This volume explores the emotions that are intricately woven into the texture of everyday life and experience. A contribution to the literature on the sociology of emotions, it focuses on the role of emotions as being integral to daily life, broadening our understanding by examining both ¿core¿ emotions and those that are often overlooked or omitted from more conventional studies. Bringing together theoretical and empirical studies from scholars across a range of subjects, including sociology, psychology, cultural studies, (...) history, politics and cognitive science, this international collection centres on the ¿everyday-ness¿ of emotional experience. (shrink)

This book works with the literature of the everyday, memory studies, and non-representational geography to open up a novel understanding of memorials not just as everyday objects, but also as fundamental to urban modernity.

In Navigating Everyday Life, Peter Adams explores the moments when everyday experience seems to open up spaces beyond what we normally experience. Adams draws on two philosophical concepts: finitude, the things that bind a person to a situation, and transcendence, the things that lie beyond these boundaries.

This research focuses upon tracing the acculturative trends of the Hui Muslim community in Xi'an. It suggests that the existence of Muslims in China is a dialectical process between the adaptation to the Chinese culture and the retention of essentially Islamic religious traits. It is exclusively based upon ethnography and aims to investigate qualitatively the patterns of acculturation/retention of the Hui in the light of four socio-religious variables, i.e. identity, dietary habits, religious festivals and life passage rituals, social networking (...) and marital homogamy. This is a small scale qualitative research based on participant observation, interviews, and an analysis of historic, archival, and documentary material. The sample consists of Hui people of Xi'an both from within and outside the Muslim Quarter without any restriction of age and gender. The archival and qualitative data is derived from the iconography and fieldwork in Xi'an between November 2011 and December 2014. Applying Gans definitions of acculturation and assimilation, this paper concludes that the Hui are acculturated in the Han society but not assimilated, as they exhibit retention of ethnic religious traits. (shrink)

Everyday life practices are one of the focuses of interest for so-called 'sustainable transitions'. Efforts in making daily life more ecological have ranged from awareness-raising and behaviour change strategies to socio-technical innovations, but have produced limited results so far. In a present characterised by a prolonged and multifaceted crisis it is imperative that, as social scientists, we interrogate the (un)sustainability of everyday practices from a more critical angle, linking them to reflections about capitalism's ecological destructiveness. One (...) fruitful way of doing so is to interrogate the dimension of subjectivity as a space where collective discourses, practices and desires are embodied in concrete experience and actions. Drawing on ethnographic material on everyday energy use, I suggest that contemporary ways of living certainly contribute to the overall reproduction of capitalism and yet, in the (dis)juncture of the crisis, more sustainable livelihoods can be experimented with and prefigured. Subjectivity is one crucial dimension in which this process unravels. (shrink)

-- v. 3. From modernity to modernism (towards a metaphilosophy of daily life).

Understanding Everyday Life All of sociology necessarily begins with the understanding of everyday life, and all of sociology is directed either to ...

The void deck, originally developed for housing projects in Singapore, refers to the open space located on the ground floor of a residential building. The model of the void deck was exported to Suzhou Industrial Park and later used in a growing number of high-rise residential developments in China. Taking community interiority as a new perspective, the discussion of void decks and everyday life investigates whether the void deck endows a new layer of interiority to communal life (...) as a special type of threshold space in China’s highly dense and high-rise residential environments. The growing number of domestic objects in the void decks represents a consensual reconstruction of community interiority, allowing the reflection and rediscovery of the resonant membrane that mediates every relationship between people and things living in a substantially enclosed community. The study of void deck, its status and its transformation reflects how neo-liberal community spaces and new social relations in the communities in China have been changing: the communities are evolving from a consumption-based and top–down designed space, circling back to a deeper relationship between people and community within the urban transformation. (shrink)

