Comfort and Contemporary Culture: The problems of the ‘good life’ on an increasingly uncomfortable planet

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Synopsis
To be comfortable stands as an aspiration of the times; to be comfortable defines what it means to live ‘the good life’. We talk about such things as maintaining a comfortable home, a comfortable lifestyle and a comfortable retirement. We seek out comforts in the relationships we sustain, the leisure practices we enact and the possessions we accumulate. We look for promises of comfort in the words of a close friend and our next pair of shoes. Furnished in the home, optionally outfitted in cars, scrutinised in holiday brochures and brushed up against in the clothes we wear, comfort is there, marking distinctions and framing decisions about what it means to live well. But by consuming comfort in the ways that we do, we do ourselves harm and limit our only planet of its capacity to provide for the requirements of life. This is a world that grows ever more uncomfortable because of comfort and when linked to consumption and excess, indulgence and apathy, it occurs that comfort carries effects that have existential consequence. Utilising analyses of popular culture and ethnographic accounts of everyday life, Comfort and Contemporary Culture works through case study accounts of comfort’s enactment to pose questions around what it means to live, now. Comfort and Contemporary Culture poses alternative renderings of the idea of comfort to return the concept to its earliest roots in notions of confortāre. The revisioning of what we take as comfort requires urgent attention, with the ecological, social and intrapersonal implications of comfort’s current excesses demonstrative of this need. This book will be relevant reading for students and scholars of cultural studies and sociology, cultural anthropology, social geography and studies of community.
Copyright:
2024

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
162 Pages
ISBN-13:
9781003802754
Related ISBNs:
9781003412984, 9781032536538, 9781032536545
Publisher:
Taylor and Francis
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Andrew T. Hickey
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Social Studies, Sociology
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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