Everyday Life Ecologies: Sustainability, Crisis, Resistance is about those complex, sticky, but also open arrangements of bodies, objects, and plants that make up daily existence. The multiple and interlocking lines of a long capitalist crisis disrupt their normal flow: sometimes, they open opportunities for transformation, sometimes else, they foreclose horizons of change. In contrast with approaches that respond to environmental crisis by advocating “sustainable lifestyles” and “responsible behaviors,” Alice Dal Gobbo suggests that it is necessary to address the complex socio-material relationalities that constitute everyday ecologies. Beyond that, the book argues for their politicization, illuminating daily existence as embedded in capitalist relations of re/production. Combining political ecology and new materialist sensitivities, this book investigates the ways in which ecologically damaging logics are inscribed in everyday assemblages through their habitual rehearsal and libidinal hold. But it also points to how apparently banal acts of resistance embody and promote different logics, such as a logic of care and an ecological “aesth-ethics” of desire. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Northeast of Italy, this journey through the concrete matters and beings of daily life in crisis talks beyond this emplaced reality and dialogues with emerging forms of contestation and prefiguration that put socio-ecological reproduction at their center.

Ecology of Everyday Life examines the ecological impulse as a 'desire for nature', a desire that emerges as people within industrial capitalist contexts respond to the personal and aesthetic, rather than the physical and political implications of ecological breakdown. While exploring the historical causes of this romantic 'desire for nature', Heller also offers a way to reconstruct ideas of both `nature' and 'desire', drawing from feminist, anarchist, and social ecological theory. She provides an activist response to ecological questions, arguing that the ecology movement too often links ecological problems to personal, psychological, and spiritual concerns, rather than to concerns of social justice. Yet rather than dismiss such personal and qualitative concerns, Heller links the desire for a more meaningful and integral quality of life to the activist impulse itself. Questioning assumptions about 'nature', 'desire', and 'the ecological agenda', the author encourages readers to consider new ways of desiring nature that entail changes not only in personal life-style and outlook, but changes in social institutions as well. Chaia Heller holds a MA in psychology and has worked for many years as a clinical social worker counselling and advocating for women struggling with issues of domestic abuse and poverty. In addition, she has had a long career as a teacher and international lecturer in the fields of social ecology and ecofeminism and is currently on the faculty at the Institute for Social Ecology. She also teaches at the University of Massachusetts where she is pursuing a PhD.

The dramatic acceleration of digital technologies and their integration into physical products is transforming everyday objects. Our domestic appliances, furniture, clothing, are growing in intelligence. Smart objects are increasingly capable of interacting with humans in a purposeful manner with intentionality. This collection of essays, descriptions of empirical work, and design case studies brings together perspectives from interaction design, the humanities, science and technology studies, and engineering, to map, explore and interrogate ways in which our relationships with everyday smart objects might expand and be re-imagined. By offering a critical assessment on the growing place of smart technology in everyday environments, this book outlines a transdisciplinary research agenda for the future of 'smartness' to help define, envision, and inspire future collaborative design practices. These essays propose an understanding and design of smart objects that embrace their hybrid nature as shifting and blending tools, agents, machines, or even 'creatures'. Authors argue that smart objects have the potential to enter into multiple kinds of relationships with humans, and form complex human-nonhuman ecologies that are both meaningful and empowering in the context of everyday life. This book also shines a light on the hidden infrastructures behind the functioning of smart objects with stirring debates tackling questions of technology, human values, and economic and ecological impact. Whether you are a design scholar, design practitioner or design activist this book will inspire through offering theoretical insights, design concepts and practical ways on how to engage in this research agenda for future smartness.

This book analyses representations of sustainable everyday life across advertising, eco-reality television, newspapers, magazines and social media. It foregrounds the discursive and networked basis of sustainability and demonstrates how such media representations connect the home and local community to broader political, social and economic contexts. The book shows how green lifestyle media negotiate issues of sustainability in varying ways, reproducing the logic of existing consumer society while also sometimes providing projections of a more environmentally friendly existence. In this way, the book argues that everyday lifestyles are not an irredeemable problem for environmentalism but an important site of environmental politics.

Talk and Social Theory will be an essential text for students of sociolinguistics and the analysis of discourse in conversation. introduces the study of 'talk' linked to social theory; develops a new theoretical argument that reviews the relations between local social practices and general societal processes of talk; the use of everyday examples - a family dinner table, a school classroom, an academic advising session in an community college - enhances the book’s appeal to a non-specialist as well as a specialist audience; reviews the key theoretical perspectives and conceptual frameworks in social theory and in the sociolinguistic study of talk.

A brilliant collection of thought-provoking essays on gender, nature, passion, and society from an acclaimed feminist, philosopher, and poet In The Eros of Everyday Life, one of America’s most provocative writers and thinkers offers insightful and compelling views on a wide range of social, ecological, and gender issues. From a distinctly feminist point of view, Susan Griffin explores the intricate connections between science and religion, nature and society, women and men, and love and consciousness. She brilliantly commingles lyrical memoir with cogent social commentary, producing a colorful literary tapestry that examines contemporary life and culture, its contradictions and complexities, and the rise of new ideologies. The Eros of Everyday Life showcases a decade’s worth of the very best writing by this acclaimed Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. It is an enthralling anthology that reveals the ways in which Western society undermines itself by diminishing both woman and the natural environment, and yet it is also a celebration of the power of passion, and the remarkable evolution of the human capacity for love.

Nature is all around us, in the beautiful but also in the unappealing and functional, and from the awe-inspiring to the mundane. It is vital that we learn to see the agency of the natural world in all things that make our lives possible, comfortable and profitable. The Ecology of Everyday Things pulls back the veil of our familiarity on a range of ‘everyday things’ that surround us, and which we perhaps take too much for granted. This key into the magic world of the everyday can enable us to take better account of our common natural inheritance. Professor James Longhurst, Assistant Vice Chancellor, University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) For many people, ecosystems may be a remote concept, yet we eat, drink, breathe and interface with them in every moment of our lives. In this engaging textbook, ecosystems scientist Dr. Mark Everard considers a diversity of ‘everyday things’, including fascinating facts about their ecological origins: from the tea we drink, to the things we wear, read and enjoy, to the ecology of communities and space flight, and the important roles played by germs and ‘unappealing creatures’ such as slugs and wasps. In today’s society, we are so umbilically connected to ecosystems that we fail to notice them, and this oversight blinds us to the unsustainability of everyday life and the industries and policy environment that supports it. The Ecology of Everyday Things takes the reader on an enlightening, fascinating voyage of discovery, all the while soundly rooted in robust science. It will stimulate awareness about how connected we all are to the natural world and its processes, and how important it is to learn to better treat our environment. Ideal for use in undergraduate- and school-level teaching, it will also interest, educate, engage and enthuse a wide range of less technical audiences.