Practices Of Everyday Life Research Articles

How Can Migrants’ Language Proficiency Be Measured? A Discussion of Opportunities and Challenges When Studying the Impact of Language Skills on Social Position

Language proficiency is crucial for migrants’ social position in the labour market and therefore plays a key role in the (re-)production of social inequalities in modern societies. There are different ways of capturing language skills in quantitative studies. However, it is important to question the extent to which existing language measures mirror migrants’ realities and relevant linguistic everyday life practices. In our paper, we contribute to this question by disentangling various measures of language proficiency. We use a large sample of migrants in Germany (GSOEP) that contains numerous language measures. We conduct detailed quantitative analyses on how various language variables influence migrants’ social position, by which we mean migrants’ socioeconomic status (as measured by ISEI). The ISEI is mainly based on occupation, but also on education and income. Our findings indicate that especially the self-assessed German speaking proficiency is an important and parsimonious predictor for migrants’ social position in Germany.

Becoming…in Lagos: a time-narration approach to city-identification in an African metropolis

ABSTRACT The “public narratives” of Africa’s largest metropolis—Lagos—in terms of “Ilu Eko” and “No Man's Land” pave a path to exploring “ontological narratives” which Lagosresidents use to make sense of urban lives. By employing a time-narrationapproach, which emphasizes the narrativity of open-ended life-story interviewsbased on ethnographic fieldwork, to interpret identificationdiscourses and practices in everyday life, this paper makes arguments in three aspects ofbecoming: “becoming urban” is not a definite consequence for urban dwellers, andthus the urban should be further specified to how the particular city—Lagos—play roles in life trajectories; structural constraints in Lagos make work and marriage firmlybound in the process of settling down—so called “becoming settled”—from whichdifferent people narrate time in distinctive ways; discourses of becoming “Lagosian”are involved with becoming less or more “Yoruba”, which varies according tointerpersonal interactions among people in everyday life.

SPACE RHYTHMS AND TECHNOLOGIES OF ASTRONOMIC NAVIGATION AS FACTORS OF CULTURAL GENESIS AND SAPIENTATION

The article proposes a new approach to these problems, developed on the basis of thenavigation concept of the information modeling of the world. From the position of the navigation concept,the development of the geographical space-time played a leading role in the processes of human biologicaland supra-biological adaptation. Such an approach takes into account the fundamental role of the planetarycosmic factors in shaping the structure of the geocultural space of the Earth and is consistent with the mainprovisions of the modern scientific picture of the world. On the basis of field and laboratory research, theinstrumental possibilities of stone labyrinths and other prehistoric cultural heritage sites are determined.According to the results of the analysis of the structure of uneven-age objects, the reconstruction stages of thedevelopment of prehistoric astronomical orientation technologies are proposed. Comparison of classical signsand symbols with sun shadow charts allowed to substantiate the astronomical nature of the sign. The analysisof ethnographic materials has provided the preservation of archaic navigation technologies in everyday lifepractice, ornaments, mythological scenes, and sacral traditions. On the basis of generalization of materials,new models of cultural genesis and anthropogenesis, based on solar navigation, have been developed. Theresults of the study show that the invariant structures of genetic and social memory are associated with theorder of geographical space-time, which is determined by the shape, daily and annual movements of theplanet Earth.

Queering social reproduction: Sex, care and activism in San Francisco

In this paper I ask what is at stake when we move past static ontologies of the ‘gayborhood’ as a form of commercial and residential concentration in decline to theorise gay urban activism as a mode of queer social reproduction, through which queer caring labour ‘redeems’ the dislocations of the neoliberal city structured by oedipalised and capitalist social relations. Through well-documented formal and informal collective action, queers in the urban West have organised in response to health crises, exclusion and systemic threats of violence. Returning to socialist feminist imaginaries of care beyond the ‘social’, and to Guy Hocquenghem’s often-overlooked theory of the sociality of the anus, this paper draws on excerpts from the film Milk, the poetry of Thom Gunn and a discussion of gay men’s volunteering to examine San Francisco as a queer urban space constituted through a network of encounters, crossings, intimacies and labours enacted through the mundane caring practices of everyday life. I ask in what ways we can think of gay urban space as continuously made and remade through non-monogamous sex practices that perform the messy marrying of public and private, and erotic and platonic.

