Doing Things with Things: The Design and Use of Everyday Objects (Ethnoscapes) - Softcover

Dreier, Ole

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1138253146 ISBN 13: 9781138253148

Publisher: Routledge, 2016

Synopsis

It has been claimed that the natural sciences have abstracted for themselves a 'material world' set apart from human concerns, and social sciences, in their turn, constructed 'a world of actors devoid of things'. While a subject such as archaeology, by its very nature, takes objects into account, other disciplines, such as psychology, emphasize internal mental structures and other non-material issues. This book brings together a team of contributors from across the social sciences who have been taking 'things' more seriously to examine how people relate to objects. The contributors focus on every day objects and how these objects enter into our activities over the course of time. Using a combination of different theoretical approaches, including actor network theory, ecological psychology, cognitive linguistics and science and technology studies, the book argues against the standard notion of objects and their properties as inert and meaningless and argues for the need to understand the relations between people and objects in terms of process and change.

About this title

About the Author

Alan Costall is Professor of Ecological Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Ole Dreier is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1138253146
• ISBN 13: 9781138253148
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256