Everyday Form Research Articles

Excremental mobilities and minimal technopolitics: Toilets, race, and expulsion in Tanzania

ABSTRACT Centreing an everyday form of human expulsion – defecation – this article demonstrates that toilets produced colonial racial orders in colonial Tanzania through the different excremental mobilities their materialities allowed, including both movement and immobility. It specifically argues that colonial pit toilets affixed excrement to African spaces and helped create a form of minimal technopolitics that expelled infrastructural possibilities from subsequent time periods.

Benteng Wuna: Tantangan Golongan Bangsawan Muna di Era Modern

Fort Wuna as evidence of the residential separation of the Muna noble class shows that the social stratification system still applies in Muna even though many people still have middle to lower economic conditions. This research aims to find out what challenges are faced by the Muna noble class in the modern era with middle to lower economic conditions. The theory used in this research is Everyday Form of Resistance by James C. Scott. By using ethnographic methods, it was found that the Muna aristocrats who are in the middle to lower economic conditions must always maintain traditions by performing life cycle rituals that require a lot of money. The tactics used in overcoming these problems are by way of donations from relatives and superimposing their children in the procession of life cycle rituals carried out by other noble families.

Everyday Healthcare Regulation: British Newspapers and Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

This article interrogates the controversial field of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), focussing in particular on the implication of the British press in its regulation. It grounds its analysis in a 'decentred' understanding of regulation; a socio-legal approach which moves beyond formal regulation and regulators, and instead foregrounds diverse social actors and their attempts to alter behaviour across a given domain. Focussing on The Times newspaper as a case-study, it identifies five regulatory techniques through which the newspaper drew (and redrew) lines separating the safe from the risky, the efficacious from the sham, and the normal from the deviant. By analytically decentring CAM's formal regulation, this article provides a conceptual contribution. It highlights an everyday form of healthcare regulation directed at prospective users which may be just as significant in potentially guiding users towards or away from particular healthcare practices/practitioners as the more traditional, formal kinds of regulation identified in regulatory literatures.

The value affordances of social media engagement features

Abstract Social media engagement is ubiquitous but contested, simultaneously framed as an everyday form of support and an urgent societal risk. To make sense of these competing claims, we introduce the concept of value affordances, defined as the set of ethical, aesthetic, and relational principles that emerge from the interaction between different stakeholders and technological infrastructures. We develop a novel method involving focus groups and value cards to study the value affordances of engagement features and explore how international students attribute values to the Like, Comment, and Share buttons of TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Across platforms, participants agree that engagement features promote expression, care, and community and hinder privacy, mindfulness, peace, and safety. We discuss how our participants navigate value tradeoffs, emphasizing individual agency over structural factors when evaluating the design of platforms, using social media creatively, and assigning responsibility for harm to other users.

Right to toilets? infra-bio-urbanism over human waste, memories, and housing inequality

This research attends to how urban tenants bring matong (toilets in the form of urine buckets)—which are a material, semiotic, and marketable piece of infrastructure—into the debates over the remaking of a heritage district in Hongkou, Shanghai. Challenges abound for the site, which is occupied by prewar buildings where Jewish refugees found shelter during the war and more than 10 thousand Chinese tenants moved in after the Jews left. Until 2020, the dilapidated buildings accommodated an aging population of tenants who wish to stay relevant to the redevelopment vision of Shanghai and a variety of community business, including urban waste recycling. To find a crack in the state-led, neoliberal system, the tenants managed to exercise infrapolitics—an everyday form of resistance—over an urban infrastructure that is of particular significance to their bio-well-being and beyond. We analyze a set of spatial politics on sanatory infrastructure in Hongkou to understand how the tenants are desperately capitalizing on their disadvantages and reassembling memories, waste, and housing inequality into something more promising from below. The theorization of infra-bio-urbanism upon toilets sheds light on the accumulating anxiety upon housing inequality and infrastructural mobility in globalizing cities in China and beyond.

Unguided. Assessing young EAL/D learners' achievements in mainstream curriculum areas

This case study serves to illustrate challenges faced by classroom educators when assessing the achievement of young English as an Additional Language/Dialect (EAL/D) learners in the Australian Curriculum. The study is situated in a remote community where a traditional Indigenous language is spoken as the everyday form of communication, and English is learned in what is essentially a foreign language (EFL) setting. Although the students’ English proficiency is not advanced, they are learning the mainstream curriculum, delivered and assessed through English. The study triangulates the available assessment guidance with the skills of a classroom teaching team and sample written and oral evidence of their students’ learning, with reference to a Year 2 achievement standard in Science. This methodology draws out the ways in which the Australian Curriculum assessment materials lack applicability to this and similar remote Indigenous community EFL classrooms because this work is unguided. A specific improvement would be annotated exemplars which illustrate how to assess EAL/D learner achievement in each learning area – Science, Mathematics and so on. Assessment is pivotal for informing teaching, feeding back to students, reporting to parents/caregivers, and for system accountabilities. Thus, the relationship between assessing student learning of Australian Curriculum subject areas, and assessing the language and learning requirements of students whose English proficiency is not advanced, needs to be clearly articulated.

