Everyday Rhythms Research Articles

Rhythmanalysis in coaching: grasping the everyday rhythm(s) of coaching

ABSTRACT This article uses Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis to critically explore and make-sense-of the (co-)productive schemes of ‘coaching rhythm(s)’ at Alvour Football Club (a pseudonym). The first author spent seven months at a semi-professional football club by living with the group’s weekly schedule of training, meetings, and matches. The precise research methods included (written) field-notes, individual semi-structured interviews, and visual data. The findings introduce and explicate how the group’s rhythmic flow of the week was subject to the perpetual manipulation and imposition of the coaching staff, while also being politically negotiated, and simultaneously resisted by athletes. Specifically, the analysis uses the interplay between ‘eurhythmia’, ‘polyrhythmia’, and ‘arrythmia’ to understand the subtle and nuanced routines of coaching, and how individuals become sensitive to their production. In addition to introducing the value of understanding rhythm(s) in coaching, it is hoped the rhythmanalysis offered in this paper contributes an original interpretation of the taken-for-granted everydayness of coaching, which can challenge many of the assumed mechanical overtones that currently exist. Doing so, the paper offers a new reading of coaching as manipulating rhythm(s).

There is No Place Like al-Dār

Abstract A Dār is a space that offers various courses and programmes that teach the Quran, the Hadith and the different branches of Islamic knowledge that derive from, and are in conversation with, both. The question this article intends to explore is: what is the Dār? It does so by looking at the temporal and geographic context the Dār exists in, and how it is situated historically, as well as its everyday rhythms. The vignettes presented throughout the article provide insight into the ways in which a space of knowledge can exist, teasing the bounds of structure, order and rigidity, allowing us to explore potential imaginaries to the ways we have experienced, and the ways we imagine, Islamic spaces of knowledge to be.

Rhythms, dressage and pacemaking in South Side Chicago: examining the construction site of the Obama Presidential Center

ABSTRACT This article examines the effects of a major civil project, the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side, on the everyday rhythms of this part of the city. In particular, we examine the construction site of this center and its impact on the production of rhythms. We focus on the notion of “dressage” in Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, suggesting a critical reading of this notion through the theory of pacemaker. Theorizing the interrelation between rhythms, dressage and pacemaking, our article investigates the interface of the built environment and everyday rhythms. We employ the chronoanalysis concept of the “pacemaker” to analyze the OPC construction site’s disruption and introduction of new rhythms which transform the park. The discussion provides reflections on how Lefebvre’s concept of dressage can be theoretically advanced through pacemaking and thereby made fruitful for empirical inquiry. The examination of the OPC construction site draws attention to how major infrastructural projects change the rhythms of urban spaces and can provide concrete perspectives on how capitalist urban redevelopment becomes manifest in people’s lived everyday experiences and routines.

‘View from the window’: On time, politics and domestics during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic

The present article aims to contribute to theorisations of the politics of time through a detailed engagement with techno-aesthetic strategies of temporal synchronisation and heterogeneisation of everyday rhythms during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. The exploration focuses on practices of mediatisation of domestic spaces, in particular by examining photographs posted on the Bulgarian-language ‘View from the Window’ Facebook group. The group was founded during the first coronavirus lockdown in April 2020 and its members used it to share images taken from their private homes onto exterior spaces. Theoretically, I build on Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalytical project, from which I derive an understanding of the polyrhythmic and multi-scalar character of the everyday, while engaging writings from visual cultures, performance studies, architecture and media theory. The article looks closely at two formal aesthetic strategies that established themselves for posting on the group: The visual strategy of framing and the use of time stamps in image captions. On the one hand, I show how these media practices are engaged in synchronising views with each other; I argue that they contribute to the creation of an equivalence between views while obfuscating their underlying socio-material conditions, which tend to remain outside of the photographic frame. On the other hand, I also demonstrate that these practices can be equally generative of asynchronicity and dissonance between views, bringing to the fore a spatio-temporal heterogeneity and the articulation of stark socio-political differences. The article thus contributes an analysis of the interplay between time, politics and domestics through the conceptual prism of an engagement with aesthetic practices of mediation.

Factors Associated with Refraining from Health Checkups during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Japan.

