Living With Latent Waste: Archaeology in a Permanently Polluted World

This chapter presents the research questions, approaches, and arguments of the book, asking how our everyday lives with media have changed after the smartphone. I introduce the topic of media use in everyday life as an empirical, methodological, and theoretical research interest, and argue for its continued centrality to our digital society today, accentuated by datafication. I discuss how the analytical concepts of media repertories and public connection can inform research into media use in everyday life, and what it means that our societies and user practices are becoming more digital. The main argument of the book is that digital media transform our navigation across the domains of everyday life by blurring boundaries, intensifying dilemmas, and affecting our sense of connection to communities and people around us. The chapter concludes by presenting the structure of the rest of the book, where these arguments will be substantiated in analysis of media use an ordinary day, media use in life phase transitions, and media use when ordinary life is disrupted. Citation Ytre-Arne, B. (2023), "Introduction: Media Use and Everyday Life in Digital Societies", Media Use in Digital Everyday Life, Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80262-383-320231001 Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited Copyright © 2023 Brita Ytre-Arne License Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This work is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this book (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode. Can you remember your first smartphone, and did it change your life? I bought my first smartphone in the early summer of 2011, right before the birth of my first child. I can safely say that life was never the same again. Although the new phone was hardly the most significant change that happened, it became part of how I reconfigured everyday life. My coincidental timing of these events might be a personal particularity, but the early 2010s, only a little more than a decade ago, was a period in which smartphones became part of everyday life for lots of people. This happened in Norway where I live, and in other countries in the Global North, soon followed by broader proliferation worldwide (Avle et al., 2020). In 2021, it was estimated that more than 90 per cent of people had smartphone access in a growing number of countries around the globe (Deloitte, 2021). ‘Smartphones changed everything’, wrote the Wall Street Journal in 2020: ‘smartphones upended every element of society during the last decade, from dating to dinner parties, travel to politics. This is just the beginning’ (Kitchen, 9.9.2020). But while all of this was happening, people lived their lives, using smartphones along with other media old and new, interwoven with what was going on in their lives, and in the world around them. This book explores the role of media in our everyday lives in digital societies, after the proliferation of smartphones and in conditions of ubiquitous connectivity. I analyze everyday media use across platforms, content types and modes of communication, taking the perspective of how we live our lives with media – how we manage plans and practicalities, keep in touch with friends and family, seek information and entertainment, work and learn, take part in shared experiences, and connect to our social lifeworlds. We might do all of this in the space of one single day, and we might experience such a day as ‘ordinary’ – just normal everyday life. But media technologies are also part of our less ordinary days, important to how we manage life-changing transitions and special events in our personal lives, and to how we relate to local communities, political processes or global events. We use media to connect to each other, and to society – throughout an ordinary day, across the life course, and in times of disruption. The smartphone is emblematic of how our everyday lives with media are changing in a digital and hyper-connected society, and as such it is essential to the topic of this book. A central question I discuss is what it means that most of us now have a smartphone to reach for, from where we are and what we are doing, to manage multiple aspects of our daily lives: A mobile, flexible device we rely on to communicate, find information, entertain and assist us, often used in combination with other media, but also a device that enables tracking and surveillance of our movements and engagements, informing feedback loops based on our personal data. How has digital media use in everyday life changed after the smartphone? To answer these questions, I draw on classic scholarship on media and communication technologies in everyday life (Baym, 2015; Silverstone, 1994), and on recent analysis of digital ambivalence and disconnection (Syvertsen, 2020). With a user perspective, I situate smartphones and other kinds of digital platforms as part of broader media repertoires (Hasebrink & Hepp, 2017), with an interest in the totality and internal relationships of any kind of media that people use and find meaningful in their everyday lives. I further understand everyday media use as central to public connection (Couldry et al., 2010), to how we orient ourselves to a world beyond our private concerns. The book provides an updated perspective on media in everyday life after digital media has become increasingly embedded and ingrained in society. A purpose for the book is to fill a gap between classic (but old) discussions on everyday media use, and recent (but sometimes narrowly focused) studies of new technologies. Our understandings of everyday media use are still shaped by theories developed before the internet, before digital and social and mobile media. This book highlights rather than discards these understandings, but moves forward in tackling dilemmas of technological transformations, and by considering recent crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. I untangle how media becomes meaningful to us in the everyday, connecting us to each other and to communities and publics. The book offers empirical, methodological and theoretical insight on media use in digital everyday life. Why Everyday Life? ‘Everyday life’ is one of those concepts that everyone understands, but which is still difficult to define. The term is not internal jargon belonging to a particular research field, but instead recognizable across a range of contexts – we might even describe it as an ‘everyday’ term. One of the early ideas behind this book was to answer the questions: ‘But what do you mean by everyday life?’ and further ‘Why do you [meaning media use researchers] go on about everyday life?’