Everyday Places Research Articles

Narracje o świeżej traumie

Recent trauma Narratives: commemorating terrorist attacks in Everyday cityscape Contemporary city incidentally becomes a non-accidental target of acts violating the primary sense of security and safety. The fundamental assumptions about so- cial and interpersonal interactions that guarantee social life are severely disturbed. These events, primarily the ones related to terrorist attacks, leave in social memo- ry traces associated with everyday places scattered in urban landscape. Should the trace of a catastrophe be preserved and exhibited, or should it be interpreted to give a new meaning to endangered places? What significance can one attribute to trauma narratives in everyday landscape?To what extent can spatial and ephemeral narratives related to dramatic events address the social need of coping with trauma and constructing a new approach to a given place? Spontaneous and official commemorative forms are created in response to terrorist attacks in Europe and the U.S.A. Official memorials are created over just a few years and sometimes even one year, which corresponds to a natural closure of mourning process leading to the acceptance of loss and reconstructing life. However, other representations – spontaneous memorials created in the aftermath of attacks, composed of objects left in urban space to honour victims and survivors – become an important element of collective mourning ritual and constitute a transition from informal commemoration to top-down representations. The article discusses how different forms of trauma narratives constructed in urban space can enhance trauma recovery.

A narrative study of mental health recovery: exploring unique, open-ended and collective processes

ABSTRACT Purpose: Guided by narrative theory and by use of a narrative-in-action approach, the aim of this study was to explore how mental health recovery unfolds through individuals’ engagement in everyday activities. Method: Data were created through participant observations with four individuals while doing everyday activities, and analysed through a narrative, interpretive approach. Findings: The findings show how mental health recovery involves unique and open-ended processes of narrative meaning-making, which unfold through an interplay between everyday activities, places and persons. Discussion: Based on these findings, we discuss how we may understand and support mental health recovery as collective processes.

Die Strafkammer aus der Perspektive von Michel Foucault

The French philosopher Michel Foucault, who is regarded as the founder of the discourse analysis of power and knowledge theory, also dealt with "heterotopias". He understood this to mean counter-places in which the everyday real places are simultaneously represented, questioned and reversed. Understanding the proceedings of the German criminal courts as a heterotopia opens up new perspectives and illustrates the difficulties that arise when the irrational "real space" of interpersonal relationships and human behavior must be mirrored with legal rationality for the (re)construction of a "truth". The criminal division's mandate to determine the truth, which can be interpreted as a "will to knowledge" in the Foucault sense, especially when considering whether the accused should be placed in a psychiatric hospital or in preventive detention, often leads to the individual concerned resisting such objectification. This is because it divides him into - scientific - categories and demands that he must accept a truth about himself that is the truth of others. This is probably one reason why the accused refuses to cooperate in the "correction" primarily intended by the state. However, this dilemma is neither a reason to return from preventive theories of punishment in favour of absolute theories of punishment, nor to dispense with the will to knowledge in a consensual settlement of proceedings.

Motivations for running in men: A comparative analysis of local runners and sports tourists

The aim of the study is to to examine the motivations for participating in a half-marathon among two groups of runners, local running in their place of residence and sports tourists, and to evaluate the differences between them. With the increase in the popularity of ‘running tourism’ the question becomes important as it encourages runners to engage in physical activity outside their everyday place of residence. Freyer and Gross’s (2002) four types of motivation for participation in sports events was the basis for the development of the author’s questionnaire. The empirical research (sample size=346) then recognized these motives for participation. The article also presents a review of the literature on such motivations in mass running events. Results indicate that both group of respondents, residents of the place where the half-marathon was organised and sports tourists, have different forms of motivation. The greatest relevance for sports tourists turned out to be motivation for sensation-seeking but for local runners it was the result, and this confirms that sports tourists travel generally in search for strong emotions and sensations.

Mobile belonging in historical everyday letters: the case of Estonia in the 1950s

ABSTRACTThis study contributes to the micro-history during the structural reorganization of Estonia in the 1950s by examining everyday letter exchange between family members, consisting of a single mother and her two daughters. The study uses a mobilities approach toward the meaning of belonging while investigating everyday places and related practices, the mentalities of individual stages of life, and symbolical relations which are influenced by structural formation. The study indicates mobile characteristics of belonging in a family’s subjective attachment to a place.

Finding common ground: The conception of community arts festivals as spaces for placemaking.

