B Highmore
Biographic Data
| ID | 10770 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B Highmore |
| GIVEN NAMES | B |
| FAMILY NAME | Highmore |
| SIGNATURE | HIGHMORE B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sussex |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7865-5184 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 74 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Adventures in Lollard Street
This essay situates the emergence of the adventure playground movement in Britain within social and intellectual contexts. It provides a detailed account of the Lollard Adventure Playground, London, which lasted from 1955 to 1960, and describes the general ecology of the playground including indoor activities, the administration of the playground, and its mediation through pamphlets and journalism. It argues that the playground combined a Christi…
The Design Culture Reader
Les structures de sentiment et la critique de la vie quotidienne
Dans les années 1960 et 1970 est apparue en Grande-Bretagne ce que l’on pourrait appeler une « structure de sentiment » ordinaire, qui a redirigé une partie de l’énergie démocratique ayant conduit après-guerre à l’émergence de l’État-providence vers la création de nouveaux goûts. Ceux-ci ont contribué à la transformation des espaces domestiques réels et idéalisés en un environnement matériel marqué par la simplicité, la sociabilité, et par un sen…
Berdamai dengan Keterbatasan Epistemologis
Following the proliferation of digital media usage, the world has seen an increasing amount of digitally-mediated lives in everyday contexts. While anthropological scholarship has started to address this ever-growing subject, anthropologists are mainly preoccupied with human engagements in virtual worlds that have their own tangible and embodied sense of spatiality (e.g., online role-playing and gaming communities). In so doing, anthropologists h…
Keywords and keywording
This article pursues two tasks. The first is to clarify the value and productivity of Williams’s Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (first edition 1976, second expanded edition 1983a) for the project of Cultural Studies. This clarification is helped, I argue, by reading it alongside Vološinov’s Marxism and the philosophy of language (published in Russian in 1929, translated into English in 1973). The second and related task is a specul…
Making a Scene
What makes ‘a scene’? Is it a collective attitude, a distinctive argot (‘you dig it?’), a shared look, a common drug-of-choice? Or is it a physical space? A place to congregate and just to ‘be’? It is hard to imagine the New York punk and New Wave scene of the late 1970s without CBGBs in the Bowery, or to imagine the New York disco scene without Studio 54. But while a specific venue might feel like the centre of a scene, it soon becomes apparent …
Aesthetic matters
What would it mean to treat Cultural Studies as a project that has had amongst its accomplishments the production of new forms and styles of writing, and a generative approach to aesthetics? An initial answer to this question would be that this would recognize how Cultural Studies interceded in an academic environment not only through its concern with supplying ambitious questions and insisting on a broad range of objects of scrutiny, but also by…
Esteetiline on oluline
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Cynicism in British post-war culture
Cynicism in British Post-War Culture pursues a cultural sensibility across nearly four decades of British culture. Its purview takes us from Philip Larkin to Mark E. Smith (of the band The Fall), b
Out of Birmingham
This piece of writing is an experiment in digressive and peripatetic cultural studies that follows a thought path around the city of Birmingham in England. Instead of constructing an argument it tries to perform a mode of enquiry that could be sensitive to the 'simultaneous non-synchroncity' of culture, and could craft a form of writing adequate to history's torn and crumpled state. It doesn't try to claim preferential treatment for such a practi…
Feeling it
In 1964 the furniture designer and entrepreneur Terence Conran, along with various partners, opened a shop in London selling furniture and household goods. It was a ‘lifestyle shop’ called Habitat. By the late 1970s is was a fixture of many cities and towns across Britain. This essay treats Habitat as a taste formation, as part of a structure of feeling that was specific to what many social commentators were calling the ‘new middle class’. The es…
Taste After Bourdieu
Antoine Hennion, The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation, translated by Margaret Rigaud and Peter Collier, Farnham, Ashgate, 2015, 339pp, £75 hardbackDavid Wright, Understanding Cultural Taste: Sensation, Skill and Sensibility, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 188pp, £60 hardbackA few years ago I undertook an audit of the theoretical resources that a Cultural Studies programme I was reviewing was offering their undergraduates. The p…
Taste as Feeling
