DIY: The Search for Control and Self-Reliance in the 21st Century

Download or read book DIY: The Search for Control and Self-Reliance in the 21st Century written by Kevin Wehr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-03 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the driveway mechanic to the backyard gardener, many diverse people are "doing it themselves" by building or repairing the stuff of their daily lives without the aid of experts. Do It Yourself uses Habermas’s colonization of the lifeworld as a frame and mobilizes Marx’s concepts of alienation and mystification to examine how social behaviors can be a conscious reply to a complex and fast-moving world, a nostalgia for simpler times past, or a just an economic impulse. Each main chapter is anchored by an extended empirical example: back-to-the-land, home-schooling, and self-government.