. These are good questions. Let us start with the latter: Why everyday life? More precisely, why would someone interested in media use find it important to refer to everyday life for contextualization? In media and communication studies, interest in everyday life has a long history. The idea of everyday life has been central to approaches and research interests in cultural studies (Gray, 2002; Morley, 1992), media phenomenology (Pink & Leder Mackley, 2013; Scannell, 1995) or media ethnography (Hermes, 1995; Radway, 1984). The term has been particularly central to theories of domestication (Haddon, 2016; Silverstone et al., 2021) focused on processes of gradually integrating media technologies in the home. Roger Silverstone wrote a classic volume on Television and everyday life (Silverstone, 1994), arguing that in order to move past debates on television as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and actually understand what it is, we have to consider television as embedded in tensions and dynamics of everyday life. Shaun Moores (2000) applied everyday life as a framework for understanding the historical development of broadcast media, and Maria Bakardjieva (2005) analyzed the domestication of computers and internet technologies in everyday life. Elizabeth Bird (2003) wrote The Audience in Everyday Life to argue for the relevance of ethnographic methods to understand our media-saturated reality, while Tim Markham (2017) wrote an introductory textbook titled Media and Everyday Life to present topics and thinkers in media studies through their relevance to daily life. All of the above are books on media with ‘everyday life’ in the title. Moreover, the term keeps popping up in journal articles on a variety of topics regarding media use: A comparative study of why people read print newspapers in the digital age refer to how different media are integrated into everyday life (Boczkowski et al., 2021), while a study of people who prefer online media at home find that digital alternatives are perceived to be better integrated into domestic everyday life (Müller, 2020). In analysis of how and why we follow news, the idea of the everyday provides a way of situating ordinary users at the centre of attention, by discussing everyday news use (Groot Kormelink & Costera Meijer, 2019) or everyday public connection (Swart et al., 2017). In debates about datafication and emergent technologies, the notion of the everyday is used to highlight human and social experiences with for instance self-tracking (Lomborg & Frandsen, 2016), smart homes (Hine, 2020) or algorithmic media (Willson, 2017). What do these different contributions have in common? They refer to everyday life to signal a position, because referencing ‘everyday life’ holds some empirical, methodological or theoretical implications. The term can be invoked to answer the ‘so what’-question: A compelling reason for why we need to study media at all is its relevance to everyday life (Silverstone, 1999). Today we can adapt this argument to why we need to study the smartphone – it is part of everyday life. Through such statements, we frame the smartphone as a technology and research topic that is recognizable and relevant to experiences and dilemmas each of us encounter. The smartphone has transformed society, but it has done so through our everyday interactions. Similarly: Why does it matter if people read international news or look at cat videos online, watch Netflix or Linear TV, listen to music on Spotify or prefer vinyl records? If you are interested in media business models or media policies, and find the choices users make a bit puzzling, you might need to look into motivations and contexts in everyday life to gain a deeper understanding of what goes on. Attention to everyday contexts can both complicate and enhance insights gained from other types of tracking and measurements of media use (Groot Kormelink & Costera Meijer, 2020). To understand new technologies, or connect critiques of these phenomena to people’s experiences, everyday life is an essential framework: It is easier to grasp the idea of ‘the Internet of Things’ (Bunz & Meikle, 2018) as having to do with whether your refrigerator needs internet connection, than through concepts such as machine learning or smart sensors. Sometimes the position signalled by referring to everyday life is explicitly normative. A key example is the debate on everyday experiences with datafication, or ‘the quantification of human life through digital information, very often for economic value’ (Mejias & Couldry, 2019). The idea of so-called ‘big data’ as more precise or valuable has been met with critical questions (Boyd & Crawford, 2012), and with concern for how audience engagement can be harvested and utilized for opaque purposes (Ytre-Arne & Das, 2020). In criticizing these developments, the notion of ‘everyday life’ is central to put the human experience of living in datafied conditions front and centre (Kennedy & Hill, 2018), or to focus on the people rather than systems (Livingstone, 2019). This interest further corresponds to feminist (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020) and postcolonial critiques (Milan & Treré, 2019) of datafication and power. We can also signal analytical and methodological interests by referring to everyday life: The term is used to prioritize context over generalizability, and ordinary user perspectives and experiences over media professionals and institutions. This could imply attention to small acts of engagement in social media (Picone et al., 2019), and inclusion of seemingly mundane practices of media use (Hermes, 1995; Sandvik et al., 2016). An everyday life perspective is a backdrop for cross-media research (Lomborg & Mortensen, 2017; Schrøder, 2011) rather than pre-selecting which media to study based on the researchers’ preconceived notions of what matters. Qualitative researchers and ethnographers also draw on ‘everyday life’ as a term that points towards preferred methods: Talking to people about a day in the life (del Rio Carral, 2014), ‘capturing life as it is narrated’ (Kaun, 2010) with diary methods, and exploring experiences and reflections in informants’ own words. Some quantitative studies of media use also use the term (Hovden & Rosenlund, 2021) and research on everyday media repertoires can combine qualitative and quantitative approaches (Hasebrink & Hepp, 2017). I am also someone who often explain and position my key research interests through the notion of everyday life. A long-running interest in everyday life has informed my preference for qualitative and user-focused methods, in the studies I draw on in this book and in other projects. I have used the term ‘everyday life’ in the title of publications (Moe & Ytre-Arne, 2021; Ytre-Arne, 2012), and also explored how media use changes with biographical disruption to everyday routines (Ytre-Arne, 2019) or discussed audience agency in everyday encounters with digital and datafied media (Ytre-Arne & Das, 2020; Ytre-Arne & Moe, 2021a). For me, the everyday signals a perspective on why and how to study media use: it is important because it is part of daily life, it is interesting because everyday life is diverse and meaningful, and it is impossible to be done with because it changes constantly. I do not think there is any necessary contradiction between an everyday perspective versus a societal or political perspective on media use – instead, everyday life is where political dimensions of media are experienced, interpreted, and acted upon. This point runs as an undercurrent through the analyses of this book and is highlighted in the concluding chapter. What is Everyday Life? We have established that media are part of everyday life, and that research on media use is interested in everyday life. That is not to say that definitions everyday life abound in the literature referenced above, or in the field at large. Even classic contributions observe that