Revolutionary Landscapes and Kitchens of Refusal: Tomato Sauce and Sovereignty in Egypt

AbstractThis article presents a cultural history of tasbika, a tomato‐based cooking technique, as a window into transformations of sovereignty in colonial and postcolonial Egypt. It draws on cookbooks, popular magazines and oral histories to argue that tasbika’s relatively recent emergence as one of the country's most ubiquitous home cooking methods was made possible not only by state‐led industrialisation and modernisation projects, but also through a form of sovereignty wielded by women working in their home kitchens. This article describes this ‘kitchen sovereignty’ as an everyday form of power exercised by home cooks making decisions about how to manage scarce resources and feed their families. Moving beyond questions of food policies and market supply, this study of food and power centres the domestic labour that home cooks performed to transform raw ingredients into the flavours of everyday life in Egypt.

Informal transportation systems in the region of Urabá in Colombia through the lens of everyday forms of resistance

The informal transport sector has various ambivalent characteristics and often a negative connotation since it commonly operates unauthorized and illicitly and is not part of the official transport sector. However, the informal sector provides a mix of legitimate transport offerings as well as important complementary services. The paper focuses on these ‘new mobilities’ and aims to understand informal transportation systems not only as a service coverage in specific areas lacking formal transit, but also as an activity that arises as a popular form of struggle and a covert and unorganized form of resistance against the political power embedded in dominant transportation systems. Through an empirical study conducted in the region of Urabá in Colombia the paper explores how the dominant agricultural industries in the region are causing huge challenges related to the overlap of transportation scales, congestion and risks of accidents in urban areas, affecting urban development, and how injustices of the existing public transport services and insufficient road infrastructures trigger the production of informal transportation. The paper mobilizes the theory of ‘everyday forms of resistance’, which draws attention to certain common behaviour and activities of subaltern groups as tactics to survive and undermine repressive domination. As such, this paper questions through its case study to what extent the informal transportation actions in Urabá are in a way challenging oppression and can be called an everyday form of resistance.

Purchase Intentions of the Working Gen Y Against Working Gen Z on Online Ads with Informal Language

Culture plays a big role in terms of shaping the preference of consumers' purchasing intentions as well as their influence in which advertisements they find attractive. Different backgrounds can factor in how consumers perceive a specific advertisement since some ad messages may not be received correctly by the consumers even though they are part of the target segmentation. This pushed the researchers to identify the consumers' attitudes towards advertisements using slang words. The study will focus on participants who belong to the working generation Y and generation Z residing in Metro Manila that uses the Internet in their contemporary lives. Therefore, they understand Internet slang and use it as their everyday form of communication. The researchers investigated if the interest and needs of the targeted participants were met based on their encounter with an advertisement with the use of slang words. Then compare which of the two working generations has a higher purchase intention based on the four metrics used (Informativeness, Entertainment, Credibility, and Adaptation). The use of a qualitative method was chosen since the pandemic restricted the researchers from gathering participants and meeting them face-to-face, which interfered with gathering accurate results because the information might have been tampered with. Upon the accomplishment of researcher results, it was concluded that the use of informal language in the advertisement had different effects on the working Generation Y and Generation Z in terms of word adaptation. This can help marketers to create more effective advertisements to capture their intended audience and how advertising adaptation plays a role in consumers' purchase intention.

Unrecognised language teaching: Teaching Australian Curriculum content in remote Aboriginal community schools

The case study in this article offers a descriptive account of challenges involved in teaching Australian Curriculum content in the common teaching context in remote communities where an Indigenous language is spoken as the everyday form of communication and students learn English in what is essentially a foreign language setting. An on-theground description of the work of a Primary school teaching team servesto illustrate the language teaching aspect of delivering Australian Curriculum content in areas such as History, Geography and Science. This aspect of the teaching team’s work is underestimated in the curriculum itself and in the guidance provided to teachers, yet is essential for student learning in this context. While the team draws on students’ L1 and early L2 English proficiency abilities to teach curriculum content, this work is not expedited from outside their classroom. An analysis of current curriculum offerings and the teaching team’s approaches finds that they receive little direction for the extensive language planning required. The findings suggest an urgent need for tailor-made curriculum and teacher guidance which better recognise this dual language context. This article canvases different curriculum settings that would alleviate this situation considerably, not only for this teaching team but for others in similar remote schools.