This study aimed to determine the characteristics of people who refrained from having regular checkups due to the spread of the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) infection and the factors associated with this behavior. We conducted a nationwide internet survey of 4593 males and females aged 20-69 in Japan regarding their health checkups from April 2020 to March 2021, when COVID-19 was widespread. Individuals who received checkups during this time were "the receiving group"; those who did not were "the refraining group". Personal attributes, responses to a health questionnaire and other items were used to compare the groups. The analysis showed that males over 53 refrained from having health checkups compared to those younger. On the other hand, males with higher personal incomes who never skipped breakfast received health checkups. Females with children under 18 years were less likely than those without to receive health checkups. For males, the characteristic factors were economic and health awareness and literacy. Females were less aware of medical checkups. Moreover, they demonstrated an inability to maintain an everyday rhythm. No factors were common to males and females, indicating the need to consider separate strategies for encouraging males and females to obtain annual health checkups.

Heritage space, multiple temporalities, and the reproduction of Guangzhou Overseas Chinese Village

This paper investigates the everyday experiences of long-term residents during the urban heritage revitalization process of Guangzhou Overseas Chinese Village (GOCV) as China's first overseas Chinese village. Drawing upon insights from the recent theories of multiple temporalities, this paper argues that the everyday sensory experiences of long-term residents during the urban heritage revitalization process can be understood through three interconnected temporal modes (past, present, and future). These modes reflect the sociopolitical context of different periods and influence the everyday rhythms and practices of community residents. Specifically, regarding the past, patriotic fervor, a shared identity, and the experience of living collectively have created a “happy home for returned overseas Chinese”. In terms of the present, the market-oriented reform and commodification of housing has had a profound impact on the built forms and meaning systems of the neighborhood, leading to long-term residents' nostalgia for the past and resistance to present changes in the everyday rhythms. Lastly, based on an envisioned future, long-term residents carry out specific preservation practices to maintain and enhance their place identity. This article explores the approaches to enrich the urban heritage research by illuminating the importance of temporality for understanding the spatial (re)production of living urban heritage.

Fast Futures and Everyday Endurance: Mobility, Temporality, and Cycle‐Rickshaws in Dhaka

AbstractThis article takes the cycle‐rickshaw industry in Dhaka, Bangladesh, as a point of departure for examining the discrepancy between the everyday rhythms and embodied realities of Dhaka traffic and the idealized image of mobility that drives imaginations of the urban future. The cycle‐rickshaw is often excluded from such imaginations, as the vehicle is not only blamed for obstructing the flow of traffic but also for impeding trajectories of urban change. I argue that such exclusionary notions of the urban future, which build on linear and epochal notions of urban change, obscure the many ways in which everyday mobilities gesture to temporal experiences of endurance rather than transformation. I employ the notion of endurance to capture both the physical effort of navigating Dhaka traffic and the distinct temporality of rickshaw labor. I show that rickshaw labor, although arduous, allows drivers to keep on going amidst the various needs of the present by providing them with “instant cash.” Rickshaw mobilities thus highlight the friction between epochal notions of urban change and the durability and contingency of the imperfect safety nets and practices that people rely on for the time being.

Rupture, repetition, and new rhythms for pandemic times: Mass Observation, everyday life, and COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded the significance of time to everyday life, as the routines, pace, and speed of social relations were widely reconfigured. This article uses rhythm as an object and tool of inquiry to make sense of spatio-temporal change. We analyse the Mass Observation (MO) directive we co-commissioned on 'COVID-19 and Time', where volunteer writers reflect on whether and how time was made, experienced, and imagined differently during the early stages of the pandemic in the UK. We draw on Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier's 'rhythmanalysis', taking up their theorisation of rhythm as linear and cyclical and their concepts of arrhythmia (discordant rhythms) and eurhythmia (harmonious rhythms). Our analysis highlights how MO writers articulate (a) the ruptures to their everyday rhythms across time and space, (b) their experience of 'blurred' or 'merged' time as everyday rhythms are dissolved and the pace of time is intensified or slowed, and (c) the remaking of rhythms through new practices or devices and attunements to nature. We show how rhythm enables a consideration of the spatio-temporal textures of everyday life, including their unevenness, variation, and difference. The article thus contributes to and expands recent scholarship on the social life of time, rhythm and rhythmanalysis, everyday life, and MO.