This article is premised on two presumptions. The first is, I think, uncontroversial, the second less so. The first presumption is that today, serious discussions about taste usually start out by rehearsing Pierre Bourdieu’s contribution to our understanding of how taste preferences operate in society. This, then, is merely to recognize that when Bourdieu first published books such as The Love of Art (1969, written with Alain Darbel) and Distinct…
Formations of Feeling, Constellation of Things
This essay revisits Raymond Williams's notion of 'structures of feeling' with the intention of clarifying what Williams meant by 'feelings', and of exploring the concept's possible range and reach within the study of culture. It recovers the initial anthropological context for the phrase by reconnecting it to the work of Ruth Benedict and Gregory Bateson. It goes on to suggest that while the analysis of 'structures of feeling' has been deployed p…
Booknote
Introducing Mood Work
In this introduction we suggest a number of ways that, mood has been and, can be a productive way to approach, various forms of labour including: the emotional expenditure of those that, care either professionally or as 'voluntary' ' labourers; the pedagogic labour of teaching; and, the mood, work of the state and, the media. The introduction also introduces the main themes of the essays in this special issue.Keywords emotional labour, Heidegger,…
Metaphor City
Giving a Damn
The Stuart Hall Project, directed by John Akomfrah, Smoking Dog Films/ BFI, 2013 At the end of an essay from 1981 Stuart Hall claimed that is 'one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why popular culture matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don't give a damn about it'. (1) I was reminded of Hall's words last week while listening to a radio programme marking fifty years of Cultural Studies (Bingo, Barbie and Barthes:…
Brutalist Wallpaper and the Independent Group
One of the difficulties facing cultural historians studying the Independent Group (IG) is to gauge its significance in the production of visual culture by those who attended the meetings. As a loose discussion group the IG can be seen as emerging from the same cultural forces that would, a little later, produce the academic counter-discipline of cultural studies. With its interests in consumer culture and in the social life of new technologies (p…
Cultural Studies in its Mirror Phase
Catherine Driscoll, Modemist Cultural Studies, Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2010, 292pp; paperback £26.95Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2010, 356pp; paperback £16.99Paul Smith (ed), The Renewal of Cultural Studies, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2011, 266pp; paperback £19.99Graeme Turner, What's become of Cultural Studies?, London, Sage, 2012, 180pp; paperba…
Playgrounds and Bombsites
This essay argues that bombsites in Britain were a vivid component of a social imaginary that informed the postwar social settlement. Postwar reconstruction, which often involved additional demolition, also produced ruined landscapes that were complexly associated with war damage. The bombsite–demolition site as an accidental or purposeful playground for children added to the vacillating meanings of these ruined landscapes, as they signaled both …
Feeling Our Way
This essay is a contribution to an emergent investigation into the usefulness of "mood" as an analytic category for communication and cultural studies. In it I offer a number of descriptive moodscapes that demonstrate the way that mood can direct us to a material world of orientation, attunement, and atmosphere. I also suggest that cultural studies, as a writerly form, can also engage generatively with mood as a productive and political project.K…
Migrant Cuisine, Critical Regionalism and Gastropoetics
This essay is based around two sentences from Nadeem Alslam's 2004 novel Maps for Lost Lovers. From this base comes an exploration of what aesthetics could mean for cultural studies, and what sorts of practices it could foster. The essay argues for the pertinence this may have for the study of food culture, while also taking up the project of 'critical regionalism' and 'gastropoetics' as a way of moving from the tightly figured frame of a fragmen…
‘Then Turn the Page’
Introduction
To claim that food matters is perhaps to repeat the most obvious of statements. How could it not; it is essential for sustaining life. Yet, how it matters, and where and when it matters, invites a variety of responses. At its most urgently political the response would necessarily invite an analysis of the world-system's deployment of hunger as a weapon of global class struggle. At its most pleasurable, but often at its most facile and over-privil…
Homework
Routine is a central feature of everyday life, yet its peculiar rhythms, and the range of experiences associated with it, are often neglected within cultural studies and sociology. Simmel’s attempt to provide a sociological aesthetics is seen as a project that needs reanimating for the study of everyday life routines. This does not mean, however, that Simmel is the only, or the best, guide to the aesthetic dimensions of everyday routine life. In …
