Everyday Life Studies

Reanimating anarchist geographies: a new burst of colour

by Simon Springer

Springer S, Ince A, Pickerill J, Brown G, and Barker A. Forthcoming. Reanimating anarchist geographies: a new burst of colour. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography.

The late 19th century saw a burgeoning of geographical writings from influential anarchist thinkers like Peter... more The late 19th century saw a burgeoning of geographical writings from influential anarchist thinkers like Peter Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus. Yet despite the vigorous intellectual debate sparked by the works of these two individuals, following their deaths anarchist ideas within geography faded. It was not until the 1970s that anarchism was once again given serious consideration by academic geographers who, in laying the groundwork for what is today known as ‘radical geography’, attempted to reintroduce anarchism as a legitimate political philosophy. Unfortunately, quiet followed once more, and although numerous contemporary radical geographers employ a sense of theory and practice that shares many affinities with anarchism, direct engagement with anarchist ideas among academic geographers have been limited. As contemporary global challenges push anarchist theory and practice back into widespread currency, geographers need to rise to this occasion and begin (re)mapping the possibilities of what anarchist perspectives might yet contribute to the discipline.

Modes of music listening and modes of subjectivity in everyday life

by Ruth Herbert

Journal of Sonic Studies, Vol. 2(1), May 2012
Available online

Technologically mediated solitary listening now constitutes the prevalent mode of musical engagement in the... more Technologically mediated solitary listening now constitutes the prevalent mode of musical engagement in the Industrialized West. Music is heard in a variety of real-world contexts, and qualities of subjective experience might similarly be expected to be wide-ranging. Yet though much is known about function (music as a behavioural resource) less research has focused on ways in which music mediates consciousness. This essay critiques conceptualizations of music listening in extant literature and explores how listening to music in daily life both informs and reflects subjectivity.

Psychological and musicological literature on music listening commonly distinguishes between autonomous and heteronomous ways of listening, associating the former with unusual and the latter with mundane, habitual listening scenarios. Empirical findings from my research, which used ethnographic methods to tap qualities of subjective experience, indicate that attentive and diffused listening do not map neatly onto 'special' and 'ordinary' contexts and that a distributed, fluctuating attentional awareness and multimodal focus are central to many experiences of hearing music.

La sposa in convento (Padova e Venezia 1455-1458), in: S. Seidel Menchi, D. Quaglioni (ed.), Matrimoni in dubbio. Unioni controverse e nozze clandestine in Italia dal XIV al XVIII secolo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001, 123-148.

by Cecilia Cristellon

Ian McEwan, SATURDAY

by José Angel García Landa

A review, in Spanish, of Ian McEwan's novel SATURDAY (2005) understood as an allegorical portrait of Western... more A review, in Spanish, of Ian McEwan's novel SATURDAY (2005) understood as an allegorical portrait of Western middle-class everyday experience and life-stories within the historical and cultural context of the early 21st century.

Ritratto di una cortigiana del Cinquecento: Caterina de Medici da Verona e le sue vicende (1518-1582). In: Ritratti. La dimensione individuale nella storia (secc. XV- XIX), Hg. Seidel Menchi, S., Pierce, R. (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2008), 147-176.

by Cecilia Cristellon

Building people into plans: Insights into decisions about heating and cooling New Zealand homes

by Brendan Doody

Improving the sustainability and performance of existing housing stock is a significant challenge. Agencies and... more Improving the sustainability and performance of existing housing stock is a significant challenge. Agencies and organisations have promoted various policies and programmes to address these matters including retrofitting insulation and the installation of energy-efficient heating and cooling technologies. Such initiatives could be enhanced through a more thorough understanding of how such technologies correspond to people’s everyday lives. We argue that the way in which people respond to these and other initiatives are mediated by their personal and familial needs and desires, as well as, broader social, political and economic factors.

Our social scientific study examined the ways people heat and cool their homes and the processes they go through in deciding whether to replace or retain their existing forms of heating and cooling. Twenty qualitative interviews were conducted with residents in their homes in Christchurch and Lower Hutt. Subsequently a quantitative questionnaire survey was developed and delivered to 3500 residential homes in Auckland, Rotorua, Tauranga, Christchurch and Dunedin. This research is part of a multidisciplinary GNS Science project funded by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (FRST). The project is aimed at helping to facilitate the development and utilisation of low-temperature (
150ºC) geothermal resources in New Zealand.

