Everyday life is fast becoming a key concept within the social sciences and humanities. In this contemporary and highly relevant new book, Michael E. Gardiner proposes that there exists a counter-tradition within everyday life theorizing. This counter-tradition has sought not merely to describe lived experience, but to transform it by elevating our understanding of the everyday to the status of a critical knowledge. In his analysis Gardiner engages with the work of a number of significant theorists and approaches, including: -- The French tradition of everyday life theorizing, from the Surrealists to Henri Lefebvre, and from the Situationist International to Michel de Certeau -- Agnes Heller and the relationship between the everyday, rationality and ethics -- Carnival, prosaics and intersubjectivity in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin -- Dorothy E. Smith's feminist perspective on everyday life. Critiques of Everyday Life demonstrates the importance of an alternative, multi-disciplinary everyday life paradigm and offers a myriad of new possibilities for critical social and cultural theorizing and empirical research.