Narrated Soviet tourist landscapes during late socialism

PurposeThe study aims to provide an insight into the inherent diversities and ambiguities of Soviet touristic landscapes during the period of late socialism by a means of Estonian biographical sources. Based on written narratives, the study focuses on the embodied ways in which Estonian travellers engaged with and experienced foreign landscapes and people during trips within the Soviet Union.Design/methodology/approachThe study treats tourists’ travel landscapes as meaningful, lived experiences that highlight features and everyday life strategies that were characteristic of the Soviet period. Approaching via the lens of Estonian culture and nationality, the study analyses the meaningful experiences through which the narrators drew boundaries between the self and the other.FindingsThe Soviet tourism landscape of the 1960s–1980s was marked by sharp cultural contrasts. The landscapes that unfold in the narratives were full of contradictions, arousing feelings of both admiration and alienation. Whilst the ideological purpose of Soviet tourism was to build a “socialist nation”, the themed narratives, on the other hand, demonstrate the wide spectrum of everyday life practices, which show both the distancing of oneself from the Soviet system as well as conformation with it. Although tourism helped travellers accept the Union, this was achieved not by consenting to socialist ideology, but by becoming familiar with its heterogeneity.Originality/valueResearch on Soviet tourism has largely relied on archival sources and the press, which shed light mainly on the organisation and ideological basis of tourism. Drawing on oral sources, this study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the complex nature of Soviet tourist landscapes.

L’ecosophie d’Avatar. Science-fiction, nature et vie quotidienne

Ecosophy of Avatar. Science-fiction, nature and everyday life. More than a century after its dawn, with Avatar (2009) cinema has returned to emanate the amazement of its origins, wrapping the viewer in a plot of synaesthesia that evokes the overwhelming effect provoked in the room by L'Arrivee d'un train en gare de La Ciotat by the Lumiere brothers (1895) and recalls the wonder sown in the audience by Le voyage dans la lune di Melies (1902). James Cameron's film, awarded by the box office but neglected by critics, was the first to propose a reading that is as transversal as it is innovative of the relationship between the media audience, the system of objects and the environment, tracing a scenario that can correspond with the contemporary imaginary and with the practices of everyday life. The film crystallizes the ecosophical sensitivity emerging in contemporary scenarios in the intertwining between the extension of the system of objects, the mediatization of existence and the overbearing return of nature in the speeches, aesthetics and practices of our culture.

Everyday Life Ecologies: Crisis, Transitions and the Aesth-Etics of Desire

Everyday life practices are one of the focuses of interest for so-called ‘sustainable transitions’. Efforts in making daily life more ecological have ranged from awareness-raising and behaviour change strategies to socio-technical innovations, but have produced limited results so far. In a present characterised by a prolonged and multifaceted crisis it is imperative that, as social scientists, we interrogate the (un)sustainability of everyday practices from a more critical angle, linking them to reflections about capitalism's ecological destructiveness. One fruitful way of doing so is to interrogate the dimension of subjectivity as a space where collective discourses, practices and desires are embodied in concrete experience and actions. Drawing on ethnographic material on everyday energy use, I suggest that contemporary ways of living certainly contribute to the overall reproduction of capitalism and yet, in the (dis)juncture of the crisis, more sustainable livelihoods can be experimented with and prefigured. Subjectivity is one crucial dimension in which this process unravels.

Education for sustainable health care: From learning to professional practice

A number of planetary boundaries, including climate change as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, has already been exceeded. This situation has deleterious consequences for public health. Paradoxically, 4.4% of these emissions are attributable to the healthcare sector. These problems have not been sufficiently acknowledged in health professions curricula. This paper addresses two main issues, humanistic learning and the application of knowledge acquisition to clinical practice. Humanistic learning principles can be used to emphasize learner-centered approaches, including knowledge acquisition and reflection to increase self-awareness. Applying humanistic principles in everyday life and clinical practice can encourage stewardship, assisting students to become agents for change. In terms of knowledge and skills application to clinical practice, an overview of varied and novel approaches of how sustainable education can be integrated at different stages of training across several health care professions is provided. The Health and Environment Adaptive Response Taskforce (HEART) platform as an example of creating empowered learners, the NurSusTOOLKIT, a multi-disciplinary collaboration offering free adaptable educational resources for educators and the Greener Anaesthesia and Sustainability Project (GASP), an example of bridging the transition to clinical practice, are described.

Manifestations and Contestations of Borders and Boundaries in Everyday Understandings of Integration

This article asks how borders and boundaries manifest themselves in understandings of integration. Drawing on qualitative interviews with migrant descendants living in Zürich, Switzerland, it investigates how understandings of integration are experienced, interpreted, appropriated and modified, in relation to either the self or others. I employ de Certeau’s theory of the practice of everyday life to establish how borders and boundaries are reflected in individual meaning-making, perceptions of self and other and the ways in which people situate themselves in society. I demonstrate not only that the interplay between borders and boundaries informs specific aspects of migration governance such as integration policies, but also that people employ tactics based on enunciations of integration to act upon the social position they are allocated as a result of ascribed, racialised markers of difference.