Feeling Our Way
This essay is a contribution to an emergent investigation into the usefulness of "mood" as an analytic category for communication and cultural studies. In it I offer a number of descriptive moodscapes that demonstrate the way that mood can direct us to a material world of orientation, attunement, and atmosphere. I also suggest that cultural studies, as a writerly form, can also engage generatively with mood as a productive and political project.K…
Formations of Feeling, Constellation of Things
This essay revisits Raymond Williams's notion of 'structures of feeling' with the intention of clarifying what Williams meant by 'feelings', and of exploring the concept's possible range and reach within the study of culture. It recovers the initial anthropological context for the phrase by reconnecting it to the work of Ruth Benedict and Gregory Bateson. It goes on to suggest that while the analysis of 'structures of feeling' has been deployed p…
The Taj Mahal in the High Street
This paper takes the British high street South Asian or “Indian” restaurant as an example of diasporic popular culture. It traces the historical emergence of the Indian restaurant as a popular form, through the early nineteenth-century to the present. Alongside the emergence of a thriving diasporic restaurant culture the paper also examines the way that South Asian food culture has been represented in recipe books and food guides. Arguing that po…
Alimentary Agents
Taking a micro-social example of a specific moment of food consumption, this paper contributes to the social aesthetic study of intercultural food exchange. Theoretically it mobilises the varied resources of anthropology, psychoanalysis and social aesthetics to argue that ‘alimentary pedagogy’ is a central component to becoming social, and that in a multicultural society ‘alimentary pedagogy’ is an urgent but equivocal political matter. It sets o…
Playgrounds and Bombsites
This essay argues that bombsites in Britain were a vivid component of a social imaginary that informed the postwar social settlement. Postwar reconstruction, which often involved additional demolition, also produced ruined landscapes that were complexly associated with war damage. The bombsite–demolition site as an accidental or purposeful playground for children added to the vacillating meanings of these ruined landscapes, as they signaled both …
A Passion for Cultural Studies
Taste After Bourdieu
Antoine Hennion, The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation, translated by Margaret Rigaud and Peter Collier, Farnham, Ashgate, 2015, 339pp, £75 hardbackDavid Wright, Understanding Cultural Taste: Sensation, Skill and Sensibility, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 188pp, £60 hardbackA few years ago I undertook an audit of the theoretical resources that a Cultural Studies programme I was reviewing was offering their undergraduates. The p…
Taste as Feeling
This article is premised on two presumptions. The first is, I think, uncontroversial, the second less so. The first presumption is that today, serious discussions about taste usually start out by rehearsing Pierre Bourdieu’s contribution to our understanding of how taste preferences operate in society. This, then, is merely to recognize that when Bourdieu first published books such as The Love of Art (1969, written with Alain Darbel) and Distinct…
Image-breaking, God-making
May 01 2011 "Image-breaking, God-making": Paolozzi's Brutalism Ben Highmore Ben Highmore BEN HIGHMORE is Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. His most recent books are A Passion for Cultural Studies (Palgrave, 2009) and Ordinary Lives Studies in the Everyday (Routledge, 2010), and the edited collection The Design Culture Reader (Routledge, 2009). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Arti…
Hopscotch Modernism
From a remarkably innovative point of departure, Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) suggests that modernist literature and art were not the only cultural practices concerned with reclaiming the everyday and imbuing it with significance. At the same time, Roger Caillois was studying the spontaneous interactions involved in games such as hopscotch, while other small scale institutions such as the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, London attempted …
Richard Hamilton at the Ideal Home Exhibition of 1958
This essay develops a close reading of Richard Hamilton's Gallery for a Collector of Brutalist and Tachiste Art , his contribution to the Daily Mail 's Ideal Home Exhibition of 1958. Included in the Gallery for a Collector was Hamilton's 1957 painting Hommage à Chrysler Corp . The essay treats both the gallery and the painting as ‘meta‐aesthetic’ practices that register something of the aesthetic historicity of their social and cultural moment. T…
Rough Poetry