Ship of Darkness: Jazz and/as Affect in the Global Cruise Industry

Ship of Darkness: Jazz and/as Affect in the Global Cruise Industry

The United World College movement in practice: the role of interaction rituals in releasing positive emotional energy to ‘spark change’

ABSTRACT The arena of international schools is continuously growing. One under-researched ‘traditional’ grouping is the United World College (UWC) movement. Its idealistic long-term mission to facilitate global peace and sustainability by ‘sparking change’ in young peoples’ lives represents an important area of study. As well as preparing young people for the two-year International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme amidst a background of co-curricular experiential learning, the UWC movement offers ‘Short Courses’ each year around the world. Our paper explores, for the first time, the ‘Short Course’ and its potential to transform and build character for social change. We present five vignettes of participants’ experiences and perspectives of a ‘Short Course’, revealing how the every-day rhythm and interactions of the course rituals coupled with an intentionally deeply emotional experience can transform young people and empower them with the positive emotional energy needed to ‘spark change’ in the future.

Romancing the frontline: a view from dar es salaam on intimacy and political attachment

This article explores the entwinement of inter-racial romance, political mobilization, and public morality using the vantage-point of Dar es Salaam as a relay station for 1960s leftwing exiles. Cleansed from many formal political accounts, romance – and talk of it – loomed large and consequential in the everyday rhythms of life along the transnational networks of political exiles who transited through Dar. Featuring couples whose trajectories connected Southern Africa to Tanzania and the United States, the article revisits the intimate ways that the anti-Apartheid movement, African decolonization, and American campus struggles over racial discrimination were stitched together. But if romantic attachment played a significant role in political mobilization across these geographies, on the ground in Dar it also furnished a powerful lexicon for rank-and-file cadres challenging a leadership class via a critique of lifestyle and consumption. This latter dynamic both made romance a focus for material struggle over the terms of a decolonization-in-waiting and connected Dar’s community of exiles to the vernacular politics of their host city.

Work-Related Practices: An Analysis of Their Effect on the Emergence of Stable Practices in Daily Activity Schedules

Despite its ‘wordless’ and hidden characteristics, it is within the everyday tasks, routines, and rhythms that consumption takes place, from getting up every morning, having breakfast, going to work or school, having lunch, going home, having dinner, reading a book, surfing the Internet, watching TV, and probably doing similar things again and again. This study examines this routinized daily use of time of employed individuals based on the 2014–2015 UK Time-Use Survey data. In doing this, we focus on individual’s day-to-day activities and how they are routinized or how they are formed into stabilized practices. Starting from the definition of stable practices, we apply a relatively new method of social network analysis to visualize stable practices during workdays. We then analyse the cohesion between practices based on work hours and connections and coordination between practices. Our results suggest that work arrangements create stable practices that by themselves are stone pillars of daily routines. This implies that the removal (or ‘unlocking’) of stable practices during these time periods could produce some – albeit marginal – decongestion of routinized activities.

Pandemic rhythms: Adults’ gaming in Finland during the spring 2020 COVID-19 restrictions

This qualitative study examines how the spring 2020 COVID-19 restriction measures impacted adults’ gaming in Finland. The study draws on a thematic analysis of qualitative data ( N = 201) collected in April 2020, which is explored through the lens of Apperley’s (2010) theory of gaming rhythms. The results illuminate the ways in which gaming was situated in everyday life both during and before the COVID-19 restrictions, and how the pandemic and its associated restrictions disrupted, reinforced, and reconfigured the everyday rhythms of gaming. The situation impacted individuals and families differently, being beneficial to some and detrimental to others, contingent on other aspects of respondents’ lives. The results underline how an individual’s gaming does not happen in isolation, but takes place in the confines of everyday life, shaped by factors outside the individual’s control. Developing Apperley’s theory, the results show that gaming can be a very resilient activity, given the right circumstances.