Everyday Life and Cultural Theory provides a unique critical and historical introduction to theories of everyday life. Ben Highmore traces the development of conceptions of everyday life, from the Mass Observation project of the 1930s to contemporary theorists. Individual chapters examine: * Theories of the everyday * Fragments of everyday life * Surrealism: the marvelous in the everyday * Walter Benjamin's Trash Aesthetics * Mass Observation: the science of everyday (...) life * Henri Lefebvre's Dialectics of Everyday Life * Michel de Certeau's Poetics of Everyday Life * Everyday life and the future of cultural studies. (shrink)

The Everyday Life Reader brings together a wide range of thinkers from Freud to Baudrillard with primary sources on everyday life such as the Mass Observation survey and key texts by Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, to provide a comprehensive resource on theories of everyday life. Ben Highmore's introduction surveys the development of thought about everyday life, setting theories in their social and historical context, and each themed section opens with an (...) essay introducing the debates. Sections include: * Situating the Everyday * Everyday Life and National Culture * Ethnography Near and Far * Reclamation Work * Everyday Things. (shrink)

In the field of psychology, the topic of everyday life as a specific subject of inquiry has been afforded little attention. Indeed, everyday life has recently been analyzed mainly in psychological studies that examine people's ways of behaving and thinking when they act in situations termed as mundane and ordinary. These studies are mainly carried out in two fields of social psychology which we refer to in general terms as Social Cognition and Social Representation Theory. The (...) aim of this paper is to examine how both these fields treat some of the features commonly attributed to everyday life. In particular, the features of familiarization, continuity and stability over time and automaticity are discussed in order to try to figure out meeting points between the two fields mentioned. (shrink)

Religion, Race, Multiculturalism, and Everyday Life takes a spirited conceptualist look back into the history of our development. The book sets out to explore the ways in which a punditry of human equality continues to lock in unassailably assured logical postures, enabled by the historically intertwined roles played by power and the passage of time, towards the invention and sustenance of social truth. Religion, race, and multiculturalism have been written about many times, and from a variety of academic, (...) discipline-specific perspectives. Nonetheless, these social issues remain ever relevant to any sincere bid to understand the inegalitarian aspects of modern society. Religion, Race, Multiculturalism, and Everyday Life was primarily written with serious students of philosophy, sociology, the humanities, and history in mind. The author contends that we should never be too afraid to explore contentious or difficult philosophical and social questions. (shrink)

How can we apply philosophy to our everyday lives? Can philosophy affect the way we live? This book will show how philosophy can help to improve your thinking about everyday life. And how, by improving the quality of your thinking, you can improve the quality of your life. It will make you more aware of what you think and why, and how knowing this can help you can change the way you think about your life. (...) Full of practical examples and straightforward advice, and written by an expertin the field, this guide can help you become calmer and happier, and make better decisions. (shrink)

Despite its prevalence in emerging economies, everyday-life business deviance and its antecedents have received surprisingly little research attention. Drawing on strain theory and the business-ethics literature, we develop a socio-psychological explanation for this deviance. Our analysis of 741 owners of Chinese small- and medium-sized enterprises suggests that materialism and trust in institutional justice affect EBD both directly and indirectly in a relationship mediated by the ethical standards of SME owners. These findings have important implications for researching deviant business (...) behavior within SMEs. (shrink)

The present review essay discusses Peter Bratsis’s work Everyday Life and the State. It is argued that Bratsis produces a sound contribution to the on-going debate on state theory, which has its particular strengths in the innovative treatment of the public-private divide and an elaborate critique of fetishistic and ideological relations in the field of the political. In this, Bratsis builds on a broad range of structuralist, poststructuralist and dialectical positions. Deficiencies of his work are likewise to be (...) found in this bricolage of theoretical approaches: it is argued that conflicting epistemological and ontological fundamentals are not sufficiently taken into account, which consequently leads to reductionist and errant conclusions. This is especially evident in the confusion of ‘structuralist’ and ‘dialectical’ heuristics, which leads to an insufficiently materialist picture of the state in relation to ‘everyday life’. (shrink)

