Banal Practices Research Articles

‘The bit of bread, the draught of coffee’: Food Imagery in Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) foregrounds the subject of food, depicting the material culture of mid-Victorian society. The text is rife with alimentary imagery and metaphors. Each section of the novel explores different aspects of food, hunger and privation, drawing upon food motifs in varying degrees to map out the heroine’s development into a moral agent. In general, food discourse tends to elucidate the major themes of the novel: childhood trauma; identity formation; education and discipline; love, marriage and sexuality. The novel thus suggests that the issue of food is associated with a wide range of human experience. It engages the reader to critically reappraise food and its consumption, seemingly a banal practice of everyday life, which resonates with material, symbolic and socio-cultural significance.

Freedom Rangers™ and landscapes that move people

Born out of long-term fieldwork in New York's Hudson Valley, this article begins and ends with reflections on a fraught attempt to conduct ethnographic research with captive chickens, paradoxically called Freedom Rangers™, living on small-scale, organic animal farms. With no available ecological and economic justifications for their confinement, I had to turn instead to animal agriculture's long-standing role in a regional landscape tradition that generates a White sense of place and personhood. Since the dawn of the colonial period, agriculture, especially animal agriculture, has constituted a powerful landscape-making assemblage in the Hudson Valley, one both deeply dependent on racial slavery and uniquely responsible for (never complete) Native displacement. Imported European farm animals and their associate organisms remade the region ecologically, enabling the proliferation of colonial settlement. Then as now, the remaking of the land is itself a site of politics and a means of realizing possible futures. Watching as Whiteness emerges along the human/nonhuman interface, I argue that meat is but one product yielded from these confined chicken bodies and that the unspectacular terror they experience on a daily basis radiates far beyond their enclosures. Addressing the persistence of settler colonialism, antiblackness, and White supremacy requires attention to a wider range of political scenes and actors than are often considered in studies of these formations. What are the banal practices and everyday affects that secure a social order? What are the possibilities for more-than-human ethnography given the violence that saturates this venerated landscape?

Liminal spaces and the shaping of family museum visits: a spatial ethnography of a major international art museum

ABSTRACT Museum managers face mounting pressures to increase and widen audiences, with families often perceived as a key audience requiring particular forms of engagement. The article utilises spatial ethnographic research at a major international art museum (Tate Modern) to examine how family museum practices relate to museum spatial design. Liminal spaces were found to be vital in shaping the experiences of family visitors by affording opportunies for more banal practices (such as playing, sitting, talking, eating and resting). Although they may be partially supported by collection displays, liminal spaces do not usually feature in museum management agendas. As the social purpose of museums continues to be debated, the paper argues for a greater understanding of the full range of affordances of museums for families, paying attention to the significance of different types of museum spaces in mediating experience and the importance of optimising those spaces for greater access.

Performing the cyborg self: explicit and implicit examples of body hacking the distributed self

ABSTRACT Today, as many work and socialize completely online, we are more acutely aware than ever of the cybernetic relationship between the body (in-situ) and the virtually or digitally extended self. However, even before the onset of the current global pandemic (COVID-19), the contemporary ‘body’ had to be understood as extended beyond physical flesh, through global communications systems. How do our practices on these platforms reveal our evolving relationships with a distributed and digitally mutable body? Drawing on my own construction of cyborg theory as a subset of posthuman discourse, this paper links the practices of explicitly cyborg performance, like Stelarc and ORLAN, with the increasingly banal practice of body-hacking as it is realized in the performance of the self (both consciously and unconsciously) on distributed, social media platforms. These discussions touch both on identified trends in contemporary self-representation as well as artists whose work within those spaces acts as a comment, critique, and application of those practices. Through this discussion, I show how these practices can be understood as body hacking and how that body hacking can both reflect an increasing sense of personal empowerment in relation to the body as well as a morally ambiguous algorithmic redefinition of the paradigmatic body.