Journal Article Rough Poetry: Patio and Pavilion Revisited Get access Ben Highmore Ben Highmore Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Oxford Art Journal, Volume 29, Issue 2, June 2006, Pages 269–290, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcl005 Published: 01 June 2006
The Politics of Aesthetics
The Politics of Aesthetics. By JACQUESRANCIERE, trans. Gabriel Rockhill. Continuum. 2004. pp. 126 £14.99 (pbk). INCERTAIN circles Jacques Rancière is probably still best known for his association with the scientific Marxism of Louis Althusser. Along with Pierre Macherey, Roger Establet, and Étienne Balibar, Rancière contributed to Althusser's 1965 seminar on Marx's late work that resulted in the volume Lire le capital (1968). In the wake of the e…
Ethno‐Graphics
Books reviewed in this article: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews Catherine De Zegher (ed.), Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World JoAnn Wypijewski, Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art
Turning Spatial
Victor Burgin. In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture Victor Burgin. Some Cities Rosalyn Deutsche. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics
Spiders, Spit and Frock Coats
Yve‐Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide
Obligation to the Ordinary
Focuses on the works of Michel de Certeau on cultural studies and its ethical considerations. Works and contributions of de Certeau on ethnology; Views on culture as ordinary; Description on other writings and the approach used by de Certeau
Ethno‐Graphics
Books reviewed in this article: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews Catherine De Zegher (ed.), Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World JoAnn Wypijewski, Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art
Everyday Life and Cultural Theory
Everyday Life and Cultural Theory provides a unique critical and historical introduction to theories of everyday life. Ben Highmore traces the development of conceptions of everyday life, from the cultural sociology of Georg Simmel, through the Mass-Observation project of the 1930s to contemporary theorists such as Michel de Certeau
Cultural history’s crumpled handkerchief
Dana Arnold, Re–presenting the Metropolis: Architecture, Urban Experience and Social Life in London 1800–1840 Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth–Century London
Homework
Routine is a central feature of everyday life, yet its peculiar rhythms, and the range of experiences associated with it, are often neglected within cultural studies and sociology. Simmel’s attempt to provide a sociological aesthetics is seen as a project that needs reanimating for the study of everyday life routines. This does not mean, however, that Simmel is the only, or the best, guide to the aesthetic dimensions of everyday routine life. In …
The Politics of Aesthetics
The Politics of Aesthetics. By JACQUESRANCIERE, trans. Gabriel Rockhill. Continuum. 2004. pp. 126 £14.99 (pbk). INCERTAIN circles Jacques Rancière is probably still best known for his association with the scientific Marxism of Louis Althusser. Along with Pierre Macherey, Roger Establet, and Étienne Balibar, Rancière contributed to Althusser's 1965 seminar on Marx's late work that resulted in the volume Lire le capital (1968). In the wake of the e…
Hopscotch Modernism
From a remarkably innovative point of departure, Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) suggests that modernist literature and art were not the only cultural practices concerned with reclaiming the everyday and imbuing it with significance. At the same time, Roger Caillois was studying the spontaneous interactions involved in games such as hopscotch, while other small scale institutions such as the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, London attempted …
Rough Poetry
Journal Article Rough Poetry: Patio and Pavilion Revisited Get access Ben Highmore Ben Highmore Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Oxford Art Journal, Volume 29, Issue 2, June 2006, Pages 269–290, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcl005 Published: 01 June 2006
An epistemological awakening
The historian and theorist Michel de Certeau offers a challenge and a promise to all those involved in the practice of ‘writing culture’. Part of the promise that his work contains is for a true interdisciplinarity that is fashioned out of a much more integrated approach to culture; but it is also a promise that suggests an approach to culture that is much more responsive to the particularity and peculiarity of culture (an ‘interdiscipline’ that …
Richard Hamilton at the Ideal Home Exhibition of 1958
This essay develops a close reading of Richard Hamilton's Gallery for a Collector of Brutalist and Tachiste Art , his contribution to the Daily Mail 's Ideal Home Exhibition of 1958. Included in the Gallery for a Collector was Hamilton's 1957 painting Hommage à Chrysler Corp . The essay treats both the gallery and the painting as ‘meta‐aesthetic’ practices that register something of the aesthetic historicity of their social and cultural moment. T…