commenting on the topic of everyday life might seem simplistic (e.g. Silverstone, 1994, p. 19). There is considerable variation in how precisely or extensively the concept is explained: Some works develop distinct philosophical understandings (e.g. Bakardijeva in Sandvik et al., 2016), or ground the term in substantial discussion of different theoretical positions (e.g. Cavalcante et al., 2017). Some authors define the term and how it connects to methodological and analytical frameworks in their studies). Others explain adjacent concepts to the everyday, such as the study mentioned above of why people still read print newspapers (Boczkowski et al., 2021), which draws on theories of ritualization, sociality and cultural contexts. Nevertheless, everyday life is theorized in disciplines from human geography (Holloway & Hubbard, 2001) to psychology (Schraube & Højholt, 2016). Some central philosophical contributions are Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life (1947), which formulates a Marxist-inspired argument about the importance of this sphere of human conduct in the face of capitalism and technological change, and Michel De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) which emphasizes the concept of potentially subversive tactics in people’s navigation through daily life. Another key work is The Structures of the Lifeworld (Schutz & Luckmann, 1973) which formulates Alfred Schutz’ theory of the lifeworld in which everyday life is enacted, including spatial, temporal and social dimensions, and how we move through ‘zones of operation’ where people and places beyond our immediate surroundings are yet within ‘restorable reach’ to us, through the familiarity or routines in the everyday which we take for granted (1973). This understanding has been particularly important to phenomenological and sociological studies of media and technologies in everyday life. Such philosophical works on everyday life are briefly to referenced in studies of everyday media use, a understanding that is more or less For (1984) to discuss the role of media in daily on and a growing as as philosophical interest in everyday life as a research that media are not used in from one or from personal an example of the of media use in dynamics at that media are an part of the way the everyday is p. and points that have been up in discussions of media (Hasebrink & Hepp, and of media use as mundane but yet meaningful in everyday (Hermes, 1995; Sandvik et al., 2016). In study of early internet use at Bakardjieva provides a theoretical discussion of how and Lefebvre’s theories relate to communication technologies, the idea of a critical phenomenology to understand users as as Roger work on everyday life also Schutz’ understanding of the and further of the in a discussion of whether this lifeworld is different in conditions of (Silverstone, Silverstone debates about order and in a world of societal and new communication with an that television is we have seemingly to take for as a technology and social and as part of our everyday lives. these Silverstone emphasizes the of routines and familiarity in in the of the world at and a sense of these are the of social order and everyday life. the and for as as through the and our lives take and within those and and we to go about our or for the most the and the that to our and (Silverstone, 1994, p. In this everyday and a sense of a concept to describe of and in people’s experience of the world and sense of central to how people position in the world and to life is also a key concept in more recent theory of digital communication as when we through digital media, and in have our continued in the world 2021). discussion how of or through digital media can to the of the these theories of everyday life, some key dimensions Everyday life has to do with the of space and people and through which we make and relate to the and our position in it I draw on these dimensions to further situate media use in everyday life, how we use media for navigation across social Media Use in Everyday Life To understand media use – applied as an term for all kinds of relationships and with media and communication technologies – we need to situate media use as part of everyday life, in people’s lifeworlds. on the ideas above, of familiarity and and of spatial, social and dimensions, we can different and positions for media. I am particularly interested in how we use media to orient ourselves as we move through our everyday lives, as part of what I navigation across social What does this Everyday media use is because we do not it from – we rely on that we are regarding media use as as other aspects of everyday up in the and not you have done before – instead of the same of and the same on your smartphone. other and and media use practices are particularly essential to the of everyday life by Silverstone, Markham and are also a central concept in media and communication psychology and central to studies to grasp user over or across We everyday in and around – including media Everyday life multiple social domains – such as work and life – that are meaningful to us and that we with and that also important contexts for how we use media. There are research that of media use in different social for instance focused on life such as or experiences such as (e.g. Das, & 2020). between life such as a or a are so significant because the social domains of our everyday lives change with these events. These social domains are essential to the we find in life, the conduct of everyday life an We with social domains in – including media use and A interest I in this book is how we use media across and social for what I refer to as Everyday media use navigation across multiple social domains because an ordinary day can an of and in which we different social with different people. Everyday life can be and with to at or or but whether we have plans for or go with the some of and navigation is both and We conduct such navigation in – including media use and Digital technologies have become to this navigation – and but also and to We have established that media are part of daily and that such routines are essential to everyday life We can also discuss if and how the social domains of everyday life are or and how these processes (Couldry & Hepp, 2017; Hepp, 2020). But my main interest in this book is how our navigation across the social domains of everyday life changes with digital media – how we use digital media to connect to different social orient ourselves to what goes on and across contexts. Media use is essential to the navigation of everyday life, and the role of media in this navigation holds for how we experience our lives as meaningful, for how we understand and situate ourselves in the How we conduct this navigation is changing with the and datafication of the media, particularly after the smartphone. Media Use in Everyday Life The theories of everyday life that are most central to media and communication studies from an of and the domestic sphere is the social that has the most dynamics and the of the home are central to analyses from discussion of who the to what when the people television also have and computers & 2016). we can as Silverstone could in classic that is a domestic It is at home. at home. at (Silverstone, 1994, p. and mobile and social media a of the established