COVID-19: Pandemic Reading

In 1832, a global cholera pandemic reached US shores Like COVID-19, cholera was a wholly new disease in the United States (although considerably deadlier), and it was, like the novel coronavirus, a poorly understood one that disproportionately affected immigrants and African Americans The cholera pandemic began immediately following Nat Turner’s rebellion, which had triggered a wave of punitive laws against Black Americans The early 1830s was, in other words, a time of brutal devastation for the African American community, particularly in the South How, we might wonder, when faced with horrific violence, systemic injustice, and a descending global pandemic, could an enslaved fifteen-year-old Frederick Douglass do anything but despair? Crucially, he did not Instead, Douglass’s understanding of Nat Turner’s murder, the racist legal retribution that followed, and the horrors wrought by cholera appear in the context of his awakening to the

Keterlibatan Masyarakat dalam Membangun Harmoni Sosial Muslim-Kristen Pra dan Pasca Konflik Etnik di Maluku

The aim of the article is to give a sociological description and analysis toward the civic engagement of Taniwel Timur in building social harmony between Muslims and Christians, pre and post-conflict in Maluku. There are two main important points which are, the history of Muslims-Christians’ engagement in building a relationship and social interaction, and Muslims-Christians’ engagement becomes the basic in building harmonious social relationships. This research employed a qualitative research method through a structured interview technique with key informants, observation, and library study. The result of the research found that; first, the Muslims-Christians engagement divided into two which are the association form of civic engagement such as religious institutions, custom and government and everyday form of civic engagement consist of such simple, routine interactions of life as Christians and Muslims family visiting each other, eating together often enough, jointly participating in festivals and allowing their children to play together. Second, the Muslims-Christians’ engagement was based on strong brotherhood, cooperation with many parties, strong traditions and mutual trust. Association form and everyday form of civic engagement had the same position to build a strong social system. It also created a sphere of solidarity, justice, and fraternity. In conclusion, Taniwel Timur's society can construct a harmonious social life.

Entrepreneuring as an everyday form of resistance

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to problematise the dominant conceptualisation of entrepreneurship by recognising the everyday resistance inherent in mundane entrepreneurial practices. Its principle purpose is to show how entrepreneurial activities enacted by ordinary individuals in a marginalised and oppressed context can be an important means of resisting economic adversity, social marginalisation and political (colonial) domination.Design/methodology/approachFramed within de Certeau’s conceptualisation of the practices of everyday life, this study utilises a “focussed ethnography”, relying on “participant observation” and “informal interviews”, to explore the perceptions and experiences of Palestinian women street vendors, and how they use everyday entrepreneurial practices in the open-air market of the Old City of Jerusalem to become socially and politically empowered.FindingsThe arguments in this paper demonstrate how marginalised Palestinian women, who are equipped with a genuine critical vision of their reality and a biophiliac attitude, use entrepreneuring to enact new possibilities for themselves and for their families. Through their entrepreneurial act of street vending, these women exemplify a struggle against economic and socio-political constraints, transforming the act of entrepreneuring from a mere economic practice to an all-encompassing human project, one with a more human face.Originality/valueThis paper extends the argument for the complex and dynamic nature of the phenomenon and exposes its political nature, hitherto inadequately addressed in existing literature, as well as uncovers the potential of entrepreneurialism to enhance individual empowerment and contribute to meaningful social change. In addition, it addresses the need for scholarly work that focuses on the everyday entrepreneurial activities carried out by ordinary individuals experiencing various forms of oppression in new and challenging spaces, which are seldom acknowledged within the dominant theoretical and research frameworks.

