Everyday without exception? Making space for the exceptional in contemporary sociological studies of streetlife

Over the last twenty years we have witnessed an increasing prevalence of ethnographic studies concerned explicitly with the social and cultural life, and production, of space and specifically of the urban public realm. In line with a wider trend, many of these studies seek to analyse urban public life through the prism of the ‘everyday’, using accounts of the ordinary to explore the ways that city streets are used and experienced. In this paper I seek to interrogate this multifarious deployment of ‘everydayness’ in ethnographic work on urban ‘streetlife.’ This interrogation is both theoretical, exploring how the everyday became the privileged approach for studies of the street, and methodological, asking what is it about our methodological choices that lends itself to conceptualising public life as everyday, and what might we do differently? At the same time, the paper will draw on ethnographic work on London’s South Bank to open up a space to consider the exceptional in sociological studies of streetlif

Houses in a Landscape: Memory and Everyday Life in Mesoamerica

In Houses in a Landscape, Julia A. Hendon examines the connections between social identity and social memory using archaeological research on indigenous societies that existed more than one thousand years ago in what is now Honduras. While these societies left behind monumental buildings, the remains of their dead, remnants of their daily life, intricate works of art, and fine examples of craftsmanship such as pottery and stone tools, they left only a small body of written records. Despite this paucity of written information, Hendon contends that an archaeological study of memory in such societies is possible and worthwhile. It is possible because memory is not just a faculty of the individual mind operating in isolation, but a social process embedded in the materiality of human existence. Intimately bound up in the relations people develop with one another and with the world around them through what they do, where and how they do it, and with whom or what, memory leaves material traces. Hendon conducted research on three contemporaneous Native American civilizations that flourished from the seventh century through the eleventh CE: the Maya kingdom of Copan, the hilltop center of Cerro Palenque, and the dispersed settlement of the Cuyumapa valley. She analyzes domestic life in these societies, from cooking to crafting, as well as public and private ritual events including the ballgame. Combining her findings with a rich body of theory from anthropology, history, and geography, she explores how objects—the things people build, make, use, exchange, and discard—help people remember. In so doing, she demonstrates how everyday life becomes part of the social processes of remembering and forgetting, and how “memory communities” assert connections between the past and the present.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1050/thumbnail.jp

Towards a conceptualisation and critique of everyday life in HRI

This paper focuses on the topic of “everyday life” as it is addressed in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research. It starts from the argument that while human daily life with social robots has been increasingly discussed and studied in HRI, the concept of everyday life lacks clarity or systematic analysis, and it plays only a secondary role in supporting the study of the key HRI topics. In order to help conceptualise everyday life as a research theme in HRI in its own right, we provide an overview of the Social Science and Humanities (SSH) perspectives on everyday life and lived experiences, particularly in sociology, and identify the key elements that may serve to further develop and empirically study such a concept in HRI. We propose new angles of analysis that may help better explore unique aspects of human engagement with social robots. We look at the everyday not just as a reality as we know it (i.e., the realm of the “ordinary”) but also as the future that we need to envision and strive to materialise (i.e., the transformation that will take place through the “extraordinary” that comes with social robots). Finally, we argue that HRI research would benefit not only from engaging with a systematic conceptualisation but also critique of the contemporary everyday life with social robots. This is how HRI studies could play an important role in challenging the current ways of understanding of what makes different aspects of the human world “natural” and ultimately help bringing a social change towards what we consider a “good life.

The ethics of ‘public understanding of ethics’—why and how bioethics expertise should include public and patients’ voices

“Ethics” is used as a label for a new kind of expertise in the field of science and technology. At the same time, it is not clear what ethical expertise consists in and what its political status in modern democracies can be. Starting from the “participatory turn” in recent social research and policy, we will argue that bioethical reasoning has to include public views of and attitudes towards biomedicine. We will sketch the outlines of a bioethical conception of “public understanding of ethics,” addressing three different issues: (a) the methodological relevance of moral questions and problems raised by lay persons in everyday life regarding biomedicine and technology, (b) the normative relevance of such lay moralities for the justification of ethical decisions, and (c) the necessity of public deliberation in this context. Finally, we draw conclusions in view of the concepts and methods such a conception of “public understanding of ethics” should employ

Individual choices? Bioscience, culture and society as approaches to genes, eating and health

This paper presents the background and a plan for an interdisciplinary study that aims at examining the practices of eating as an entanglement of biology, culture and society all together. Our interest is on genes not only as a biological fact but also as a scientific discovery that increasingly shapes our understanding of the interconnections between genotype, eating patterns and health. Genetics is assumed to bear a growing role in the self-understanding and eating practices of future consumers. In this paper, we first highlight the basic assumptions on the role of the social and the individual in theory of practices, food-relating taste psychogenomics, and cultural studies