when living and for a question in internet studies of whether and how people would actually to make space for computers in their homes is more not just by and but also by and technologies. The home is still but our navigation with media and beyond the home has A broader point is that the proliferation of digital media has it more difficult to make about how to situate media in everyday life, while media might be more important than to how we across our daily lives. This also has for the analytical concepts and approaches we to study everyday media To analyze media in everyday life, it is to a particular or media and look for its and in everyday to into how the cultural role of television in people’s everyday lives. But to for the for variation in everyday media use, it is more relevant to start with people and how we live our lives, and how media matters. of the scholarship discussed in this chapter for the of less approaches to media studies – media might need to be in order to understand what it I will particularly draw on approaches to situate media use in everyday life through a user Media repertoires and public Media repertoires is a concept to the totality and meaningful between media a (Hasebrink & & Hepp, 2017). the essential insight that are a key of approaches is to focus less on experiences with The of or using and instead how these or different are to each other in the context of a everyday media media approaches which media users have a how prioritize between different and how people and the totality of their media Media research has from how to of repertoires towards growing interest in repertoires as and how are and change over & Schrøder, et al., 2021; et al., Ytre-Arne, 2019). connection is a concept that people’s to society, in a sense – how people connect to public life, or (Couldry et al., et al., 2017; Ytre-Arne & Moe, The of a public connection – as to a focus on whether people follow news or – is to more what people are interested and how follow those across but also beyond (Couldry et al., & Ytre-Arne, 2021). Media is important to public connection, but not the only means of societal and public connection can take and define public connection as ‘the shared of that to and in and political in everyday life’ (Swart et al., and that relevance and engagement are dimensions in how media becomes meaningful in everyday life. of these perspectives imply that there is answer to or why media in everyday life – it is and perspectives are up to analysis of the that have to everyday media In this book, I draw on media approaches to analyze everyday media use from the perspective of and on the public connection concept to discuss how people connect to society through everyday media A More Digital Everyday Life A different way of situating media in everyday life is to if one the other, and if which way

'Everyday life' is an enigmatic term which eludes a straightforward or universal definition. The notion is less precise and more complicated than it looks. One reason may be that since 'everyday life' and the categories with which it is described are constituted within specific cultural and historical contexts, we face a host of (often contradictory) concepts.l Yet all approaches to everyday life in contemporary historical writing do have something in common: a concern with the world of ordinary experience (as opposed to society in the abstract) as their point of departure, together with an attempt to view daily life as problematic, in the sense of showing that behaviour or values which are taken for granted in one society are dismissed as self-evidently absurd in another (cf. Burke 1991: 11). For some time historians and social anthropologists have been trying to uncover the latent rules of daily life. The everyday includes actions, which could be defined as the 'realm of routine' (Braudel), and also attitudes, which may be labelled mental habits. Another important aspect in the context of everyday life is ritual. On the one hand, as a marker of special occasions in the life of individuals and communities, ritual is often defined in opposition to the everyday. On the other hand, outsiders and visitors notice everyday rituals such as ways of eating or forms of greeting in the life of every society, which the locals fail to perceive as rituals at all. In this introduction we attempt, first of all, to present some general conceptual and methodological issues which have evolved around the concept of everyday life in European, especially German history. The German debate about 'Alltag' is illuminating, because the discussions have been conducted in an often fierce and 'fundamentalist' way and thus highlight a number of problems inherent in this notion. While the concept of 'everyday life' has provoked a widely recognized and often highly controversial debate in European and American history, it has hitherto been more or less neglected in the context of African history. Although, as will be shown, aspects of everyday life (especially for the colonial period) have recently received increased attention in historical writings on Africa, 'everyday life' as an analytical category has seldom found its way into current Africanist debates. Thus, in order to provide a more adequate framework for research into 'everyday life in colonial Africa', we will address some of the 'achievements' and 'weaknesses' of the everyday life concept that have been discussed in the context of

Background Globally, ageing populations have increased the number of older adults living with multiple long-term conditions, resulting in healthcare redesign and recognition that first-person perspectives are vital to inform meaningful service transformation. This study answered the call for research with a population whose voices are not always sought, to explore ‘everyday life’ in the context of being older and living with multiple long-term conditions at home. Methodology Interpretive hermeneutic phenomenology shaped the study’s design. Eight Caucasian participants recruited from community groups in West Yorkshire (aged 66-93) took photos that illustrated their everyday lives. These were explored through photo-elicited interviews and reflexive data analysis. Findings Everyday life had become a balancing act, and occupational participation was more difficult. Participants were thoughtfully and positively adjusting to the impacts of ageing with long-term conditions through occupational adaptation to live their life – their way. Five interlinked themes illustrated the findings: Confronting precariousness, Loss of anticipated everyday life, At the mercy of others, Journey of transition, and What matters to me. Discussion Participants shaped everyday life in community, social, and home environments through occupational choices and personal adaptation aligned with their values and priorities. Participation was sometimes disrupted and vulnerability illuminated by ageing, invisible illness, and others’ well-meaning actions, including moments within healthcare contexts. Conclusion This study offers new insights into how older adults with long-term conditions engage in occupational adaptation to live life on their own terms. As ageing populations grow, further first-person research with demographically diverse older adults is needed to deepen understanding of everyday participation in later life.