Centring “classroom life” in India’s debate on quality of education

India is a continent-like country, with country-sized constituent provinces, and hence is, not unexpectedly, internally differentiated when measured in terms of the dominant educational imagination, educational programmes and policies, and the nature of democratic politics itself, which either opens up or closes down educational opportunity for the masses. What enables the relatively disadvantaged social groups to step into the classroom and continue their school life in some parts of India but disable them from doing so elsewhere is a matter of great import, as it invites us to make use of a comparative lens in order to “learn from India by India”, and to be both critical and constructive in our research and action for universal schooling of quality. This paper has the inherent limitation of not covering the vast and diverse educational landscape of India, trying instead to shed light on only a few corners of this huge canvas, grounding the discussion mainly on preschool and elementary education in the Indian state of West Bengal.The paper addresses the central question of the quality of “classroom life” in its everyday form in government-run schools, against the general backdrop of widespread cynicism with anything public, which is noticeable in recent times in both India and many other parts of the globe. The analyses and arguments advanced here in defence of public education and the larger ethos of democratic education seek to counter this view, without in any way dismissing the role of private alternatives. This reasoning in favour of democratic and inclusive education is, however, not a mere assertion about the inevitable progress of public institutions, but rather an attempt to translate our “constructive impatience” – to borrow the pithy term used by Amartya Sen – with the serious inadequacies of the public education system into effective and egalitarian remedial action.

Vizualinės dokumentacijos ir refleksijos pagalba mokantis lauko tyrimų

Nuotraukos gali būti naudojamos kaip lauko tyrimo užrašų priedas ir refleksiją skatinantį priemonė lauko tyrimų ir jų analizės metu. Būdamos tyrimo dienoraščio dalis, nuotraukos gali padėti atgaminti patirtį ir palaikyti reflektyvų atstumą nuo įvykių. Nuotrauka, kaip vaizdinė reprezentacija, taip pat gali skatinti mokymo(si) ir žinių „gavimo“ (angl. production) refleksiją bei atskleisti paslėptas žinias. Remiantis studentų patirtimi vykdant dalyvaujantįjį stebėjimą, straipsnyje diskutuojama, kaip nuotraukos ir vizualinės reprezentacijos padeda mokytis lauko tyrimų ir jų analizės. Mokymosi proceso vaizdai gali padėti suvokti ir užfiksuoti svarbias reikšmes, įgytas lauko tyrimo metu ir apie patį lauko tyrimą. Žinoma, nuotraukos negali pakeisti rašytinių dokumentų. Jos turi eiti išvien su tekstu, kuris gali paaiškinti, kas nuotraukoje reprezentuojama. Analizė rodo, kad studentų portfolio gali būti saugykla, kurioje jie dokumentuoja savo mokymosi ir supratimo procesą. Reikšmių kūrimo procesas – dėl savęs (arba grupėje) ir dėl analitinių minčių prezentacijos – gali vykti tiek su, tiek be realaus nuotraukų rinkinio. Tačiau individualus mokymosi nuotraukų rinkinys tampa neišsemiamų minčių ir aprašymų vienetų šaltiniu. Jis padeda sujungti pasinėrimą į savo mintis, ankstesnes refleksijas, prisiminimus ir patirtis bei reflektyvų atstumą ir tai yra esmingai svarbu, norint atlikti sėkmingą dalyvaujantįjį stebėjimą.

British satire, everyday politics: Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci and Charlie Brooker

This article develops a critical engagement with the politics of British satire. After first engaging the mainstream critique of satire—that it promotes cynicism and apathy by portraying politicians in stereotypically corrupt terms—we develop a performative approach to comedy as an everyday vernacular of political life. Beyond a focus on ‘impact’, we suggest that satire can be read as an everyday form of political reflection that performs within a social context. This argument yields an image of Morris, Iannucci and Brooker as important critics of contemporary British politics, a point which we explore through their interventions on media form, political tragedy and political agency.

Leave a comment: mommyblogs and the everyday struggle to reclaim parenthood

“Mommyblogs” are significant for feminist media theory, given how these give mothers a public venue to voice their experiences and anxieties at a stage of life that often generates new feminist insight. Whereas previous generations of mothers relied on interpersonal communication and books authored by professional experts, contemporary mothers are more likely to seek parenting information and offer advice by reading and responding to blogs. These media texts are also bases of communal support, blurring older theories of audience “reception” and complicating notions of expertise, authority, and power. Analysis of comments about two controversies—one involving the measles vaccination, the other about so-called free-range parenting—posted to the New York Times Motherlode blog shows that parenting blogs enable audience members—not only women but also men—to debate parenting decisions that result from neoliberal imperatives. Commenters both endorse neoliberal parenting, framing it as an exercise in good decision-making and risk management that yields positive outcomes, and contest it, arguing that parenting must contribute to social and collective justice. The audience thereby discursively participates in an everyday form of activism that enables citizens to help shape the terms of public debate.