Holiday Home, Sweet Home: a Phenomenological Approach to Second Home Living in Ireland

This study constructs a phenomenological account of the second home living experience in Ireland, exploring the interactions between the everyday home life and the holiday home life of the second home owner. It is contextualized by a critical review of the relevant literatures on post-modernism, cosmopolitanism, home and second home living. The thesis utilises a package of participant-centred qualitative methodologies (including in-depth interviews, audio diaries and participants’ photographs) in order to produce a fine-grained insight into their experiences of second home living. The fieldwork consists of two phases, the first based on in-depth interviews with second home owners and the second based on a further series of in-depth interviews driven by the participants’ audio diaries and photographs. The key themes to emerge from the first phase of this study are: everyday life; family life; friends and neighbours; frequency of use, access, mobility and transcendence; other holidays; activities in the second home; acquisition of home; primary home; attachment and rituals. The second phase of the study was developed to explore these in greater detail and it emerges that there is considerable overlap between the ‘everyday’ or primary home lives and the ‘holiday’ or second home lives of the participants of the study. It is suggested that holiday home life constitutes a ‘stripped down’ version of home that allows for more ‘living’. The study thus examines the very essence of what we understand tourism to be; tourism cannot be understood except in relation to ‘home’, it is our point of departure into a place and space that is different. The study reveals that in the case of second home living home remains an integral part of the tourism experience. It concludes that while there are similarities between everyday home life and everyday holiday home life, the everyday and the touristic, there are significant differences. It is also clear, however, that the holiday home owners do not find this ambiguity uncomfortable and indeed they flit between homes with practised ease

Stigmatised, marginalised and overlooked: health, later life and gender in India and the United Kingdom

Dominant discourses and conceptual frameworks tend towards stereotypical understandings of what ‘the issues’ are for older people. This forces research, policy framing and everyday discourse down predictable pathways. These stereotypical discourses on old age locate health in the body, in access to health practitioners and in being cared for. This chapter will challenge these stereotypes by demonstrating how a focus on what older people do, that is not pre-determined by ageist thinking, produces a broader understanding of what determines health in later life

Contours in reflexivity: Commitment, criteria and change

This article examines the intellectual contours in calls to reflexivity in social research. In charting changes in these calls and their ideas on the role of social research in society, the article draws out lessons for future orientation. Whilst highlighting that the contribution of social research to our common understanding is part of its vitality, different authors have sought to see it in terms of how social actions are produced in research texts, via the role of experience as a starting point for reflexivity, to deploying exclusion of the researcher from dominant forces in order to produce more accurate explanations of social relations. Overall, we can be left bewildered in the face of these differences. Yet the article concludes by arguing that each has its place for clarifying the role and place of social research in society, but that they should not be over-extended as that produces an inward-looking perspective and leads to a paralysis in practice

Blogging art and sustenance : artful everyday life (making) with water

In the local area of Western Port Catchment, Victoria, Australia, I engaged in an arts-based qualitative inquiry over seven years. As a marine ecologist, educator, maker and mother, I looked to artists who created artworks in relation to water to investigate how art-making might contribute to traditional science-based Sustainability Education. Initially I examined: What alternative relationship is negotiated and knowledge attained between an artist and a waterway in the art-making process? Artworks, photographs and transcripts of time spent with seven women – each of whom creatively encounter their local waterways in their everyday lives – were captured on my private research blog. A new query surfaced: How can I sustain waterways if I am not sustaining myself? An alternative methodology of blogging formed (bodyplaceblogging). I used an awareness of my body and its inclusion in the ecology of the world around me (place) through Somerville’s (1999) embodied response to place which asserts a body’s right to know place. With the bodyplaceblogging process, I moved through a post-structural/ (post)qualitative style onto a posthuman platform. I began to think with-water, moving playfully through an initial methodological frame of sustainable education (Sterling, 2001); beauty in everyday life (Rautio, 2009); post modern emergence (Somerville, 1999); and material thinking (Carter, 2004), into an emerging methodology that continued to be reframed as I encountered the words and images of the local artists, my children, the academic and theoretical literature (e.g. Grosz; Barad; Bachelard; Rautio; Deleuze and Guattari), and an emerging critical, embodied, place-aware everyday life. Data analysed in the blog was discovered to be data again in the thesis-writing process, leading to an a-typically formed and formatted thesis: a blogged, knitted blanket of space, place and body-squares. A linear notion of time became disrupted in a space of virtual time preserved in the past (blog posts) and actual time passing in the present (academic/prose) (Grosz, 2005). Here there is an abundance of matter made with, and making, all that I encounter in my mothering, artful, ecological, everyday life with water. Sustainability, as a movement, is traditionally defined as resisting the catastrophe before the end, sustaining what we have in rations – a provocation for lack. New possibilities for sustenance and for what is becoming, and unbecoming, emerge here in the making processes of everyday life