Shakespeare’s plays have long captivated scholars and lay readers alike, inviting multiple readings and interpretations aimed at uncovering the layered, often hidden meanings embedded in his works. The profound worldly wisdom Shakespeare imparts and his keen observation of human nature stem, in part, from his deep acquaintance with the lives of both rural and urban communities. Born in Stratford-Upon-Avon, a small English town, Shakespeare’s formative years were shaped by the rhythms of provincial life. Later, his relocation to London and his professional successes in the city’s vibrant playhouses exposed him to the complexities of urban existence. These dual experiences—rural simplicity and urban sophistication—imbued his works with a rich tapestry of human experiences, reflected in his nuanced portrayal of everyday life. Shakespeare’s unparalleled ability to depict the domestic world of his time is especially evident in his comedies. These plays often serve as windows into the household dynamics, social customs, and intimate relationships of the early modern period. The domestic sphere, encompassing themes of marriage, family life, gender roles, and economic concerns, is intricately woven into the narratives, creating a mirror for the audiences of his day to reflect on their own lives. His comedies, in particular, lend themselves to a careful examination of how the ordinary yet essential aspects of domesticity intersect with broader social and cultural structures. This paper seeks to explore the ways in which Shakespeare’s own lived experiences—rooted in the everyday lives of villagers in Stratford-Upon-Avon and city dwellers in London—inform his artistic portrayal of domestic life. By undertaking a general survey of domestic life during the early modern period, this study contextualizes Shakespeare’s treatment of domesticity within the cultural and historical framework of his era. It further investigates how the themes of household affairs, interpersonal relationships, and societal expectations manifest in selected comedies, revealing Shakespeare’s acute sensitivity to the interplay between the personal and the social. Ultimately, this analysis aims to illuminate how Shakespeare’s comedies resonate with universal truths about human existence while capturing the specificities of domestic life in his time.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Social Psychology and Media: Critical Consideration

Islam is a perfect religion because its teachings cover various aspects of human life. Islam teaches us how humans relate to humans (hablum-minannâs). Muamalah is an inseparable part of human life. The problems of muamalah in everyday life in society are deviations and violations that damage economic life and the lives of fellow humans. Therefore, it is necessary to socialize the importance of sharia-based muamalah so that people can understand the benefits and scope of muamalah in everyday life. The method used to solve muamalah problems in society is through 3 stages (planning, implementation, results and evaluation). The results of this socialization include participants starting to understand how to practice muamalah in everyday life, being able to improve and increase the quality of honest values in muaamalah, which will be followed up by directly practicing what has been conveyed in this socialization activity in community life.

This article argues that everyday life is related to all social relations and activities, including both the ‘official’ practices that are codified and normalized and the ‘unofficial’ practices and articulations of experience. Indeed, everyday day life is seen as the single plane of immanence in which these two forms of practice and articulation interrelate and affect one another. The lived experience of everyday life is multidimensional, composed of various social fields of practice that are articulated, codified and normalized to different degrees and in different ways (either officially or unofficially). Moving through these fields in daily life, we are aware of passing through different zones of time and space. There are aspects of everyday relations and practices more open to government, institutionalization, and official codification, while others are more resistant and provide the basis for opposition and social movements. Everyday life is a mixture of diverse and differentially produced and articulated forms, each combining time and space in a unique way. What we refer to as ‘institutions’ associated with the state or the economy are attempts to fix social practice in time and space – to contain it in specific geographical sites and codify it in official discourses. The relations and practices more often associated with everyday life – such as friendship, love, comradeship and relations of communication – are more fluid, open and dispersed across time and space. However, the two should not be uncoupled in social analysis, as they are necessarily interrelated in processes of social and political change. This is especially so in contemporary capitalism or, as Lefebvre called it, the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’.

FRI0487-HPR Dilemmas of participation in everyday life in early rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a qualitative interview study (the swedish TIRA study)

The goal of the research is to reconstruct the everyday life of minors in the Boryspil district of Kyiv region during 1944–1950, based on an analysis of documents from the Archives department of Boryspil State district administration. The study aims to determine how the socio-economic conditions of the postwar period influenced their living, labor, education, and socialization. The research also highlights the role of the district archive as a valuable source base for academic studies. A microhistorical approach was applied, along with historical-archival and problem-thematic methods, content analysis, socio-historical and narrative analysis. This made it possible to comprehensively examine the archival materials and emphasize the socio-economic aspects of minors’ everyday life in rural communities, highlighting their active integration into social life. Scientific novelty. The study implements a multidimensional approach to exploring children’s everyday life in the postwar period. Unique local materials have made it possible to reveal new aspects of regional history. The potential of the district archive as a source for studying social history — particularly the condition of minors — is demonstrated. Childhood is considered as a phenomenon closely intertwined with the social environment, family structures, economic conditions, and cultural practices. Archival materials make it possible to reconstruct the living conditions of children, their employment, social support, and access to education and healthcare, although the sources mostly reflect the official point of view. Nevertheless, they allow for tracing the mechanisms by which minors adapted to the realities of the postwar period. Children worked, supported their families, and participated in community life, adjusting to harsh conditions. The experience of the Boryspil district represents typical features of children’s everyday life in rural areas, shaped by resource shortages, intensive labor, limited access to education, and ideological control.

