Toby Miller is a British-Australian-US interdisciplinary social scientist. He is the author and editor of over 30 books, has published essays in more than 100 journals and edited collections, and is a frequent guest commentator on television and radio programs. His teaching and research cover the media, sports, labor, gender, race, citizenship, politics, and cultural policy, as well as the success of Hollywood overseas and the adverse effects of electronic waste. Miller's work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, German, Turkish, Spanish and Portuguese. He has been Media Scholar in Residence at Sarai, the Centrefor the Study of Developing Societies in India, Becker Lecturer at the University of Iowa, a Queensland Smart Returns Fellow in Australia, Honorary Professor at the Center for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland, CanWest Visiting Fellow at the Alberta Global Forum in Canada, and an International Research collaborator at the Centre for Cultural Research in Australia.
Popular Culture and Everyday Life offers a broad-randing survey of social and cultural theory, while also issuing an audacious challenge to contemporary cultural studies with its emphasis on speculation, rather than observation-the spectacular, at the expense of the routine. Combining an analysis of power and subjectivity drawn from cultural studies with perspectives on the everyday provided by ethnography, textual reading, ethnomethodology, and discourse analysis, Toby Miller and Alec McHoul invite us to question our participation in both dominant and subcultural practices. To achieve this end, each chapter focuses on a routine practice, such as eating or listening. Each opens with a summary of key ideas on the relevant subject, considers the discourses that construct these practices, and concludes with one or more empirical investigations. By acknowledging the historical specificity and mundane character of popular culture and everyday life by looking at everyday practices in their own right rather than merely as representations of something else, the authors open up the possibility of a significant departure in cultural studies.
