Extra/ordinary Everyday Lives
Everyday life is the most self-evident, yet the most puzzling of ideas.
-Rita Felski
We invite you to reflect upon the everyday life with us. Anthropology did not warm to the notion of everyday life up until a few decades ago. And even today, while the everyday as a research interest is broadly accepted within such disciplines as anthropology, sociology, ethnology, and cultural studies, much ambiguity lingers around what the everyday looks like from an empirical standpoint. What, it is tempting to ask, are the parameters of this elusive and plastic category? And to what is the everyday opposed? One could further ask what an analytics of the everyday would entail and how it would be carried out.
This PhD seminar seeks to formulate, however partly, and however faintly, novel suggestions to such intractable questions through ethnographically grounded explorations of what we call extra /ordinary everyday lives.
The everyday is traditionally seen as both a temporal and a spatial notion. On the side of time, the everyday is usually understood as a domain of ordinary practices, repetitive routines, and habits that come to pattern our lives (Löfgren 2001, Felski 2012); a social heartbeat that allow us to expect certain matters and outcomes as a matter of course and engage with bits and parts of the world in an unre-flective, taken-for-granted manner.
Spatially, the everyday has usually been connected to the home and, by extension, the female gender (de Beauvoir 1988, Felski 2012). Even if – from a quantitative perspective - workplaces, youth clubs, and educational institutions today account for much and more of people’s time, the home serves as a paradigmatic image or symbol of everyday life (Heller 1984; Ellegård & Vilhelmson 2004; Rönkä & Korvela 2009). And, as Löfgren reminds us, home is likewise ‘a site in which the outside world is al-ways present and dealt with’ (Löfgren 2014)
However, for many people around the world a description of everyday life as inherently bound up with mundane, recognizable routines wrapped in the package that is home, is wholly inaccurate. For this reason, we encourage contributors to look beyond such well-entrenched models of the everyday to engage with what might be deemed extraordinary everyday lives. Think of, say, in-mates, violent activists, the terminally ill, the mentally ill, illegal migrants, or homeless drug addicts. For many such people, everyday life may not necessarily take on the trivial quality of which we just spoke. In such life situations, everyday life may not even be something that people perceive themselves to have, and therefore may need new conceptualizations.. Conversely, we recognize that the extraordinary might come in seemingly ordinary shapes and sizes. Therefore, we also welcome contributions that chal-lenge traditional notions of the everyday by adding new perspectives or something ‘extra’ to the or-dinary.
With any luck, ethnographic engagements with such extra/ordinary everyday lives may not only prove illuminating in an empirical sense but also, and importantly, help take the notion of the every-day to productively novel places.
The seminar will be a two-day event on the 17th and 18th of October 2017.
We have invited two keynotes who in their own ways have engaged with the concept of everyday life in their work, namely: Professor Myra Bluebond-Langner (University College London) and Professor Orvar Löfgren (Lund University).
PhD Students are required to submit a paper (5-7 pages) two weeks before the PhD seminar. The PhD course accepts participants who engage with at least one of the following questions:
1) What does the notion of the everyday (life) mean ethnographically?
2) How can we understand everyday life in social settings characterized by rupture, unpredict-ability, and change?
3) What, if any, is the normative idea/perception of everyday life in differing social locales?
4) How do we study 'extra/ordinary' everyday lives ethnographically, and how does such an en-deavor influence the concept of the everyday?
Professor Löfgren and Professor Bluebond-Langner will each give a lecture at the seminar as well as provide individual feedback on papers from the participating PhD Students.
Organisers
Matti Weisdorf
Maj Hedegaard Heiselberg
Marie Kofod Svensson
Chair
Associate Professor Birgitte Refslund Sørensen
| Periode | 17 okt. 2017 → 18 okt. 2017 |
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| Begivenhedstype | Seminar |
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| Placering | København, DanmarkVis på kort |
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