Philosophy, Culture and Everyday Life

Research in our unit all springs from the conviction of the value of bringing critical theory to bear on everyday phenomena, challenging their taken-for-grantedness and refusing to accept that apparently banal elements of ordinary life are unworthy of our attention.

Nowhere is this more true than in the work of our Philosophy, Culture and Everyday Life research group. This group brings thinkers like Gramsci, Adorno and Bakhtin to bear on areas such as popular music, food and travel cultures and film comedy. It analyses post-recessionary culture through a feminist lens. It probes questions around science and bioethics or atheism and belief drawing on philosophical tools.

Philosophical insights are also put to work to analyse different models of education and to point towards more co-operative ways of learning or to conceive education in terms of gift relations rather than the narrowly economistic or instrumental frames that currently dominate. In each case, critical theory and philosophy are used to generate new insights about the everyday in ways that have a potential to feed into practice and change behaviours.

• Matt Connell
• Benjamin Curtis
• Stephanie Genz
• Ruth Griffin
• Steven Jones
• Patrick O'Connor
• Ben Taylor
• Neil Turnbull
• Andreas Wittel

• BELL, D., HOLLOWS, J. and JONES, S., 2015. Campaigning culinary documentaries and the responsibilization of food crises. Geoforum. ISSN 0016-7185
• Connell M, Talking about old records: Generational musical identity among older people. Popular Music, Cambridge University Press, 2012, 31/2, 261-278
• CLUGHEN, L. and CONNELL, M., 2012. Writing and resistance: reflections on the practice of embedding writing in the curriculum. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 11 (4), pp. 333-345. ISSN 1741-265X
• GENZ, S., 2016. Austerity bites: refiguring Dracula in a neo-liberal age. In: L. BLAKE and A. SOLTYSIK MONNET, eds., Neoliberal Gothic: international Gothic in the neoliberal age. Manchester University Press International Gothic Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press. (Forthcoming)
• GENZ, S., 2016. Baring the recession: sexual sensationalism and gender (a)politics in popular television. In: H. DAVIES and C. O'CALLAGHAN, eds., Gender and austerity in popular culture. London: I.B. Tauris.
• GRIFFIN, R., 2016. 'Sympathetic sentiments: affect, emotion and spectacle in the modern world' and 'Sensational subjects: the dramatization of experience in the modern world'. Im@go (8), pp. 121-125. ISSN 2281-8138
• HOLLOWS, J., JONES, S., TAYLOR, B. and DOWTHWAITE, K., 2013. Making sense of urban food festivals: cultural regeneration, disorder and hospitable cities. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events, 6 (1), pp. 1-14. ISSN 1940-7963
• JONES, S., 2016. The Gramscian turn in British cultural studies: from the Birmingham School to cultural populism. In: P. BOUNDS and D. BERRY, eds., British Marxism and cultural studies: essays on a living tradition. Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN 9781409454816
• O'CONNOR, P., 2014. Atheism reclaimed. London: Iff Books.
• O'CONNOR, P. and CROME, K., 2016. Learning together: Foucault, Sennett and the crisis of the co-operative character. Journal of Co-operative Studies, 49 (2), pp. 30-42. ISSN 0961-5784
• TURNBULL, N., 2015. Modern technology within the Western theological imaginary. Im@go (6), pp. 7-26. ISSN 2281-8138
• TURNBULL, N, 2017, The Two Kings of Modernity: Science and Religion in Simmel's Metaphysics of Value, Im@go, 10, pp. 21-32
• WITTEL, A., 2018. Higher education as a gift and as a commons. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 16 (1), pp. 194-213. ISSN 1726-670X
• WITTEL, A., 2016. Digital transitions. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing. ISBN 9783659779640