In our day and age, everyday life has become a receptacle of various spheres of human life and development. Its expansion and current role of the main reference point for the valuation of phenomena and processes can be seen in the media, various branches of the economy, politics, education, religion, science, art, new technologies, etc. Therefore, the question that we seek to answer in our article is the following: what is the role of democratic politics and educational (...) practice in the context of the modern appreciation of everyday life as the most essential locus of human life? (shrink)

Cheating is deeply embedded in everyday life. The costs of the most common forms of cheating total close to a trillion dollars annually. Part of the problem is that many individuals fail to see such behavior as a serious problem. "Everyone does it" is a common rationalization, and one that comes uncomfortably close to the truth. That perception is also self-perpetuating. The more that individuals believe that cheating is widespread, the easier it becomes to justify. Yet what is (...) most notable about analysis of the problem is how little there is of it. Whether or not Americans are cheating more, they appear to be worrying about it less. In Cheating, eminent legal scholar Deborah L. Rhode offers the only recent comprehensive account of cheating in everyday life and the strategies necessary to address it. Because cheating is highly situational, Rhode drills down on its most common forms in sports, organizations, taxes, academia, copyright infringement, marriage, and insurance and mortgages. Cheating also reviews strategies necessary to address the pervasiveness and persistence of cheating in these contexts. We clearly need more cultural reinforcement of ethical conduct. Efforts need to begin early, with values education by parents, teachers, and other role models who can display and reinforce moral behaviors. Organizations need to create ethical cultures, in which informal norms, formal policies, and reward structures all promote integrity. People also need more moral triggers that remind them of their own values. Equally important are more effective enforcement structures, including additional resources and stiffer sanctions. Finally, all of us need to take more responsibility for combatting cheating. We need not only to subject our own conduct to more demanding standards, but also to assume a greater obligation to prevent and report misconduct. Sustaining a culture that actively discourages cheating is a collective responsibility, and one in which we all have a substantial stake. (shrink)

In the field of psychology, the topic of everyday life as a specific subject of inquiry has been afforded little attention. Indeed, everyday life has recently been analyzed mainly in psychological studies that examine people's ways of behaving and thinking when they act in situations termed as mundane and ordinary. These studies are mainly carried out in two fields of social psychology which we refer to in general terms as Social Cognition and Social Representation Theory. The (...) aim of this paper is to examine how both these fields treat some of the features commonly attributed to everyday life. In particular, the features of familiarization, continuity and stability over time and automaticity are discussed in order to try to figure out meeting points between the two fields mentioned. (shrink)

Applying Aesthetics to Everyday Life surveys current debates in the field of everyday aesthetics, examining its history, methodology and intersections with cognate research areas. Lisa Giombini and Adrián Kvokacka bring together an international team of renowned scholars who are shaping the present and future of the discipline. They demonstrate how the historical origins of everyday aesthetics emerges across the history of Western aesthetic thought, from Renaissance thinkers to the modern German philosophers Baumgarten, Kant and Heidegger. Chapters (...) shed light on the field's methodological underpinnings, tracing its theoretical foundations back to epistemology and ethics and assess the potential of everyday aesthetics as a theoretical tool. They reveal its interdisciplinary nature and how it assists various fields of inquiry, including environmental and urban aesthetics, conservation ethics and the philosophy of art. Through fresh explorations of its origins, background and contemporary developments, this collection advances a new definition of everyday aesthetics and provides a cutting edge reflection on the world we inhabit today. (shrink)

_Everyday Life and the Sacred_ offers gender sensitive interdisciplinary perspectives from the fields of feminist theology and religious studies on the everyday and the sacred. The volume aims to re-configure the current domain of religion and gender studies.

_Everyday Life and the Sacred_ offers gender sensitive interdisciplinary perspectives from the fields of feminist theology and religious studies on the everyday and the sacred. The volume aims to re-configure the current domain of religion and gender studies.