The present research posits the significant role that arts and cultural festivals play in contributing to placemaking and generating well-being within communities. Placemaking is recognized to be important when considering how to improve population health and well-being, and festivals can be seen to amplify those benefits. Drawing on qualitative data gathered from interviews with festival organizers in SouthEast England and deploying theories of space from Foucault and Massey, the present article argues that community arts and cultural festivals support the positive creation or transformation of pro-social spaces that could support community acceptance and well-being, the ability to live together and cohesively and accepting difference.

‘It’s fun in the legs’: children’s dwelling in garden trampolines

ABSTRACTPhysical activity is critical for children’s current and future health status. Understanding how children’s everyday outdoor environments encourage movement could help progress the health-environment debate. In response to this, and adopting a theoretical focus upon dwelling, skills and the haptic engagement, this qualitative case study explores 25 Danish 10–11-year-old children’s everyday use of garden trampolines. Three principal methods of data generation were employed in the fieldwork: photo-elicited interviews, group interviews and participant observation at children’s important outdoor places. Findings suggest that garden trampolines are important everyday outdoor places for children that – among other things – can spark a vigorous physical movement in abundantly meaningful and joyful ways. Further, findings indicate that trampolines are places of inexhaustible movement opportunities, which operate through haptic sensations, feelings of skilfulness and attunement, expansions of the range of motions available to the body, and interactions between children. Implications for future research and design are highlighted.

LISTENING AS ACTION: THE ORDINARY PEOPLE AND PLACES OF STORYCORPS

StoryCorps is a nonprofit organization aimed to empower the voices and stories of ‘ordinary’ Americans. Founded by radio producer David Isay in 2003, StoryCorps collaborates with National Public Radio (NPR) and the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center to provide a public platform for broadcasting and preserving American oral history. The project has collected and archived over 75,000 stories, recounting the everyday places and practices that comprise American life in ordinary and extraordinary ways (StoryCorps, 2018). StoryCorps privileges both storytelling and listening as communicative practices that constructively build human connections. This piece emerges in response to my listening to NPR’s broadcast of StoryCorps segments alongside reading US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Smith’s (2015) memoir Ordinary Light.

Human Values and Digital Work: An Ethnographic Study of Device Paradigm

I examine Albert Borgmann’s concept of device paradigm as a way to underscore the significance of human values in one’s engagement with digital work in an organizational setting. Device paradigm explains the pervasive patterns of everyday engagement with information technologies as devices that facilitate prosperity without burden and efforts and, in so doing, can downplay the human values in practices. Although prior research has highlighted the significance of focal things and practices, much remains to be learned about the role of human values in contemporary everyday engagement with digital technologies. Drawing on a critical ethnography of everyday practices at an information technology firm (approximately 300 employees), I apply the critical social theory of Borgmann to analyze how digital work is firmly anchored in human values, and how device paradigm can be used as a critical lens to examine the contemporary everyday engagement with information technology. The study reveals that digital devices can have focal aspects and everyday places can be seen as focal places. Focal things are firmly grounded in focal places, which facilitate the emergence of focal practices. Ethnographers are encouraged to explore values in the field (held by people) as well as values of the field (attached to the places).

High Stakes: Children’s Exposure to Gambling and Gambling Marketing Using Wearable Cameras

Concerns continue to be raised about the ‘normalising’ influence of gambling and its marketing on children. This study sought to determine the nature and extent of children’s everyday exposure to gambling and its marketing. New Zealand children (11–13 years; n = 167) wore wearable cameras, capturing images of their day every seven seconds for four days, June 2014–July 2015. Images (n = 380,000) were assessed for their exposure to gambling and its marketing. On average, children were exposed to gambling products or activities 0.6 (95% CI 0.4, 1.0) times/day and marketing 6.9 (95% CI 4.6, 10.3) times/day. Marketing exposures occurred most frequently in book stores (1.7 (95% CI 0.7, 4.0)/day), convenience stores (1.5 (95% CI 0.7, 3.0)/day), and supermarkets (1.4 (95% CI 0.8, 2.5)/day), via a shop front signage (3.3 (95% CI 1.9, 5.5)/day) and in-store marketing (1.9 (95% CI 1.3, 2.7)/day). The national lottery (4.7 (95% CI 3.2, 7.0)/day) and scratch cards (0.6 (95% CI 0.4, 0.9)/day) were most frequently promoted. Children were frequently exposed to gambling and its marketing, in the everyday places they go. Regulation of gambling and its marketing could contribute to the reduction of gambling-related harm, improving children’s health, and well-being.

