[csaa-forum] New Book: Andrew Hickey (2024) Comfort and Contemporary Culture

[Laurie Johnson]

Comfort and Contemporary Culture: The problems of the ‘good life’ on an increasingly uncomfortable planet

Andrew Hickey
University of Southern Queensland, Australia


To be comfortable stands as an aspiration of the times; to be comfortable defines what it means to live ‘the good life’. We talk about such things as maintaining a comfortable home, a comfortable lifestyle and a comfortable retirement. We seek out comforts in the relationships we sustain, the leisure practices we enact and the possessions we accumulate. We look for promises of comfort in the words of a close friend and our next pair of shoes. Furnished in the home, optionally outfitted in cars, scrutinised in holiday brochures and brushed up against in the clothes we wear, comfort is there, marking distinctions and framing decisions about what it means to live well. But by consuming comfort in the ways that we do, we do ourselves harm and limit our only planet of its capacity to provide for the requirements of life. This is a world that grows ever more uncomfortable because of comfort and when linked to consumption and excess, indulgence and apathy, it occurs that comfort carries effects that have existential consequence.

Utilising analyses of popular culture and ethnographic accounts of everyday life, Comfort and Contemporary Culture works through case study accounts of comfort’s enactment to pose questions around what it means to live, now. Comfort and Contemporary Culture poses alternative renderings of the idea of comfort to return the concept to its earliest roots in notions of confortāre. The revisioning of what we take as comfort requires urgent attention, with the ecological, social and intrapersonal implications of comfort’s current excesses demonstrative of this need.

https://www.routledge.com/Comfort-and-Contemporary-Culture-The-problems-of-the-good-life-on/Hickey/p/book/9781032536538


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Professor Laurie Johnson FSA FRHistS PhD MA BAHon BA DipT
English and Cultural Studies | School of Humanities and Communication | Q208B
President, Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association
Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (London)
Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK)
Chair, The Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize
Twitter: @LostPlayhouse
Ph: +61 7 4631 1739 | M: +61 413 303 904 | Fax: +61 4631 5597
E: Laurie.Johnson at unisq.edu.au<mailto:Laurie.Johnson at unisq.edu.au>
School of Humanities and Communication | Faculty of Business, Education, Law and Arts
University of Southern Queensland | Toowoomba, Queensland | 4350 | Australia

I acknowledge the Giabal and Jarowair peoples on whose unceded lands I live and work, and pay my deepest respects to First Nations Elders past, present, and emerging.

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