Going on holiday only to come home: making happy families in Singapore

Family holidays have become a ubiquitous cultural norm – imagined as the epitome of family togetherness and encapsulated through the production of ‘happy family’ photographs. The pressure to conform to ‘naturalized’ idealizations of the family is underpinned by pervasive family ideology that remain hegemonic, despite the changing structures of modern family life. But how exactly does the ‘happy family’ materialise through tourism practices? What is it about the tourism time-space that differentiates it from home, transforming the ordinary family holiday into an extraordinary obligation that desires to be performed? These questions warrant an investigation into the exceptionalism of the family holiday, and we answer them by deconstructing the dilemma between the expectations and lived realities of modern family life, using the typical Singaporean nuclear family as an empirical lens. By amalgamating an ‘everyday geographies’ conceptual approach with Gilligan’s (1982) ‘feminist ethics of care’ perspective, the paper re-examines the seemingly banal practices of carework on the family holiday. It draws its findings from qualitative data based on focus group discussions conducted with five Singaporean families and an autoethnography of the first author’s family holidays. The paper reveals that carework practices on holiday are perceived as a means for families to authenticate nostalgic identities about what a family is – perceived to be lost in modern life. These acts transform the holiday into a home-away-from-home, underpinned by a prioritisation of familial relationship. Hence, this paper conceptually formulates a reinterpretation of ‘feminist ethics of care’ as a morality whose salience through holiday practices renews family relationships of care with each recurring episode of the family holiday. This theorisation elucidates that the family tourism time-space is exceptional, simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, existing in-between home and away. Through its (re)production of the ‘happy family’ identity, going on holiday has become one of the few ways of coming back home to the family.

The Everyday Aesthetics of Public Space

The main claim of the article is that everyday aesthetics conceived as a philosophical analysis of everyday objects and situations offers a theoretical perspective that may be applied to the aesthetics of public space. Analysed in aesthetic terms, the public space may be thought to be a space that offers an aesthetic experience to the widest possible public. I contend that the aesthetic quality of public space should be a quality that favours positive experiences of the everyday, banal practices taking place in it. Accordingly, designing public space should consist in making it “everyday experience-friendly.” My argument will be illustrated by the example of a site-specific installation, the Oxygenator, created in Warsaw by Joanna Rajkowska, whose intention was to offer people an ordinary place where they could meet in a “healthy atmosphere.”

From severe to routine labour exploitation: The case of migrant workers in the UK food industry

The issue of exploitative labour practices against migrant workers has been well established in previous work. Yet most research and policy focus on severe forms of exploitation, including types of ‘modern slavery’ such as human trafficking and forced labour. Research has paid less attention to ‘routine’ labour abuses that are less extreme than severe exploitation, but which are still exploitative or harmful. This article argues that a stronger emphasis is needed on routine labour exploitation, which risks being overlooked when contrasted with severe exploitation. Drawing on a qualitative study of migrant labour in the UK food industry, the article demonstrates that workers experience a range of mistreatment in the workplace, which is unlikely to fall within the scope of severe exploitation and remit of ‘criminal justice’ interventions. In order to achieve full ‘labour justice’, more consistent attention is needed on these routine and banal practices, not just the most brutal.

(Extra)ordinary activism: veganism and the shaping of hemeratopias

Purpose Literature on social movements increasingly identifies everyday life as significant to understand political practices and activism. However, scholars have retained a major bias towards movement mobilisation and collective action, often relegating the everyday at the margins of social movements. While there have been notable exceptions, with studies of prefigurative activism and everyday practices of social change, they have usually focussed on alternative community spaces such as autonomous social centres and protest camps, and paid less attention to “ordinary” practices and spaces of activism. The purpose of this paper is to address these problems by suggesting that everyday life may be central to the production of activist spaces and the action of social movements. Design/methodology/approach Drawing upon ethnography methods, interviews with vegan activists, an on-line survey of supporters of vegan movements and an examination of on-line vegan forums, it seeks to analyse the practices of the vegan movement in France. Findings This paper attempts to demonstrate that prefigurative activism and seemingly banal practices may be central to strategies for social change. Drawing on an anarchist perspective on activism, it further suggests that activism and everyday life should not be studied in isolation from each other but as mutually constitutive in the creation of everyday alternative spaces – hemeratopias. Originality/value This paper adds to the literature on activism and social movements by offering a more complex picture of the spatial politics at work in social movements and a better understanding of individual action and mobilisation.

‘Daddy is a difficult word for me to hear’: carceral geographies of parenting and the prison visiting room as a contested space of situated fathering

Advocating greater engagement between children’s and carceral geographies, this paper explores the spaces of parenting as they exist within a UK male prison, building upon criminological research on the effects of imprisonment on prisoners’ families and children. Focusing primarily on the visiting room, it extends discussion of the specificities of everyday material spaces and practices of parenting currently under scrutiny within children’s geographies and geographies of parenting, and brings these subdisciplines into dialogue with carceral geography. Concerned specifically with the intimate, embodied and sometimes banal practices of parenting in this constrained and highly surveilled context, it draws attention to previously overlooked spaces and identities of situated fathering.