Interface de apoyo didáctico de Ciencia y Tecnología

The classroom has not changed much since its inception as everyday places where knowledge is acquired at all school levels. Currently, our education has progressed moderately, although there is still much to be done in education and teaching aids. Students nowadays, regardless of their age, are growing in contact with a technological world which provides them with quick, easy and often low quality information. Due to this, and taking advantage of current technological resources, a didactic interface was designed through a web environment open access. This interface has pneumatics material for the moment and allows to provide support to technical subjects through videos. Six videos were created and upload them in the developed platforms, which allow generating a better academic performance, the number of accesses to the platform and the reproductions of the videos allows observing the acceptance of the proposal that potentially will grow in time and options. Was applied a quiz to students of the engineering in mechatronics career of the UTSJR, where more than 70% they thought that the videos help them with understanding of their subjects and the students preferred that they make the videos.

Chronotope as a framework for landscape experience analysis

ABSTRACTThe paper explores the analysability of landscape experience and the interpretation enabled by the concept of the chronotope. Beyond its potential for a holistic study of texts, the chronotope can also be applied in landscape studies. In geography, the chronotope has primarily been used for analysis within three different areas: discourses and narratives, spatiotemporal sense of everyday places and biological spaces. Our aim is to show the applicability of the chronotope in the experiential aspect of landscape studies. Experiencing the landscape implies a dialogic understanding of action in a situation including the subject’s interrelationship with the environment. We examine how the subjective experience of an abandoned landscape is internally multiple and has significant value for imagination and meaning-making. The example analysed is an Estonian architect’s description of his visit to Hashima Island, Japan, and focuses on three levels of chronotopes—the topographic, the psychological and the metaphysical.

Auto‐photographic study of everyday emotional geographies

Recent developments in cultural geography have brought forth everyday life and emotions as critical categories for understanding place. Yet, the focus on everyday emotional geographies also presents methodological challenges. This paper argues that auto‐photography is a particularly well‐suited method to explore the intricate relations between everyday practices, emotions and the formation of places. Auto‐photography combines participant‐generated photographs and participants’ interpretative narrations of these photographs. Our argument is based on auto‐photographic research we conducted with 38 young women in Czechia in 2016. We asked participants to photograph everyday places that they associate with positive or negative emotions, or religious meanings, and to discuss their emotions in a following interview. We analysed participants’ photographs together with their narrations. This analysis reveals the emotions and meanings participants attached to photographed places. We argue that the method of auto‐photography helps understand the complexity of everyday emotional geographies that may not be possible through other geographical methods. The strength of auto‐photography is its combination of visual representations and narratives, which help identify how ordinary everyday places without any apparent significance, such as a door or a staircase, might be sites of strong emotional intensity. The insights gained by analysing photographs and narratives together and in relation to one another produce an understanding of emotional bordering practices, anxieties and desires of place‐making. Auto‐photography thus provides multiple layers of visual and textual data that help understand the complexity of emotional geographies in mundane everyday places.

Playing in the Shadow of Event Urbanism: Newcomer Youth, Neighborhood Change, and TO2015

There has been recent academic attention focused on youth geographies. This literature has worked to emphasize youth experiences in urban life. Concomitantly, there has been a bourgeoning body of research directed at the evaluation of the sport mega-event as a catalyst of urban-spatial reform that has questioned the role of sport in the design of socially-equitable and environmentally-sustainable cities. In this paper, we examine the intersection between geographies of youth and the sport mega-event. Specifically, through a qualitative document analysis of relevant sport mega-event documentation, we compare and contrast written material with a thematic analysis of qualitative data collected with a small sample of newcomer youth in Toronto, Canada. Ultimately, we aim to explore the manner in which event-linked development priorities (and associated ideologies) manifest transnational (elite) representations of space through sport, and in turn, reconstruct urban-spatial fantasies of citizenship in the supposed diverse and inclusive “host” context. Our qualitative data demonstrate the extent to which the everyday places of newcomer youth, so filled with their own hope for the future, are most readily experienced as a perpetual negotiation between strategic exclusion and repressive inclusion—or the future otherwise envisioned for them.

Clustering-based disambiguation of fine-grained place names from descriptions

Everyday place descriptions often contain place names of fine-grained features, such as buildings or businesses, that are more difficult to disambiguate than names referring to larger places, for example cities or natural geographic features. Fine-grained places are often significantly more frequent and more similar to each other, and disambiguation heuristics developed for larger places, such as those based on population or containment relationships, are often not applicable in these cases. In this research, we address the disambiguation of fine-grained place names from everyday place descriptions. For this purpose, we evaluate the performance of different existing clustering-based approaches, since clustering approaches require no more knowledge other than the locations of ambiguous place names. We consider not only approaches developed specifically for place name disambiguation, but also clustering algorithms developed for general data mining that could potentially be leveraged. We compare these methods with a novel algorithm, and show that the novel algorithm outperforms the other algorithms in terms of disambiguation precision and distance error over several tested datasets.