Results of the study show typical New Zealand households use electricity and/or a wood burner to heat one or two rooms in the house. The lounge is most commonly heated, although some households (particularly those occupied by young families and elderly residents) heat bedrooms in the interest of maintaining their health and wellbeing. Most households rely on natural ventilation through windows and doors to cool their homes. When selecting new forms of heating or cooling, people typically interpret information in light of its source, and triangulate particular information ‘packages’ with data available from other sources they consider to be relevant. In this context, discussions with family and friends can be equally, if not more, influential than expert consultations and information provided by suppliers, companies, councils and government agencies. In concluding we argue that it is critical to recognise that improving the sustainability and performance of existing houses and buildings is inextricably a social process.

Argiilma poeetika ja pidulik elu

by Epp Annus

Annus, Epp (2009). Argiilma poeetika ja pidulik elu. Methis. Studia humaniora Estonica, 4, 134 - 144.

The poetics of the everyday and festive life


This article investigates ways of writing about the... more The poetics of the everyday and festive life


This article investigates ways of writing about the everyday in contemporary life. It starts by posing the question of why literature thrives especially on violence and extraordinary events. If literature strives to speak to us through our experience of being in the world, and aims to help us understand our common human experience, then shouldn’t it rather avoid the extraordinary?
Without doubt, a topic needs to captivate its writer no less than its reader—otherwise the writing and the reading would not take place at all. Facing death in literature proposes that a given text is something to be taken seriously; it signifies that here one is dealing with existential matters, not just with the myriad small nothingnesses of the everyday. Nonetheless, the present article analyzes a different way to intensify the quotidian: to turn the everyday into an experience of beauty. A writer can find moments of special importance from inside the everyday, thus relieving the reader from the boredom of „nothing happens“ otherwise than through an encounter with death and the extraordinary.
Through a close reading of several Estonian novels (Indigo by Peeter Sauter and Tõde ja õigus by A.H. Tammsaare), the article suggests that, instead of underlining the burdensome boredom of the everyday, literature has the potential, through the power of its imagery, to aestheticize the everyday, even against the conscious will of the writer. If the routine of the everyday involves the automatization of life and a loss of the intense feeling of being in the world, Heidegger reminds us that the work of art opens up being in the world as a whole—and does so precisely by relying on the everyday, not on moments of extraordinary significance. Thus, art would imply the disappearance of the everyday as a locus of boredom, unfullfilment, obligation and repetition, and the replacement of the everyday with pidulik elu, a life at once festive and solemn. For Heidegger, the everyday is a based on a structure of Care. Care is the existential meaning of the everyday and the basis of human existence. Insofar as literature might aim towards revealing the structure of care, this effort would involve the creation of festive life precisely out of the ordinariness of the everyday. Thus, in addition to the way literature may depart from the everyday with the violent and the extraordinary, literature may also recover the solemn festivity of the everyday as a way to make a piece of fiction readable, create loci of desire and interest in the text.

Neopogański nacjonalizm jako praktyka. Tożsamość Zakonu Zadrugi "Północny Wilk"

by Mariusz Filip

Państwo i Społeczeństwo 2009, 9(4): 45-57

Consuming Technology in a Closed Society: Household Appliances in Soviet Urban Homes of the Brezhnev Era

by Natalya Chernyshova

Published in: Ab Imperio. Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post Soviet Space, Issue 2 (July 2011), pp 188-220

For all its relative isolation from the West, underpinned by claims that a socialist way of life was fundamentally... more For all its relative isolation from the West, underpinned by claims that a socialist way of life was fundamentally different from that of the capitalist world, the Soviet Union under developed socialism experienced changes that were not at all unique or, strictly speaking, specifically socialist. One of the areas where this was evident is the field of consumption. Living standards were improving since the mid-1950s, but the Brezhnev era saw a veritable boom in personal consumption, which gave rise to a host of social and cultural consequences. This article takes up a case study of home technology goods, such as washing machines, refrigerators and television sets, in urban areas to demonstrate that the processes taking place in closed socialist urban society of the late 1960s-early 1980s had a surprising number of basic parallels with Western consumer cultures. It shows how during this time Soviet buyers rather quickly developed agency as modern consumers of technology, growing increasingly well-informed, selective and consumerist in their approach to domestic appliances and other electric durables. In exploring these social trends, I want to shift the emphasis from a focus on failures of socialist production of goods towards an examination of cultures of consumption of goods within different, indeed antagonistic, political and economic settings. This should help provide a more sophisticated and comprehensive portrait of lived ‘mature socialism’ than anecdotes about queues and shortages can achieve.