Drawing Life from Ledgers Sherry L. Smith (bio) Linda English. By All Accounts: General Stores and Community Life in Texas and Indian Territory. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. 257pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. A promising trend is underway in U.S. Western history. Scholars are returning to the so-called “traditional” subjects that attracted historians of the 1950s and 1960s. Researchers are once again producing economic, business, political, and intellectual histories that focus on the people who exercised the greatest power—elite white males. But they are doing so with a difference: by integrating the insights learned from the decades-long turn to social histories that centered on those who exercised less power and from the analytical tools of critical race theory, class, and gender. They are consequently recalibrating traditional topics by examining not only the exercise of economic power by Anglo men, for instance, but the ways in which women and people of color interacted with them and, in the process, helped shaped the historical landscape. This new synthesis results in a satisfying blend of foundational works, which for too long have been overlooked, with more contemporary studies and sensibilities. It was only a matter of time before the two historiographies joined. That time has come. Linda English’s By All Accounts: General Stores and Community Life in Texas and Indian Territory is a very good example of this new approach. She uses general stores—or more precisely, the ledger books kept at those stores—as entry into rural economic life during the 1870s and 1880s in eastern and central Texas as well as what becomes Oklahoma. English looks at lists of names and numbers and teases out a picture of social and cultural life in small-town America, with particular emphasis on how class, gender, race, and ethnicity play out. She begins, then, with the barest outline of economic behavior—purchases—and, from there, attempts to recreate a multidimensional sense of individual lives. This is, in truth, a rather slim archive with which to work. Happily, sufficient scholarship on business, consumerism, race relations, immigration, and ethnic and women’s history exists to flesh things out. English is not primarily interested in economic history but rather in what business [End Page 98] activities reveal about everyday life, relationships of power, and the interplay between national trends and policies and those of a particular region. Admitting that general stores lack the fascination of saloons and brothels, which have been studied more often, English maintains they are important because they attracted the widest, most diverse clientele. People of all races and classes, men and women, frequented them. Everyone needed life’s basics, and the better-off occasionally purchased luxuries there, as well. These businesses were important gathering places that displayed a town’s social dynamics. Their records help elucidate a variety of themes: the role of the merchant class in rural America, insight into regional identity, the importance of women consumers, inscription of race onto everyday life, the cultural imprint of particular ethnic groups on particular places, and the interplay between national policies and local consumerism. English begins with a sample of merchants who are all white and, with one exception, male. Some entered into post–Civil War retail businesses with significant assets: for example, plantation owners who, after the Civil War, maintained their wealth as they rechanneled some of it. More typical, however, were those who fit the “self-made” model, relying upon personal ambition, ability, and favorable market conditions to establish their general stores. One man, J. J. McAlester from Arkansas, parleyed information about untapped mineral wealth on Choctaw lands into a fortune. First he opened a trading post that morphed into a dry-goods store near the coal outcroppings. He married a Chickasaw woman, thus establishing a relationship that allowed him entrée to Chickasaw and Choctaw resources as well as business and political ties with prominent tribal members. Eventually he expanded into cattle ranching and mining, before being elected to office as an Oklahoma lieutenant-governor. Anna Martin, who began her life in Texas as a poor German immigrant girl, ended up running the retail business her husband started and went on...

<scp>COVID</scp>‐19 and Food Security in Fiji: The Reinforcement of Subsistence Farming Practices in Rural and Urban Areas

This chapter attempts to break the ‘conspiracy of silence’ around prison escapes. The ethnographic analysis of prison life has the capacity to reveal the notions of escape, freedom, confinement and subversions in unique ways (Bandyopadhyay et al., Criminal Justice Matters, 91(1), 28–29, 2013; Rhodes, Ethnographic Imagination in the Field of the Prison. In D. Drake, R. Earle, & J. Sloan (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Ethnography. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Prison ethnographies also potentially disrupt acknowledged ways of seeing and representing these concepts. In this chapter I reclaim the understanding of escape from its binary metanarrative—that of the agency and self-determination of the prisoner and the collective that the prisoner represents, and the reproduction of the prison. I explore multiple meanings of escape for prisoners and draw out from different instances of successful and attempted but failed escapes, the braiding of this extraordinary event into the ordinary everyday lives of prisoners. This enables a conceptual and theoretical rethinking of escapes, their place and content in relation to prison sociality and implications for everyday life, and the revealing of emergent critiques of the notions of escape, freedom, confinement and subversions.

Summary Introduction The aims of this thesis are twofold; firstly, it aims to increase the understanding of the extent to which community gardens enhance social cohesion for those involved; secondly, it aims to gain insight into the importance community gardeners attach to food growing per se, and the extent to which participants perceive community gardens as an alternative to the industrial food system. I define community gardens as a plot of land in an urban area, cultivated either communally or individually by people from the direct neighbourhood or the wider city, or in which urbanites are involved in other ways than gardening, and to which there is a collective element. Over the last years, community gardens have sprung up in several Dutch cities. Although there are various reasons for an increasing interest in community gardens, there are two that I focus on in this thesis in particular. The first is the assumption made that community gardens stimulate social cohesion in inner-city neighbourhoods, to be seen in the light of the 'participatory society'. The second is community gardens' contribution to the availability of locally produced food, in the context of an increased interest in Alternative Food Networks (AFNs). The Dutch government aims to transform the Dutch welfare state into a participatory society in which citizens take more responsibility for their social and physical environment. This way the government not only hopes to limit public spending, but also wishes to increase social bonding and the self-organisational capacity of society. Community gardens fit the rhetoric around the participatory society, as they are examples of organised residents taking responsibility for their living environment. Moreover, the literature suggests that gardens are physical interventions that may decrease isolation by acting as meeting places. However, both the extent to which community gardens enhance social cohesion and under what conditions they may do so are unclear, especially as gardens come in various designs, shapes and sizes. The popularity of community gardens also seems to be related to an overall increasing societal interest in food, and can be discussed in relation to Alternative Food Networks. AFNs are food systems that are different in some way from the mainstream, and are seen as a reaction to consumer concerns about the conventional food system. They are often considered to be dictated by political motivations and injected with a 'deeper morality'. The category 'AFN' is however a heterogeneous category, as is the conventional food system; neither can be easily defined. The degree to which community gardens can be seen as AFNs is therefore unclear. While they do improve the availability of local food and operate outside of the market economy, we do not know how much and how often people eat from their gardens, nor