Böcker av Barbara Adam

An accessible introduction to the expanding field of cultural studies, "Theorizing Culture" provides a range of critical perspectives on contemporary cultural forms, practices, and identities. In an era of posts', terms such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, post-Enlightenment, post-feminism, post-disciplinary, and even post-history pervade much of the conceptual terrain for cultural research. At the same time, more familiar analytical categories, such as representation, experience, reality, and power, have been neglected. This book agrees with the important postmodern focus on contingency, temporality, and situational definitions of the world. Without the neutral ground of modernism beneath our feet, we face culturally specific, contingent questions of value. Extending beyond the postmodern debate to reinstate the critical dimension in cultural analysis, this anthology covers a wide range of contemporary subjects, such as the body, AIDS, race, the environment, and virtual reality.

Introducing a "timescape" perspective, the author dislodges taken-for-granted assumptions about environmental change, enables reformulation of environmental problems and their cures and provides the potential for strategies to deal with some of the most severe environmental hazards of our time.

What is time? How has our relationship to time changed through history and how does time structure our social lives? In this lively introduction, Barbara Adam explores the changing ways in which time has been understood and how this knowledge is embedded in cultural practices.

In this book the author moves beyond the time of clocks and calendars in order to study time as embedded in social interactions, structures, practices and knowledge, in artefacts, in the body, and in the environment. Adam suggests ways not merely to deconstruct but to reconstruct both common-sense and social science understanding.