When Space Heating Becomes Digitalized: Investigating Competencies for Controlling Smart Home Technology in the Energy-Efficient Home

In the near future, renewable energy sources (RES) will make up an increasing share of energy production in the district heating grid, implying that utilities must enable energy flexibility in order to compensate for the intermittent nature of RES. Current initiatives rely on smart approaches, encouraging a flexible energy demand by integrating various demand-side-management technologies. While praised for their ‘smart’ capabilities, smart home technologies have also been criticized for not meeting their potential in terms of savings and flexibility. This paper examines space-heating practices in everyday life in 16 Danish households. The study relies on qualitative in-depth interviews and ‘show and tell’ tours within these homes. Results show how space-heating practices are reconfigured by embodied knowledge related to respectively space-heating and use of smart technology. This implies that occupants’ adaption to smart home technology is reconfigured by their previous experiences as well as the meanings they ascribed to their practices. By showing the different ways in which occupants ‘get to know’ smart home technology, results highlight forms of embodied knowledge which occupants habitually draw on when they heat their homes. Occupants learn and carry competences for conducting space heating throughout life, and interventions aimed at enabling a flexible energy demand need to consider this. As smart home technology is integrated in homes, interventions should consider embodied knowledge as part of occupants’ competences for controlling smart home technology, as this will impact the reconfiguration of (new) space heating practices.

How the collaborative work of farm to school can disrupt neoliberalism in public schools

Farm to school (FTS) is a popular approach to food systems education in K-12 schools across the United States. FTS programs are highly heterogeneous, but generally include serving locally grown fruits and vegetables in school nutrition programs, planting and maintaining school gardens, and engaging students in garden and food-based learning across the school curriculum. While FTS has been promoted as a “win–win–win” for children, farmers, and communities, it has also been critiqued for reinscribing neoliberal trends (i.e., individualism, private funding, and volunteerism) that exacerbate social inequalities. Through a year-long, ethnographic study of FTS within one public middle school in the Southeast US, this paper contributes to these debates. Drawing upon theoretical frameworks of materiality and affective labor, we investigate how engagement with FTS activities can transform the social practice of everyday life in school for students, staff, and teachers. We find that FTS can reframe success in collaborative terms, engage the school around collective responsibility, and foster relationships across socioeconomic and racial difference. Although there is continued need to expand policies to ensure equitable funding for FTS, our research demonstrates that the hands-on work and collective subjectivities produced through FTS can mitigate the harms of neoliberalism and be a force for positive social change within a school.

Sovereign dupes? Representations, conventions and (un)sustainable consumption

If resource intensive practices are regularly represented as conventional, these potentially become naturalised and inconspicuous consumption will increase. Understanding how representations, conventions and everyday practices interact is thus fundamental in tackling unsustainable consumption. To gain new insights into how representations, conventions and practices interact, this paper explores how people respond to cleanliness representations in Swedish media. Cleanliness is chosen as a case for its role in accelerating water and energy consumption ( Shove, 2003 ), and Sweden where cleanliness activities are in line with upward trends (Jack, 2017). Focus-group participants read magazines, discuss content and how it relates to their lives. Cleanliness is perceived as being intertwined with a host of co-conventions such as freshness, health, femininity, masculinity, sustainability, et cetera. Participants have strategies to receive and resist representations, and are especially averse to representations that they suspect are meant to increase consumerism. Dilemmas for participants do not arise from deciding when or how to receive or resist representations. The real dilemmas arise when integrating meanings into everyday life practices given the multiplicity of meanings. Participants see conventions as influencing wider society, but see themselves as individuals critically interacting with representations, a sovereign dupe 1 juxtaposition.

Brandon SCHECHTER, The Stuff of Soldiers. A History of the Red Army in World War II through Objects

Brandon Schechter’s first book, drawn from his PhD dissertation, offers a beautifully written, sweeping and nuanced history of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War through the lens of objects and material culture. The Stuff of Soldiers is not only a major contribution to the history of the war; it is also a stimulating attempt to overcome disciplinary boundaries and long-lasting debates about the Soviet project through an ethnographic focus on objects and practices of everyday life. Th...