do we know to what extent they are involved in the gardens in order to provide an alternative to the industrial food system. Hence, there is a lack of knowledge about the sense in which community gardens are alternative alternatives. Research questions The overall research question of this thesis is: What is the significance of community gardening in terms of its intention to promote social cohesion as well as its representation as an alternative food system? This broad question is instructed by the following sub-questions: Why do people get involved in community gardens? What are their motivations?How, to what extent, and under which conditions does community gardening promote the development of social relations between participants? How do participants value these social effects? To what extent do the diets of community garden participants originate from the gardens in which they are involved? What is the importance of food in community gardens?What is the importance of growing or getting access to alternative food for participants of community gardens? Methodology An important theoretical lens in this research is the theory of practice. Practices are defined as concrete human activity and include things, bodily doings and sayings. By performing practices people not only draw upon but also feed into structure. Routinisation – of practices, but also of daily life – therefore plays a central role in practice theory. Practice theory allows for an emphasis on practical reality as well as a study of motivations. This focus on how people manage everyday life, and how gardening fits within that, makes it particularly useful for this thesis. I define social cohesion as the way in which people in a society feel and are connected to each other (De Kam and Needham 2003) and operationalised it by focusing on 'social contacts, social networks, and social capital', one of the elements into which social cohesion is often broken up. This element was operationalised as 1) contacts (the width of social cohesion) and 2) mutual help (the depth of social cohesion). This research has a case study design; I studied four Dutch community gardens over a two-year period of time, and later supplemented these with an additional three cases. As practices consist of both doings and sayings, analysis must be concerned with both practical activity and its representation. I used participant observations to study practical activities, and interviews, questionnaires and document study to examine the representation of these activities. Findings Chapters 3 to 7 form the main part of this thesis. They are papers/book chapters that have been submitted to or are published by scientific journals or books. All of them are based on the field work. In chapter 3 we compare two of the case studies and determine to what extent they can be seen as 'alternative'. We argue that although reflexive motivations are present, most participants are unwilling to frame their involvement as political, and mundane motivations play an important role in people's involvement as well. By using the concept of 'food provisioning practices' we show that participants of community gardens are often required to be actively involved in the production of their food. This means that participants are both producers and consumers: the gardens show a 'sliding scale of producership'. This chapter also shows that political statements are not a perfect predictor of actual involvement in community gardening. This finding was one of the main reasons for starting to use the theory of practice, which is the main topic of the next chapter. In chapter 4 we compare one of my case studies with an urban food growing initiative in New York City. By comparing the internal dynamics of these two cases and their relations with other social practices, we investigate whether different urban food growing initiatives can be seen as variations of one single practice. We also study the question of whether the practice can be seen as emerging. In particular, we take the elements of meaning, competences and material (Shove et al. 2012) into account. We found both similarities and differences between the two cases, with the main difference relating to the meanings practitioners attach to the practice. We conclude, therefore, that it is not fully convincing to see these cases as examples of the same social practice. We also argue that urban food growing may be considered an emerging practice, because it combines various practices, both new and established, under one single heading. In chapter 5 we use the theory of practice to explore how urban food growing is interwoven with everyday life. We compare four community gardens - two allotments and two cases which we define as AFNs. We found that participants of the allotments are involved in the practice of gardening, while members of the AFNs are involved in the practice of shopping. The gardening practice requires structural engagement, turning it into a routine. The produce is a result of that routine and is easily integrated into daily meals. As AFNs are associated with the practice of shopping, they remain in competition with more convenient food acquisition venues. Eating from these gardens is therefore less easily integrated in daily life; every visit to the garden requires a conscious decision. Hence, whether members are primarily involved in shopping or in growing has an impact on the degree to which they eat urban-grown food. This shows that motivations are embedded in the context and routine of everyday life, and 'only go so far'. Chapter 6 concerns the organisational differences between the seven case studies in this thesis and the extent to which these influence the enhancement of social cohesion. We study people's motivations for being involved in the gardens and compare these with the three main organisational differences. This comparison reveals that the gardens can be divided into place-based and interest-based gardens. Place-based gardens are those in which people participate for social reasons – aiming to create social bonds in the neighbourhood. Interest-based gardens are those in which people participate because they enjoy growing vegetables. Nevertheless, all of these gardens contribute to the development of social cohesion. Moreover, while participants who are motivated by the social aspects of gardening show a higher level of appreciation for them, these social aspects also bring added value for those participants who are motivated primarily by growing vegetables. In chapter 7 we present a garden that exemplifies that gardens may encompass not only one, but indeed several communities, and that rapprochement and separation take place simultaneously. While this garden is an important meeting place, thereby contributing to social cohesion, it harbours two distinct communities. These communities assign others to categories ('us' and 'them') on the basis of place of residence, thereby strengthening their own social identities. Ownership over the garden is both an outcome and a tool in that struggle. We define the relationship between these two communities as instrumental-rational – referring to roles rather than individuals - which explains why they do not form a larger unity. Nevertheless, the two communities show the potential to develop into a larger imagined garden-community. Conclusions This thesis shows that the different organisational set-ups of community gardens reflect gardeners' different motivations for being involved in these gardens. The gardens studied in this thesis can be defined as either place-based or interest-based; gardens in the first category are focused on the social benefits of gardening, whereas gardens in the second category are focused on gardening and vegetables. Nevertheless, social effects occur in both types of gardens; in all of the gardens studied, participants meet and get to know others and value these contacts. Based on this finding, I conclude that community gardens do indeed enhance social cohesion. Place-based community gardens specifically have the potential to become important meeting places; they offer the opportunity to work communally towards a common goal, and once established, can develop into neighbourhood spaces to be used for various other shared activities. Most interest-based gardens lack opportunities to develop the social contacts that originated at the garden beyond the borders of the garden. These gardens are often maintained by people who do not live close to the garden or to each other, and those who garden are generally less motivated by social motivations per se. Important to note is that community gardens do not necessarily foster a more inclusive society; they often attract people with relatively