Alimentary Agents
Taking a micro-social example of a specific moment of food consumption, this paper contributes to the social aesthetic study of intercultural food exchange. Theoretically it mobilises the varied resources of anthropology, psychoanalysis and social aesthetics to argue that ‘alimentary pedagogy’ is a central component to becoming social, and that in a multicultural society ‘alimentary pedagogy’ is an urgent but equivocal political matter. It sets o…
The Taj Mahal in the High Street
This paper takes the British high street South Asian or “Indian” restaurant as an example of diasporic popular culture. It traces the historical emergence of the Indian restaurant as a popular form, through the early nineteenth-century to the present. Alongside the emergence of a thriving diasporic restaurant culture the paper also examines the way that South Asian food culture has been represented in recipe books and food guides. Arguing that po…
A Passion for Cultural Studies
Bitter after Taste
Introduction
To claim that food matters is perhaps to repeat the most obvious of statements. How could it not; it is essential for sustaining life. Yet, how it matters, and where and when it matters, invites a variety of responses. At its most urgently political the response would necessarily invite an analysis of the world-system's deployment of hunger as a weapon of global class struggle. At its most pleasurable, but often at its most facile and over-privil…
Image-breaking, God-making
May 01 2011 "Image-breaking, God-making": Paolozzi's Brutalism Ben Highmore Ben Highmore BEN HIGHMORE is Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. His most recent books are A Passion for Cultural Studies (Palgrave, 2009) and Ordinary Lives Studies in the Everyday (Routledge, 2010), and the edited collection The Design Culture Reader (Routledge, 2009). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Arti…
‘Then Turn the Page’
Brutalist Wallpaper and the Independent Group
One of the difficulties facing cultural historians studying the Independent Group (IG) is to gauge its significance in the production of visual culture by those who attended the meetings. As a loose discussion group the IG can be seen as emerging from the same cultural forces that would, a little later, produce the academic counter-discipline of cultural studies. With its interests in consumer culture and in the social life of new technologies (p…
Cultural Studies in its Mirror Phase
Catherine Driscoll, Modemist Cultural Studies, Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2010, 292pp; paperback £26.95Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2010, 356pp; paperback £16.99Paul Smith (ed), The Renewal of Cultural Studies, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2011, 266pp; paperback £19.99Graeme Turner, What's become of Cultural Studies?, London, Sage, 2012, 180pp; paperba…
Playgrounds and Bombsites
This essay argues that bombsites in Britain were a vivid component of a social imaginary that informed the postwar social settlement. Postwar reconstruction, which often involved additional demolition, also produced ruined landscapes that were complexly associated with war damage. The bombsite–demolition site as an accidental or purposeful playground for children added to the vacillating meanings of these ruined landscapes, as they signaled both …
Feeling Our Way
This essay is a contribution to an emergent investigation into the usefulness of "mood" as an analytic category for communication and cultural studies. In it I offer a number of descriptive moodscapes that demonstrate the way that mood can direct us to a material world of orientation, attunement, and atmosphere. I also suggest that cultural studies, as a writerly form, can also engage generatively with mood as a productive and political project.K…
Migrant Cuisine, Critical Regionalism and Gastropoetics
This essay is based around two sentences from Nadeem Alslam's 2004 novel Maps for Lost Lovers. From this base comes an exploration of what aesthetics could mean for cultural studies, and what sorts of practices it could foster. The essay argues for the pertinence this may have for the study of food culture, while also taking up the project of 'critical regionalism' and 'gastropoetics' as a way of moving from the tightly figured frame of a fragmen…
Introducing Mood Work
In this introduction we suggest a number of ways that, mood has been and, can be a productive way to approach, various forms of labour including: the emotional expenditure of those that, care either professionally or as 'voluntary' ' labourers; the pedagogic labour of teaching; and, the mood, work of the state and, the media. The introduction also introduces the main themes of the essays in this special issue.Keywords emotional labour, Heidegger,…
Sociology (25 works) · Art (22 works) · Aesthetics (18 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · History (14 works) · Art history (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Visual arts (11 works)