Modern Places and the Practice of Everyday Life

본고는 미셸 드 세르토와 앙리 르페브르를 중심으로 근대사회에 대한 자각을 통한 일상 공간의 전술과 전략적 전유의 실천 가능성을 고찰한다. 마르크 오제는 “비장소”를 통해 현대 사회의 구조를 효과적으로 드러내었는데 그것은 미셸 푸코의 “통치성”의 작동원리와 닮아있다. 근대는 통치성의 사회로 인구를 생명정치의 대상으로 삼아 전체를 통치함과 동시에 개인을 개별화하여 통치해나간다. 푸코의 논의에서 중요한 지점은 통치성이 자유주의와 자유를 작동기제로 삼아서 비가시적이고 미시적으로 권력의 지배를 가능케 하였다는 사실이다. 푸코의 자유주의는 자본주의의 통치성에 지배된 상태로서 자유를 통치성의 원리로 활용하고 있다. 이에 반해 자유는 자유주의로부터 벗어날 수 있는 가능성이며 통치 받지 않을 권리로 볼 수 있다. 하지만 통치성의 표본적 공간인 오제의 비장소는 자유를 허위적으로 활용하며 개인을 통치의 망 안으로 끊임없이 포섭하기에 주체가 스스로의 자유를 실천할 수 있는 가능성은 희박해 보인다. 이에 공간적 실천의 전략과 언어적 전략을 결합한 드 세르토와 독특한 변증법적 구조를 통해 자본과 노동의 리듬을 파악하고 분석한 르페브르의 논의를 가져와 일상에서 자유의 공간을 확보해내는 실천적 차원의 가능성을 분석하였다. 드 세르토는 “걷기”의 행위를 통해 보행자가 도시 공간을 다시 쓰는 미시적 차원의 전술을 제시하였고, 르페브르는 변증법적으로 도시의 “리듬”을 분석하는 것으로 노동하는 삶의 이질적 시간을 드러냄으로써 자본주의하에서 빼앗긴 시공간과 조련된 몸을 되돌리게 하는 거시적 전략을 펼쳤다. 드 세르토와 르페브르의 상호 보완적 읽기는 푸코의 전략적 차원이 결여한 틈새를 보충하며 근대의 일상성에서 자유의 실천 가능한 공간을 구현한다.

Network pluralism in psychology: the perspective of polymethodology and transdisciplinarity

The current transformations present in psychological science, on the one hand, affect its methodological and disciplinary status, on the other, they change the relationship with the current socio-cultural reality and everyday human life practices. The problem of integration of psychological knowledge arises again and is rethought at this new stage of psychology development. Opposing research orientations, such as methodological monism and methodological pluralism, methodological rigorism and methodological liberalism, offer different strategies for epistemic integration. However, from the standpoint of network pluralism, these orientations are seen as part of a unified process of cognition, where the dialectical relationships between them contribute to the achievement of integral knowledge. Flexible, networked, searchibly labile methodological strategies are coming to the aid of psychological science that seeks to integration of researches in an ontologically and epistemologically complicated world. In epistemological terms, there are polymethodologies and metatheoretical constructs that allow us to use many theories and approaches to solve a particular problem. The antinomy of incompleteness and the integrity of cognition is most effectively solved today by the network methodology. Network pluralism is a research position that supports a variety of psychological approaches, conceptual representations and theories, comprehended in the perspective of hermeneutical optics, the principle of coherence and with the ability of integration of polar attitudes in the ideal of holistic knowledge. The integration of psychological research takes place at different levels of the methodology of science: the philosophical and general scientific refers to a transdisciplinary approach that overcomes the disciplinary model of knowledge organization, replacing its problem-oriented version of the network; at the specific scientific level, the use of polymethodology leads to search methodological strategies, which are based on the approaches and methodologies available in the scientist’s arsenal; in the conceptual plan the metatheoretical constructs which are nowadays both a field of his free choice and personal responsibility are being processed here. The ability in cognitive activity to self-reflection, critical thinking and communicative rationality are important features-qualities of the modern researcher, which complete his professionalism and socio-cultural competence.