Prime-time access for whom? Rhythms fairness and the dynamic pricing of infrastructure services

ABSTRACT In this paper, we approach a fair and inclusive transition to a circular economy from a perspective of daily rhythms and illustrate these concepts using examples from the electricity and transport sectors. The circular economy discourse endorses sharing and efficiently using capital assets. To be effective, such strategies further need to manage the timing of demand. Dynamic pricing is frequently used to manage, for example, the demand for electricity services and to match demand with the capacity of production. Congestion charges for road usage similarly aim to shape peak demand. The economic and environmental benefits of these schemes have been demonstrated, but the social consequences remain underexplored. Dynamic prices forge new everyday rhythms and contribute to “shift consumption” by limited access during peak demand. We inquire whether, and to what extent, the existing schemes of dynamic pricing consider issues of equality, equity and fairness when offering time-dependent and dynamic tariffs, and highlight the policy implications of promoting a circular economy with effective and more socially just management of the timing of demand.

Promoting active lifestyles in schools. Effect of school day on daily physical activity levels

Introduction: The effect of school day is a major factor in everyday rhythms during childhood and adolescence. The relevance of Physical Activity (PA) in school-aged children raises the need to: (a) analyse whether Primary School pupils achieve the recommended levels of daily PA; (b) find out the impact of school day and, specifically, Physical Education (PE) classes on levels of PA compared to weekends; and (c) explore the differences according to sex in daily PA at these ages. Method: A cross-sectional study was carried out, using a sample of 126 participants (aged 10.2±0.48 years; 51.6% girls, 48.4% boys) from primary schools. Data on the steps taken by pupils during a week were recorded with an ADXK362 three-axis accelerometer integrated into a wristband. Descriptive (means and standard deviation) and inferential analyses (Student’s T-Test) were performed, assuming a 95% confidence interval (p<0.05). The magnitude of the difference was quantified with power (1-β), α=0.05 (bilateral). Results: The average of steps was lower than the minimum recommended, revealing a weekly pattern in which, the most active children were so throughout the week and vice versa. Significant variations were found depending on the days of the week (r=0.40, p<0.001, d= 0.63) or whether they had PE classes (r=0.65, p<0.001, d= 0.79). School day contributed significantly to greater activity and families were less physically active on weekends (t=6.62, p<0.001, d=0.70). Girls had a lower level of PA than boys, and more difficulty reaching the recommended levels of daily PA (t=-4.05, p<0.001, d=0.96), except on weekends. Conclusion: Pupils do not reach the minimum recommended daily steps for their age, with a well-established gender gap in favour of boys. School day (especially when PE is taught) increases their daily PA more than at weekends.

Cinematic rhythmanalysis of architecture: mining moving images for post-occupancy studies

Faced with the impossibility of extensive post-occupancy studies to enhance knowledge of everyday rhythms in domestic environments, this article explores an alternative technique by tapping into the medium of fiction film. Holding at their core significant evidence of everyday life, fiction films may offer the potential to reveal how domestic practices vary between different demographics, cultures, seasons, building typologies, or times of day. This article discusses a pilot study of 106 fiction films, which were analysed via a new digital methodology involving systematic time-based attachment of meta-data in a searchable database. Utilising the ensuing cinematic data, several types of architectural rhythmanalyses are carried out as a starting point, and the concept of an architectonic of cinema is established through case studies. From the varying rhythms of everyday activities to cultural differences in the use of architectural elements, the article proposes a range of quantitative and qualitative insights achieved by strategic data mining of the global cinematic archive. It explores how cinema may reveal the ‘lived’ aspects of ‘lived spaces’ and hence offer architects a new avenue to more fully grasp the domestic everyday as architectural experience and interaction.

The time and place of social mixing: Everyday rhythms of long-term residents and newcomers in a Dutch neighborhood

Despite research questioning the beneficial effects of social mixing interventions, urban governments continue to strive for a social mix. In this paper we examine the effects of social mixing through the concept of rhythm. We paint an ethnographic portrait of a disadvantaged area in the city of Groningen, The Netherlands, which was targeted by a social mixing intervention. We analyze everyday rhythms of newcomers and long-term low-income residents in order to shed light on the effects of the mixing intervention on perceptions of social division and disadvantage. By introducing ‘exemplary’ newcomers, the social mixing intervention improves the area in terms of e.g. livability scores and socio-economic indicators. However, looking through the lens of rhythm, we found how social divisions between advantaged and disadvantaged groups become exacerbated as a result of ‘arrhythmias’ occurring. We argue that institutional actors fail to align the social mixing intervention with long-term residents’ daily rhythms, which impinges upon that group’s right to the social production of their neighborhood. On a wider scale, we assert the social mixing intervention renders the problem of socio-economic disadvantage spatially insignificant under the guise of improved livability. Therefore, we implore future urban policy to explicitly imagine the ways in which socio-spatial interventions might affect daily rhythms of inequality within neighborhoods.