DEFORMATION PRACTICES OF SOCIAL REALITY INTEGRITY: OBJECTIFICATION OF DESIRES AS THE INHERITANCE OF CIVILIZATION PROGRESS

Objective. The interest of the article focuses on the analysis of the social integrity phenomenon and its deformation practices in the modern society. The character’s sociality of the modern era indicates serious problems and contradictions that actualize the possibility of social integrity. The cultural crisis, spiritual vacuum, updated existential problems of the modern humanity forces to turn to the problem of the integrity constructing and maintaining and social reality functioning, as well as to the mechanisms and practices of its deformation. Methodology. Thus, in the analysis of the above mentioned points the problem of desires is getting more relevant, and these desires are actively being invested by the civilization progress in the human life. As simulacra of the natural mechanisms of individual activity (needs) desires help to transform the personality harmonious development process (cultural consumption) in a destructive civilization strategy – consumerism. Under these conditions consumption is losing its traditional meaning. From the natural processes of meeting the needs and developing the world it is transforming into a total destructive act that implements certain desires. Consumption grows borders of the traditional practice (it has not been already determined only by food, clothes, car, etc.). It is turning into an active mass orientation; practice of the materialization that is aimed to transform the surrounding world into a thing, a symbol of use. Thus, consumption transforms into a practice of total consumerism. The scientific novelty. In this context, the aim of the research is to analyze the destructive potential of consumerism, which nature is getting a real threat to the integrity of both individual world and social reality. This pattern of consumption determines the gap between a real purpose of the things and their contrived sense that gives them the desired effect (prestige, power, material wealth, etc.). In this situation, we can see updating of the tendency when things lose their true purpose, and man loses his active role. He is no longer a creator of qualitatively new products that fill his life with meaning. He is a conformal trimmer who routinely plays ersatz and fills his live with them. Material aspects rather than spiritual ones determine the value and meaning of human’s life, they represent a desired object that he wants to receive. His choice is ruled not by creative work, but by the civilization "benefits" bondage. Conclusions. Such deformation of harmonious development of the man and society, and of the traditional order transforms nature of the human relations to turn them into a banal practice of consumerism – usage. The desire to own, exploit, use makes a human to devalue surrounding reality and its members, turns a human into a homo economics, who calculates his circle of friends, communication, relationships. Exactly such "commercialization of relationship" overcomes the limits of the economic, political and legal spheres and encroaches on the family, friendship sphere to determine the whole character of the modern society.

Noise

This essay develops a cultural materialist theory of listening through a historical ethnography of Gibraltarian men's contradictory sensitivity to the ‘noise’ of mass media and desensitization to the industrial soundscape of the state. I argue that this contradiction can be historicized through close attention to the social antagonisms embedded in the history of noise ordinances, and the ways in which British colonial officials structured an idealized form of masculinity premised on the sonic relationships between bodies and technologies. Gibraltarian men reproduce this masculine disposition, and through it colonial hierarchies, in the seemingly banal practice of listening to mass media, and ignoring the soundscape of the neoliberal, colonial state.

Geographers Performing Nationalism and Hetero-masculinity

Our article builds upon the insights of recent critical geographic inquiry that has examined the involvement of geography in a multitude of power relations, and in particular the processes of European imperialism and colonisation. The focus of this article, however, is the involvement of the discipline of geography in the constitution and maintenance of a hetero-masculine nationalist discourse. We focus our analysis on articles published in the New Zealand Geographer, but suggest that such hetero-masculine nationalist discourse exists also in the works of geographers writing about other nation-spaces. Our purpose is to draw geographers' attention to the constitutive effects of banal practices in geographic scholarship. We draw upon Michael Billig's concept of ‘banal nationalism’ to argue that the articulation of nationalist narratives is an endemic feature of the contemporary nation/state, and one that forms a particular discursive order that situates author, text and reader in an assumed national and hetero-masculine landscape.

Banal Accounts: Subaltern Voices

In this review essay I argue that accounting research as it is currently constituted can be viewed as a banal practice in that the majority of research is largely insulated from and irrelevant to the majority of the world’s population. Starting from prior research on “subalternity” I propose that accounting research is primarily a practice of the center, that the institutional field of accounting contributes to the unoriginal and partisan nature of accounting research, and finally that a consideration of the social location of accounting scholarship provides a tentative vantage point for decreasing the insularity and increasing the relevance of accounting research.

Masculinism, Emplacement, and Positionality in Peer Review

In this article I examine peer review (refereeing) of manuscripts for geography journals, focusing in particular upon the discourse of refereeing. I suggest that this discourse is constituted through seemingly banal practices and that it constructs and positions referees, the conceptual space of geography, and the knowledge produced by academics about specific places. Drawing upon feminist theory, I suggest that the dominant practice of “blind” (and “double-blind”) refereeing relies upon a masculinist model of “objectivity” that is disembodied, impartial, and unlocated. This approach to peer review, I argue, genders geographic theory, reconstitutes abstract Cartesian space, and effaces place.