Rethinking alternative youth identities in Izmir: ‘Indifferently cool’ manifestations

This article discusses the self-identification and meaning-making processes of ‘alternative’ youth in Izmir, Turkey, by focusing on their own narratives and the microcosmos of their everyday life practices. The research argues that while alternative young individuals benefit from the global subcultural scene, particularly hipster subculture, they also create complex signifiers within their cultural environments to emphasise both individual subjectivities and shared ‘alternative’ group identities. The article claims that subcultures, with their styles, images and music that are consumed in imaginative ways, become productive and creative spheres of cultural production that are constantly at interplay with broader cultural forms in a given society. Hence, opening up a debate on youth subcultures has the potential to give salient clues about the transformations of society at large and its cultural values and beliefs. In this sense, the study formulates subcultures as offshoots – even forms of resistance – both drawing on and feeding mainstream cultural forms. The study is based on field research conducted among alternative youth in Izmir, Turkey – through participant observation, semi-structured interviews with youth groups and in-depth interviews with the owners and workers of the places where ‘alternative’ youth hang out. Since contemporary youth cultures in Turkey are a highly under-researched area, this article aims at mapping out a general framework towards a better understanding of the everyday practices and meaning worlds of alternative young people. It is hoped that this, in turn, will serve to pave the way for further research on youth subcultures in Turkey.

Deprivation of Everyday Life and Coping Strategies During the Crisis of the 1980s in Poland: An Analysis of Women’s First-person Narratives

AbstractThis article seeks to show how the economic, political, and social crisis of the 1980s in Poland was experienced, understood, survived, and managed in the micro-scale of individual households. Keeping in mind the inner dynamic of the period, I focus on the first years of the economic collapse (1980–1982), when supply shortages were extremely painful. The text contributes to the current interest in every-day life practices under communism. It intends to take a closer look at the adaptive strategies undertaken by individuals, precisely by women. It is based on the critical analysis of the first-person women’s narratives: memoirs, personal diaries and letters to the editor published in popular women’s magazines

Purity and Mixture in the Category of Refuge in Brazil

In this paper I analyze the definition and uses of the category “refuge” in Brazil to understand how it operates in legal terms on the one hand and in terms of the practice of everyday life on the other. I consider refuge to be a tense field of definitions that will impact the delimitation of other differences and political categories. In order to reach this goal, I turn to research on migration legislation in Brazil, which I have been developing since 2010, and a set of ethnographic research that is being developed under my coordination in the laboratory of migration studies of the Federal University of São Carlos on the experiences of refuge in Brazil. I intend to advance in an analysis of what I will call a “show of refuge” in Brazil, where the state and the media articulate certain definitions for refuge that tend to obscure the entire field of migration and producing a perverse effect of erasing migrations due to the prominence of the category of refuge.

Dwelling-in-Travelling: Western expats and the making of temporary home in Guangzhou, China

ABSTRACT As China continues to open its economy to the world, more and more expats migrate to Chinese cities for employment and business investment. Little research exists on their practices of everyday life and translocal connections. Echoing the emphasis on the intersection between expatriation and everydayness, this article focuses on Western expats and explores their daily experience of homemaking in Guangzhou, the third largest city in China. We develop the concept of ‘temporary home’ to examine how the global constellation of expatriation happens in a specific place and forges a delicate balance between dwelling and travelling. We argue that the making of temporary home exemplifies the ways in which Western expats undertake and experience a privileged mode of mobility. Temporary home reflects both fitting-in for familiarity between these expats and the host city of Guangzhou, and opting-out in order to navigate the global race for skilled professionals and to accumulate transnational experiences. They engage in the making of temporary home – a form of material and symbolic landscape that represents a privileged lifestyle of dwelling-in-travelling.

Peculiarities of perception by former slaves of their social status in the era of slavery (based on the collection of their memoirs in the Library of US Congress)

Slavery has always been condemned across the world; however in the end of the XX century, such canonical concept was rectified based on the extensive examination by American scholars of compilation of narratives of the former slaves collected in 1930s in the United States. At that time, 2,300 former slaves from 17 states were interviewed about their life in the era of slavery. Later, these interviews were placed in open access on the website of the Library of US Congress, reconstructing a contradictory picture of everyday life of African-Americans in the conditions of plantation economy: some reminiscences convey almost a nostalgic feeling of the past, while others criticizes it severely. The author in his attempt explain the historical accuracy of the results of mass interviewing of African-Americans, tries to make sense why 70 years later, the eyewitnesses of the same event have polar viewpoints. Forming the new comparative-historical approaches towards examination of collective consciousness under the influence of anthropologization of historical knowledge, the interview materials allow reconstructing the period, demonstrating the value system of the entire population group, unlike biography that structures the chain of events in chronological order. Analysis of the archive “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938” has not been previously conducted within the Russian historiography, just briefly mentioned as one of the documentary aspects of the institution of slavery. The contained material is important for scientific comprehension of the bygone era of slavery, reflected in the collective memory of long-suffering African-American sub-ethnos. The problem of slavery in the United States, which synthesizes heritage of the past with practices of everyday life in various manifestations, seems optimal from the perspective of historiographical interest.