Rethinking centrality

In this paper, I tackle the center-periphery dynamics under planetary urbanization by focusing on Gebze, the gigantic industrial city just outside of Istanbul’s administrative borders. Through an empirical study of peripheral urbanization processes in the Gebze-Istanbul axis, the paper engages with the planetary sub/urbanization debates and serves the triple purpose: (I) to emphasize the significance of peripheralization and the center-periphery dialectics to critique the predominant emphasis on centrality in urban and regional research which relegates the socio-spatial and political transformations of the peripheries to the background, (II) to offer an alternative approach to depictions of cities as sentient, anthropomorphic actors in a hierarchical and competitive Darwinian ecology, and (III) to contribute to planetary sub/urbanization debates by zooming in on some of the micro-spaces of peripheral Gebze during the extended urbanization process in greater Istanbul. Through a transdisciplinary methodology, the paper provides a local ontology by displaying how peripherality is constructed not merely from above and the center by the state or economic actors, but also by the people from below and the periphery, as it were, during their everyday rhythms, activities, negotiations, and coping. By resisting the merely expanded application of the term suburban, and instead taking seriously the complex web of governance, agency, defeat, organization, and exploitation within the lives of Gebze’s inhabitants, the article concludes that such phenomena make any universalizing claim about the urban or the suburban incomplete.

Rhythm of endurance and contestation: Everyday practices of roaming vendors in Hanoi

Cities are sites of contestations in which the spaces of people’s everyday lives are in constant clash with the spaces envisioned and enforced by planners and politicians. For many modern governments, the spatial ordering of the city according to a certain aesthetic ideal has been a powerful tool to implement the state vision of social and moral order. Oftentimes, this means the suppression of economic activities and spatial practices that do not fit into the prescribed order.In Vietnam, the ordering of urban space has always been used as a tool to establish the state’s vision of social order. In its current pathway to a market-oriented economy, ordering is all the more important to shape a ‘global city’ that is competitive in the global economy. The city’s sidewalks are the focus of repeated state ordering projects that aims to create a modern, orderly city. Street vending is perceived as a backward practice and is thus the foremost target for state ordering actions. However, despite increasing ordering actions, vendors have time and again shown a sheer resilience in their struggle for a place in the city. Based on in-depth interviews with 32 vendors in Hanoi, the paper explores vendors’ everyday practices to understand their struggle mechanism against the city that excludes them.The paper highlights how rhythm-making are important for vendors’ everyday struggle for livelihood, and how vendors are important agents in the production of the polyrhythmic city, as rhythm-makers and space-makers. The paper reveals the complex nature of vendors’ everyday rhythms, which are born out of suppression and constraint. These rhythms of endurance require not only synchronization but careful calibration, improvisation, and above all circumvention. The paper argues for the need of an urban politics that focuses on the urban poor, a politics that learn from and support the making of the rhythm of endurance.

Anxious immobilities: an ethnography of coping with contagion (Covid-19) in Macau

ABSTRACT In February 2020, Macau became one of the first regions where the pandemic of coronavirus or Covid-19 affected the totality of social and economic life leading to increased anxieties over movement and distance. Although Macau has had very few actual cases of the virus – 46 in total – and no deaths from it, the Macau government rapidly instituted a lockdown. The aim of this article is to reflect on how the social experience of being in lockdown can provide insights into understanding the type of experience or condition that we provisionally term ‘anxious immobility.’ Such a condition is characterized by a total disruption of everyday rhythms and specifically anxious waiting for the normalization of activity while being the subject of biosocial narratives of quarantine and socially responsible. The paper is based upon 3 months of ethnographic research conducted by two researchers based in Macau. We also reflect upon some aspects of the politics of mobilities in the light of disruptions and friction points between Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China, and the rest of the world.