Brazil has one of the highest levels of economic disparity in the world. The educational system plays a large role in this reality, acting as a mechanism of social exclusion. Neoliberalism has resulted in the commodification of education, empowering private schools while undermining the public system. This has created a vicious cycle, whereby educational inequality reflects and reinforces social inequality. Such a system violates the rights of children not lucky enough to be born into wealth – the right to equal (...) education; to equal opportunity; and equal treatment. From within this context, we propose a model, dubbed The Eagle’s Flight, for psychological intervention in public schools. This will form an extension of our research group’s Psychosocial Assessment and Intervention – Prevention, Community and Liberation, which has been an on-going project for the past fourteen years. The intervention model advocates monitoring child development from a critical, social and historical perspective, focusing on how school and community affect everyday life. The analysis will be carried out via the daily immersion of psychologists in the public school setting, who pay attention to key aspects which include various expressions of violence, financial difficulties related to unemployment, informal employment or drug dealing, poor access to health services, and the developmental impact of factors such as poverty. Based on Paulo Freire's Emancipatory Education Proposal and Ignacio Martín-Baró’s Liberation Psychology, intervention in school and community must be an interdisciplinary procedure, employing professionals from a range of disciplines involved in the study of child development. The various subjects’ perspectives seek to provide support for everyday problems and solutions, whilst breaking down the hegemonic model of psychological practice that considers the child and family as responsible for their problems. A concrete example of this critical psychosocial intervention model is presented. (shrink)

The notion of the everyday is at the heart of modern French cultural and Anglo-American cultural studies. Since the 1960s numerous writers, artists, philosophers, and social theorists have tried to home in on the patterns and rhythms of our daily activities. This book provides a detailed map of this territory, linking the pioneering work of such key figures as Georges Perec and Michel de Certeau, to currents in Surrealism, ethnography, fiction, film, and photography.

The everyday is that element of our material and social environment that comes closest to us, and is thus the least visible; for it stands to reason that it will neither attract attention to itself, nor catch the eye.

Philosophy distinguishes life in general, inherent in all living things and social life – human life in a society. The last means the numerous relationships of man to nature, society, and all other people. To understand the social life, it should be considered at two levels: first, as everyday life, and, second, as «civilized», much higher according to its contents. The everyday life and the «civilized life» – are interconnected integrally with (...) each other and at the same time are different from each other. Note the primary differences in the most general aspect. The usual everyday life is characterized by thing that people do daily, constantly. It is real, practical, biological-social life of each person: whether a man or a woman, an ordinary man and an eminent person. «The civilized life» is a life of higher level; it is penetrated by the theory, more comprehended and systematized; it is based on scientific and legal laws, philosophical truth and moral categories. Therefore people, on the basis of philosophical and scientific laws, regularities, and tendencies know the ancestral life, evaluate correctly estimate the present life and are able to predict the future life. Laws of everyday and civilized human life have been formulated. (shrink)

Looking at objectivity in scientific practices from a rhetoric point of view, this paper focuses on three related strategies of objectification found in the early psychoanalytic situation (1901-1924): formalisation and purification of language, accumulation of symbolic capital, and social distancing. On the one hand, these strategies help empower psychoanalytic discourse while, on the other, they reduce its proponents at the same time to subjects of these strategies. The aim of the analysis is to look at the moment when this happens (...) and for this purpose focuses on the many transformations, adaptations and alterations in one of Freud's most popular and influential books, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and its subsequent editions, as a collective effort by Freud and his students to build a language of their own. In the conclusions, the question as to if and in what way an objectified discourse can be resisted is addressed. (shrink)

En el presente estudio se busca superar la sensación que existe entre los autores de que la “cotidianidad” es un concepto vago, problemático, polisémico y que, por lo mismo, es inasible o incluso imperceptible. Esta tarea se vuelve aún más apremiante actualmente, al constatar la importancia central que ha ido tomando la categoría de cotidianidad en los estudios contemporáneos. Es así como hemos abordado este trabajo a partir de diferentes problemas: primero, desde la pregunta por la universalidad del concepto; segundo, (...) desde su carácter narrativo, desde su heterogeneidad y necesaria homogeneidad ; en tercer lugar, desde las posibles motivaciones; en cuarto lugar, desde su interrupción o quiebre; luego, desde su diferencia y cercanía con el concepto de “rutina” y, finalmente, desde sus consecuencias: desencantamiento y aburrimiento. This study aims to overcome some authors’ feeling that “everyday life” is a vague, problematic and polysemous concept which, for those reasons, is unreachable and even imperceptible. This task is more relevant at present, considering the central importance that “everyday life” category has gained in contemporary studies. We have approached this task starting from the analysis of different problems: first, the question of the universality of this concept; second, its narrative nature, its heterogeneity and necessary homogeneity ; third, the possible motivations; fourth, its interruption or break down; then, its difference and proximity to the concept of “routine” and; finally, its consequences: dis-enchantment and boredom. (shrink)

