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Time and the Rhythms of Everyday Life: New Agendas and Directions
Summary: Time and the Rhythms of Everyday Life: New Agendas and Directions Editors: Elizabeth Shove (Lancaster University), Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck College, University of London) and Richard Wilk (Indiana University) "Time" has become a central topic of current debate, in the academy as well as in public life more generally. Anxieties about "time poverty" and hurriedness, burn-out and stress are a daily staple of public debate. There is widespread concern that our material civilization has spun out of control, become too fast for our own well-being and that of the planet -- fears that find an expression in movements ranging from slow food and slow cities to slow sex and a simpler life-style. Yet, we are surprisingly ill-equipped to understand the temporal organization of everyday life and its changing rhythms. Existing research has primarily focused either on aggregate statistical information (national time use series) or on the sense of rush and contemporary anxieties about running out of time. What lies behind and shapes the temporal pattern of our lives and material culture, however, is imperfectly understood. This volume showcases new ways of thinking about the subject and establishes a new agenda of research.
Key Facts
Type of Activity: Academic Research - Other
Other: Elizabeth Shove
Dept/Research Group: Sociology
Project Description
Time and the Rhythms of Everyday Life: New Agendas and Directions offers a new intellectual agenda on the role of time in everyday consumption. It is designed as a pathway for readers into new ways of thinking about the temporal order of material practices, the significance of routines and their rhythm, and their emotional, moral, and political dynamics.
"Time" has become a central topic of current debate, in the academy as well as in public life more generally. Anxieties about "time poverty" and hurriedness, burn-out and stress are a daily staple of public debate. There is widespread concern that our material civilization has spun out of control, become too fast for our own well-being and that of the planet -- fears that find an expression in movements ranging from slow food and slow cities to slow sex and a simpler life-style. Yet, we are surprisingly ill-equipped to understand the temporal organization of everyday life and its changing rhythms. Existing research has primarily focused either on aggregate statistical information (national time use series) or on the sense of rush and contemporary anxieties about running out of time. What lies behind and shapes the temporal pattern of our lives and material culture, however, is imperfectly understood.
This volume showcases new ways of thinking about the subject and establishes a new agenda of research. It is meant as an intellectual tool box, giving students and researchers an introduction into the main subject of time and everyday practice, a critical overview of key questions, and a repertoire of new concepts and ideas that readers can apply and experiment with in their own field of work.
The volume is organized thematically, guiding readers through the core dimensions of the subject. Beginning with general conceptual questions of time and space in everyday life, the volume then turns to practices and routines, their coordination and disruption; to cycles and rhythms, and the interplay between material and natural, social and emotional forces; and, finally, to the temporalities of material culture. Chapters are deliberately kept short (around 6,000 words each) and use case studies to address conceptual and methodological questions of general interest. The volume covers several European countries, Turkey, the United States as well as parts of Asia (Japan) and Africa (Ghana). It draws on a wide range of expertise, bringing together leading international authors from sociology, anthropology, geography, history, and theory.
What is innovative and attractive about the volume is that it is the first to connect the study of practice and temporality with the field of material culture, and to investigate questions of coordination and rhythm alongside the emotional, moral and political dynamics and effects of ordinary routines. All consumption takes time and creates time. Yet in spite of its centrality to how we live our material lives, temporal dynamics have received little sustained attention in the booming field of consumption studies. Studies of material culture have shown how objects can become containers of feelings and identities over time, but, likewise, this research has had little to say about the temporality of practices as such. Studies on time, by contrast, have illuminated the evolution of daily, weekly, and yearly calendars and the influence of instruments like the clock on social relations, but have said less about the role of consumption in the production of time and the temporal organization of life. The contribution of this volume is to move the temporality of practices to the fore. Much, perhaps even most, of contemporary life is caught up in a series of routines, from eating and sleeping to commuting and washing. How do these rhythms evolve over time? How are they reproduced, modulated, and broken? Why do some societies have different rhythms of everyday life? How do people and institutions manage to coordinate practices with different rhythms, or fail to do so? And what do routines tell us about power and freedom in our material civilization? These are the central questions than run through this book.
Purpose of Research
Academic Research - Other
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