The power of participatory story mapping: Advancing equitable development in disadvantaged neighbourhoods

Abstract Community developers and planners have long recognized the value of storytelling to engage communities. Yet, in working with disadvantaged communities, they are often challenged to meaningfully engage residents and uncover place values that can help drive community development strategies. In a case study of Langley Park, Maryland, a neighborhood comprised of largely low-income Latino immigrants facing potential displacement from a new transit line, this article investigates the potential of new story mapping techniques and technologies to assist communities in leveraging everyday place meanings and values to advance greater equity in the process of neighborhood redevelopment. It demonstrates how participatory story mapping can empower traditionally marginalized voices and encourage more complex place narratives within community development and planning.

The Mauritian Novel: Fictions of Belonging - Chapter 4 - Everyday Belonging : Bertrand de Robillard’s L’Homme qui penche and Une interminable distraction au monde.

Drawing on metropolitan theories of le quotidien, this chapter investigates Robillard’s Franco-Mauritian protagonists’ thwarted quests to find a place of belonging within the shared, public spaces of Mauritius and of Paris. It then plots their ultimate reconciliation with the mundane, everyday place of ‘home’ by means of strategic ‘pratiques de l’espace’ (Certeau) and through writing. In their focus on the minutiae of everyday life, Robillard’s unjustly neglected novels confound critical expectations of the nature of ‘post-colonial’ literature. Nonetheless, I argue, his novels could also be seen to depict Mauritius as a place in which only white, male, middle-class individuals have the luxury of entertaining such purportedly ‘everyday’ forms of belonging.

EVERYDAY PLACES: WHY NEIGHBOURHOODS MATTER FOR PEOPLE LIVING WITH DEMENTIA

This paper provides an experientially-grounded exploration of the relationships and connections that figure in the lives of people living with dementia. Existing research has identified clear roles for neighbors and others living locally in supporting older people. Social interactions between individuals in public and ‘pseudo-public’ places are also well-documented for generating both civilizing and alienating experiences. The paper extends these ideas by drawing on longitudinal research deploying a creative mix of qualitative methods, including network mapping, mobile interviews and home tours with almost 100 people living with dementia and their supporters in the UK. It will consider experiences of developing and maintaining connections with non-intimate others encountered during the routine ebb and flow of everyday life for ongoing support as well as help in situations of crisis. Consequently, the paper advances understanding of how people living with dementia are supported by, and can contribute to, the neighborhoods where they live.

“We build vacations into everyday life”: rethinking carers’ restorative experiences through the lens of place

This article proposes a reimagining of the concept of carer respite. It explores the role of place in eliciting restorative experiences for carers and reconsiders the mechanism of ‘respite as an outcome’. Findings from a Canadian-based study about dementia carers’ experiences in their neighbourhoods illustrate that everyday places, whether in the home or in the social or built environment of the neighbourhood, facilitate their connections to themselves and others, leading to a sense of restoration. As such, respite is the outcome not necessarily of mental or physical removal from the care situation, but rather of the (em)placing of care within everyday life.

McPublic Spaces: McDonald's appropriation of the everyday place in Hong Kong

This paper analyses the role of McDonald’s in Hong Kong as a consumption-oriented place where the production of social space happens under the constraints of the market’s spectacle and speculations. McDonald’s in Hong Kong have evolved from the original aesthetics of the company, with a colorful postmodern cafeteria look, to the latest concept “Next” with a bold design, neat materiality, touch screens and open layout. Throughout this process, its restaurant design and polices have evolved by appropriating the rhythms of the city and its citizens. Whereas Hong Kong’s city escape is commonly perceived as the product of top down strategies carried out by “coalitions” between public institutions and private corporations, McDonald’s offers a case study of informal activities influencing the way a global enterprise develops. Its new “Next” concept might be seen as an attempt to anticipate informality. Two opposing ideas underlie this “open look”: the aim to homogenize customers through the sanitation of the space, versus the provision of neutral spaces to allow for the occurrence of heterogeneity. The presence of the screen as an intermediary between the restaurant and its customers empowers a dichotomy between an impersonal fast food service and current paradigms that aim to prioritize people and food.