The Phenomenology of Everyday Life presents results from a rigorous qualitative approach to the psychological study of everyday human activities and experiences. This book does not replace scientific observation with humanistic analysis, but provides an additional perspective on significant human questions. The qualitative approach this book employs is grounded in the philosophical traditions of existentialism and phenomenology, which use dialogue as their major method of inquiry. These traditions are especially well adapted to encompass and describe human events (...) and activities. In addition, such events can be properly investigated only on the basis of a method sensitive enough to articulate the nuances of human experience and reflection. In this latter regard, it is important to note that insights deriving from literature and the humanities are equally as revealing of the human world as those from experimental psychology, biology or medicine. (shrink)

The work of literary structuralists, particularly Roland Barthes, provides sharper insights into ethnomethodology than symbolic interactionism, labeling theory, or phenomenology. Further, it suggests that the metaphor of text may be fruitful for analysts of everyday life. Greater theoretical benefits derive from that metaphor, however, if one applies it using the ideas of literary theorists outside the structuralist tradition.

Lynne Rudder Baker presents and defends a unique account of the material world: the Constitution View. In contrast to leading metaphysical views that take everyday things to be either non-existent or reducible to micro-objects, the Constitution View construes familiar things as irreducible parts of reality. Although they are ultimately constituted by microphysical particles, everyday objects are neither identical to, nor reducible to, the aggregates of microphysical particles that constitute them. The result is genuine ontological diversity: people, bacteria, donkeys, (...) mountains and microscopes are fundamentally different kinds of things - all constituted by, but not identical to, aggregates of particles. Baker supports her account with discussions of non-reductive causation, vagueness, mereology, artefacts, three-dimensionalism, ontological novelty, ontological levels and emergence. The upshot is a unified ontological theory of the entire material world that irreducibly contains people, as well as non-human living things and inanimate objects. (shrink)

In this incisive book, Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.

Young people everywhere seem to experience religion in their everyday living environments. They do theology. The question is how faith communities and theologians can nurture a creative and sensitive dialogue with these young people? More so, can we as researchers learn from each other across disciplines and geographic distances and how could the result of comparative dialogical research be relevant for youth ministry work and teaching? This contribution focuses on the value and prospects of comparative youth research on the (...) everyday life of these young people for academic theologians. While it takes the approach of Meredith McGuire as a starting point as she challenges dominant Western approaches to the study of religion, yet this contribution also aims to maintain theological perspective, as I seek to find connections. (shrink)

Yuriko Saito, the leading figure in the field, explores the nature and significance of the aesthetic dimensions of people's everyday lives. She argues that everyday aesthetics can be an effective instrument for directing humanity's collective and cumulative world-making project.

The aesthetics of everyday life, originally developed by Henri Lefebvre and other modernist theorists, is an extension of traditional aesthetics, usually confined to works of art. It is not limited to the study of humble objects but is rather concerned with all of the undeniably aesthetic experiences that arise when one contemplates objects or performs acts that are outside the traditional realm of aesthetics. It is concerned with the nature of the relationship between subject and object. One significant (...) aspect of everyday aesthetics is environmental aesthetics, whether constructed, as a building, or manipulated, as a landscape. Others, also discussed in the book, include sport, weather, smell and taste, and food. (shrink)

In addition, this volume can be used in courses specifically dealing with ethnomethodology, in graduate seminars dealing with these issues, and in academic work ...