivate students to do their own investigations of everyday life."
-- David Altheide, Arizona State University
"Popular Culture as Everyday Life celebrates how daily commonplaces can become rich subjects for deep sociological insights. The diverse chapters reveal the mundane doings of people to be anything but. A must read for anyone who has ever slept, gotten dressed, drank coffee, put on makeup, gone to the bathroom, has never smoked or kicked ass, has watched television, or has had sex."
--Eugene Halton, University of Notre Dame