NOVA COSMÓPOLIS: AS FRONTEIRAS COMO OBJETOS DE CONFLITO NO MUNDO CONTEMPORÂNEO

A globalização não suprimiu as fronteiras: ela as transforma, as desloca, as dissocia umas das outras. Algumas atividades econômicas, por exemplo, não têm o mesmo alcance das atividades políticas ou das comunicações. As fronteiras se multiplicam, se alargam e se tornam, assim, simultaneamente mais frágeis e incertas. O momento atual do processo de globalização nos traz duas questões referentes à possibilidade de viver em uma escala global. Por um lado, um número cada vez maior de fronteiras se transformam em muros, mais migrantes morrem em mares, desertos e montanhas ao tentar atravessar fronteiras fechadas. Por outro lado, a questão filosófica e política do cosmopolitismo volta à ordem do dia em um contexto diferente daquele do Iluminismo, mas que formula, concretamente, as mesmas perguntas. A partir de etnografias de “homens-fronteira” e “lugares-fronteira” (Borderlands), proporei pensarmos uma nova cosmópolis, considerada como um mundo em movimento que antecipa a forma banal e quotidiana do cosmopolitismo. Na esfera antropológica, trata-se de uma nova situação onde a cultura e a sociabilidade se definem em situações de fronteira que se tornam cada vez mais constantes.

Stories of Words, Words as Stories. Some lexico-statistically based Reflections on the Meaning Unit in Spoken Language

This paper develops a theoretical discussion about the definition of the unit of content in spoken language. The issue originates from the applicative field of corpus-based lexico-statistical surveys, which are traditionally and prevalently used to optimize and standardize the programs for the vocabulary didactics of foreign languages. The main critical limitation of lexico-statistical inquiries can be identified in their impossibility to determine a representative threshold of the basic content lexicon of a language or, put otherwise, the most important words referring to the concrete things that are spoken about. Beyond the threshold of the most recurring 1,000 lexemes, in fact, words virtually show low and irregular as well as semi-equivalent probabilities to recur in spoken texts. The lexico-statistical applications that have followed aim exactly at overcoming this limitation. Albeit through different methodologies, the various approaches conceive in fact the basic content lexicon as made up by the most frequent or used concrete substantives of a language. From time to time, either limited or particularly extensive series of concrete nouns have been compiled: however, these nouns are de facto subject to sporadic and irregular trends of recur-rence values in spoken texts and are likely to be encountered very rarely by the language user in actual spoken utterances. The discussion on basic spoken contents simply ends up in a theoretical flaw and in a mere representational paradox, because it investigates and describes exactly what is not constitutive of the examined phenomenon. The consideration of the very semiotic peculiarity of spoken language constitutes the premise of an alternative definition of its meaning unit. The things that are talked about are in fact expressed only sporadically, because they are embedded in the situational context wherein they are shared – and mostly reiterated – by the conversation partners. More than with a dis-crete lexical element, the unit of spoken content seems to be identifiable with the holistic con-versational practice that is instead regularly carried out by the speakers within likely ordinary frames of experience; consequently it seems to be closer to a basic unit in the “practice of meaning” than to an isolated meaning constituent. As the habitudinary modality of construct-ing, inhabiting and sharing our everyday form of life, the meaning unit in spoken language rather unveils as a narrative unit, for reasons that this paper explores in details. Such an alter-native theoretical vision is dealt with in the final part of the contribution, which also outlines further issues related to the possibilities of both its representation and its didactic usability.

‘The screaming streets’: Voice and the Spaces of Gossip in Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and Liza of Lambeth (1897)

In the proliferation of periodical literature in the 1890s, gossip columns carried positive, masculine connotations and worked across male class boundaries. Oral gossip in this period was defined as negative and female, and had a critical role in regulating behaviour. This article discusses late-Victorian narratives which represent urban places defined and managed by gossip. These sites use the power of gossip to assert their communality and their separation from the world of the printed word. Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and W. Somerset Maugham’s Liza of Lambeth (1897) are set in London streets characterized by homogeneity and monotony. Their inhabitants exist in ‘the nightmare of a world that is all streets’. Gossip plays an essential role in these spaces. Residents demonstrate anxiety about living at the borders of slum spaces, and manage their separation from slums by using gossip to attack those who threaten the narrowly defined boundaries of these places. In these works, gossip is not idle chatter but a formidable mode of speech which has serious effects. In representing sites governed by this ostensibly everyday form of speech, Maugham and Morrison simultaneously disenchanted previous romanticized visions of the working-class streets, and represented them as other places, with a lack of written culture. In their representations of the determination of place by gossiping voices, Maugham and Morrison concomitantly convey the impossibility of the absorption of such places into mainstream culture, and assert the privileged position of the late-Victorian realist who can access the otherwise inaccessible.