Overview
- Constitutes the first academic book on the long-running hit series Grand Designs
- Explores the material and symbolic meaning of the program in everyday life
- Responds to enduring popular and academic interest in home-making, consumer lifestyle and transformation
- Taps into current social trends in consumption and connects them with established television studies research, as well as literature on ethical, thrift, and sustainable practices across cultural studies, anthropology and sociology
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
The authors apply an empirically grounded, critical perspective to the study of television to reveal how people use the program in their everyday lives. The emphasis on everyday uses and meanings combines creatively with understanding the program theoretically, textually and in terms of its production structures. This position challenges framings of the popular lifestyle and factual television genre that has been dominated by a neoliberal or governmentality perspective for many years.
Presented by British designer and writer, Kevin McCloud, Grand Designs follows the progress of home owners as they embark on design, renovation and building projects at almost always dizzying scales of endeavour. Understanding the program as both a text to analyse and a site ofmaterial impact, the book draws on interviews with production members, home renovators, building practitioners and audiences, as well as references to associated media formats to provide contextual depth to the analysis. The authors argue that, as a cultural object, the program is both shaped by and enacts social discourses of home-making, design value and taste. Navigating public, commercial and promotional logics, Grand Designs sparks new forms of cultural production and consumer markets.
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Authors and Affiliations
About the authors
Aneta Podkalicka is a researcher and lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, Australia.
Esther Milne is Associate Professor of Media and Communication at Swinburne University, Australia.
Jenny Kennedy is a postdoctoral research fellow in Media and Communications at RMIT University, Australia.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Grand Designs
Book Subtitle: Consumer Markets and Home-Making
Authors: Aneta Podkalicka, Esther Milne, Jenny Kennedy
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57898-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-57897-6Published: 12 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-57898-3Published: 28 November 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 177
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 4 illustrations in colour
Topics: Screen Studies, Consumer Behavior, Media and Communication