similar socio-economic backgrounds and may support not one, but several communities. Most participants from place-based gardens eat from their gardens only occasionally; others never do so. This type of community garden can therefore hardly be seen as a reaction to the industrialised food system, let alone an attempt to create an alternative food system. Nevertheless, certain aspects of these gardens are in line with the alternative rhetoric. By contrast, most gardeners at interest-based gardens eat a substantial amount of food from their gardens, and to some of them the choice to consume this locally-grown food relates to a lifestyle in which environmental considerations play a role. However, this reflexivity is not expressed in political terms and participants do not see themselves as part of a food movement. Participants who buy rather than grow produce showed the greatest tendency to explain their involvement in political terms, but many of them have difficulty including the produce in their diets on a regular basis. I therefore conclude that community gardens cannot be seen as conscious, 'alternative' alternatives to the industrial food system. Nonetheless, the role of food in these gardens is essential, as it is what brings participants together – either because they enjoy gardening or because the activities which are organised there centre around food. Theoretical contributions In this thesis I used and aimed to contribute to the theory of practice. Using participant observations to study what people do in reality was particularly useful. It turned research into an embodied activity, enabling me to truly 'live the practice', and therefore to understand it from the inside. Deconstructing the practice of food provisioning into activities such as buying, growing and cooking was helpful in gaining an understanding of how people manage everyday life, and how food acquisitioning fits into their everyday rhythms. It sheds light on how and to what extent people experience the practice of community gardening as a food acquisitioning practice, and to what degree they relate it to other elements of food provisioning such as cooking and eating. The focus on the separate elements of food provisioning practices helped me realise that acquiring food from community gardens represents a different practice to different people; some are engaged in the practice of growing food, others in the practice of shopping for food. This thesis showed that motivations delineate how the practice 'works out in practice'; the way in which a practice such as community gardening is given shape attracts people with certain motivations, who, by reproducing that practice, increase the attractiveness of the practice for others with similar motivations. This implies that while community gardening appears to be one practice, it should in fact be interpreted as several distinct practices, such as the practice of food growing or the practice of social gathering. Motivations therefore influence a garden's benefits and outcomes. This thesis thus highlights that motivations should not be overlooked when studying practices. Apprehending the motivations of community gardeners is also an important contribution to the literature around AFNs, since it helps us to understand the extent to which urban food production is truly alternative. By studying motivations, this thesis reveals that AFNs do not necessarily represent a deeper morality, or that not all food growing initiatives in the city can be defined as alternative. However, participants of community gardens are often both producers and consumers (there is a 'sliding scale of producership'); the gardens are thus largely independent from the conventional food system. Moreover, for participants who buy produce, the meaning of the gardens often goes beyond an economic logic (there is a 'sliding scale of marketness'). Hence, while the gardens studied in this thesis are no alternative alternatives, most of them can be qualified as 'actually existing alternatives' (after Jehlicka and Smith 2011). This thesis showed that even those gardens in which the commodification of food is being challenged do not necessarily represent a deeper morality, which is contrary to what is argued by Watts et al. (2005). This implies that understanding whether or not initiatives resist incorporation into the food system is insufficient to be able to determine whether or not they can be defined as alternative food networks. However, determining whether or not deeper moral reflection is present is not a satisfactory way of defining food networks as alternative either, as this neglects the fact that motivations do not always overlap with practical reality. This suggests that establishing whether a food network can be regarded as alternative requires studying both motivations and practical reality. The thesis also raises the question to what extent the label AFN is still useful. Since it is unclear what 'alternative' means exactly, it is also unclear whether a given initiative can be considered alternative. Moreover, the world of food seems too complex to be represented by a dichotomy between alternative and conventional food systems; the gardens presented in this thesis are diverse and carry characteristics of both systems. I therefore suggest considering replacing the term AFN with that of civic food networks, as Renting et al. (2012) advocate.

This article argues that everyday life is related to all social relations and activities, including both the ‘official’ practices that are codified and normalized and the ‘uncfficial’ practices and articulations of experience. Indeed, everyday day life is seen as the single plane of immanence in which these two forms of practice and articulation interrelate and affect one another. The lived experience of everyday life is multidimensional, composed of various social fields of practice that are articulated, codified and normalized to different degrees and in different ways (either officially or unofficially). Moving through these fields in daily life, we are aware of passing through different zones of time and space. There are aspects of everyday relations and practices more open to government, institutionalization, and official codification, while others are more resistant and provide the basis for opposition and social movements. Everyday life is a mixture of diverse and differentially produced and articulated forms, each combining time and space in a unique way. What we refer to as ‘institutions’ associated with the state or the economy are attempts to fix social practice in time and space—to contain it in specific geographical sites and codify it in official discourses. The relations and practices more often associated with everyday life—such as friendship, love, comradeship and relations of communication—are more fluid, open and dispersed across time and space. However, the two should not be uncoupled in social analysis, as they are necessarily interrelated in processes of social and political change. This is especially so in contemporary capitalism or, as Lefebvre called it, the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’.

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the well-being impacts of social enterprise, beyond a social enterpriseper se, in everyday community life.Design/methodology/approachAn exploratory case study was used. The study’s underpinning theory is from relational geography, including Spaces of Wellbeing Theory and therapeutic assemblage. These theories underpin data collection methods. Nine social enterprise participants were engaged in mental mapping and walking interviews. Four other informants with “boundary-spanning” roles involving knowledge of the social enterprise and the community were interviewed. Data were managed using NVivo, and analysed thematically.FindingsWell-being realised from “being inside” a social enterprise organisation was further developed for participants, in the community, through positive interactions with people, material objects, stories and performances of well-being that occurred in everyday community life. Boundary spanning community members had roles in referring participants to social enterprise, mediating between participants and structures of community life and normalising social enterprise in the community. They also gained benefit from social enterprise involvement.Originality/valueThis paper uses relational geography and aligned methods to reveal the intricate connections between social enterprise and well-being realisation in community life. There is potential to pursue this research on a larger scale to provide needed evidence about how well-being is realised in social enterprises and then extends into communities.