Houses in motion

by Greg Seigworth

Banality for Cultural Studies

by Greg Seigworth

Rethinking Everyday Life: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out

by Greg Seigworth

Introduction: Everyday Life in Postwar Sierra Leone

by Susan Shepler

Co-authored with Aisha Fofana Ibrahim. Africa Today. 58(2): v-xii.

Bridging between the regional degree and the community approaches to rurality—A suggestion for a definition of rurality for everyday use

by Niels C. Nielsen

co-authored with Pia Heike Johansen (who is first and corresponding author).  "Article in Press"

The territorial approach to rural development highlights the role of local actors, networks, culture, nature and... more The territorial approach to rural development highlights the role of local actors, networks, culture, nature and landscape amenities. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) definition of rurality is, however, not capable of dealing with local and community definitions of rurality, which vary from study to study. In everyday life, physical planners, rural policymakers and local rural actors need a consistent definition of rurality. The reason is that structural reforms have led to larger administrative units that have less experience-based knowledge about the individual rural communities within a municipality than do local authorities. In this article, we propose a consistent definition of rurality that is easy for physical planners, rural policy makers and local rural actors to understand and apply in everyday use. In addition, our definition will be able to deal with both the regional and the community approach to rurality. This definition is based on an interdisciplinary literature review that starts with land cover and geographical mapping. The definition is then applied to the case of Denmark.

Hot, banal and everyday nationalism: Bilingual road signs in Wales

by Peter Merriman

Co-authored with Rhys Jones, this article was published in the journal "Political Geography" in 2009, volume 28(3), pp.164-173.

An empirical study of normative dissociation in musical and non-musical everyday life experiences

by Ruth Herbert

Now available online,  in advance of publication in Psychology of Music

Dissociative experiences involving music have received little research attention outside the field of ethnomusicology.... more Dissociative experiences involving music have received little research attention outside the field of ethnomusicology. This paper examines the psychological characteristics of normative dissociation (detachment) across musical and non-musical experiences in ‘real world’, everyday settings. It draws upon a subset of data arising from an empirical project designed to compare transformative shifts of consciousness, with and without music in daily life, and the ways in which use of music may facilitate the processes of dissociation and absorption. Twenty participants kept unstructured diaries for two weeks, recording free descriptions of involving experiences of any kind as soon as possible after their occurrence. All descriptions were subsequently subjected to Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA).

Results suggest that dissociative experiences are a familiar occurrence in everyday life. Diary entries highlight an established practice of actively sought detachment from self, surroundings or activity, suggesting that, together with absorption, the processes of derealization (altered perception of surroundings) and depersonalization (detachment from self) constitute common means of self-regulation in daily life. Music emerges as a particularly versatile facilitator of dissociative experience because of its semantic ambiguity, portability, and the variety of ways in which it may mediate perception, so facilitating an altered relationship to self and environment.

Witchcraft in Tanzanian Everyday Life: Death in the traffic jam. / Hexerei im tansanischen Alltag: Tod im Feierabendstau . In: Schulte-Bahrenberg, Ralf (ed.): Glaube, Kult und Geisterwelt. Steinheim: Edition Phaistos, 20-21. (ISBN 978-3-00-022181-1).

by Jigal Beez

This paper is written in German and English as the publisher intended to have the book in both languages. It starts with the German version. The ENGLISH VERSION STARTS ON PAGE 6. So please do not give up when you get confused by German blabla but scroll down. Unfortunately the publisher had to reduce the size of the book so that the English version was neither published nor proof read but it should give you an idea what this paper is about.
Thanks for your interest

Message Me: Temporality, Location and Everyday Technologies

by Catherine Driscoll

Driscoll, C. and M. Gregg (2008) "message me: temporality, location and everyday technologies". In Media International Australia: Special Issue on Digital Literacy, No. 128. August 2008.

Living In Glass Houses: Domesticity, Interior Decoration, and Environmental Aesthetics

by Kevin Melchionne

originally published in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 56, No. 2, spring 1998.

Also in INTIMUS: Interior Design Theory Reader, edited by Mark Taylor and Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006 and The... more Also in INTIMUS: Interior Design Theory Reader, edited by Mark Taylor and Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006 and The Aesthetics of the Human Environment, edited by Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant, Broadview Press, 2007.

Front Yards

by Kevin Melchionne

collected in The Environment and the Arts, edited by Arnold Berleant, Ashgate Press, 2002.

Offers an interpretation of the suburban front yard as a genre of gardening art.
Offers an interpretation of the suburban front yard as a genre of gardening art.