Everyday Life Perspective Research Articles

A ‘Back Door’ Exploration of Social Problems in Comic Strip Dialogues With Marginalized Children

ABSTRACTBased on 35 comic strip dialogues with marginalized children in Italy, Norway and Slovenia, as well as three individual interviews with Italian practitioners, this article introduces a methodological approach that offers a ‘back door’ for exploring social problems embedded in the everyday lives of children. The analysis demonstrates the importance of adopting an everyday life perspective as an analytical strategy in conversations with children in marginalized life situations. This means shifting the focus away from solely examining risk factors and instead promoting a contextual understanding of risk, with an emphasis on amplifying the diverse voices of children.

An Exploration of the Relationship Between English Language and Social Identity from an Everyday Life Perspective

This research discusses the relationship between language and identity. In sociolinguistics, the term identity refers to the way in which speakers convey themselves via language. This highlights the dynamic relationship that exists between language and identity.As a result, the link between language and identity will be the primary topic of this article, with a special emphasis placed on Age Gender Ethnicity Class Nationality occupation these six dimensions from the point of view of their application in everyday life. In addition, we will talk about the problem of language alteration in the setting of many identities at the conclusion of the article.

Household niche experimentation in sustainability transitions and everyday life: A novel framework with evidence from low-waste living in Melbourne

Sustainability transitions research and policy treat households and the home in a narrow way. The paper reviews niche-based experimentation and social-practice theory informed sustainability transitions literature to develop a novel framework for deliberate household experimentation. The usefulness of the framework is explored in an action research project on low-waste living in Melbourne. Data was collected through interviews, weekly self-reports and three participatory workshops. The research confirms the usefulness of the framework and offers reflections on deliberate household experimentation. The conclusion is that similar to other niche spaces, household niches are instrumental in demonstrating, learning about, advocating for and critiquing different aspects of sustainability transitions. But in contrast to other niche spaces, households are deeply embedded in the everyday life of what matters to people. If the transition to low-waste living is to be successful, it needs to be planned from the perspective of everyday household life.

Maize-farming Forever?

Abstract Based on qualitative and ethnographic field research in the Panfilov District of Almaty Region, Kazakhstan, and selected supportive quantitative data, this contribution explores the dynamics of agricultural transformation along the former Sino-Soviet border since the mid-1990s. It particularly scrutinises path dependency, as well as friction, in cultivation patterns navigated by local agricultural actors in the face of changing irrigation water and infrastructural access, commodification schemes and alternative employment opportunities that are produced by emerging transborder (and increasingly globalised) infrastructures. Therefore, how do agricultural actors in Panfilov District make sense of and negotiate past and current agricultural development at the local level? The article aims to provide a reflection of what the analytical ‘post-Soviet’ category might still mean from an everyday life perspective in a borderland context affected by socio-political neglect and newly evolving connections alike.

Keeping A Distance: Changing Everyday Lives of Married Migrant Gay Men in China’s State-owned Enterprises

ABSTRACT This study examines continuity and change in the lives of rural migrant gay men working in China’s state-owned enterprises (SOE) from an everyday life perspective. By examining their sexuality, migration histories, and heterosexual marriage experiences, this study contributes to sexuality and migration literature by exploring how rural-to-urban migrant gay men maintain their everyday homosexual intimacies in post-socialist China. It adds to the perspective that gay men’s perceptions, interpretations, and reactions to marriage and sexuality vary, due to their personal migration experiences. These findings also contribute to scholarly discussions of everyday life by providing a nuanced analysis of how spatial tactics are employed as forms of everyday resistance by gay men for maintaining their sexualities.

Making meaning of everyday life in the context of lung cancer treatment—a qualitative study of outpatients’ perspectives

Background The increasing survival after a lung cancer diagnosis implies that patients live longer with the disease, which means that symptoms and side effects of the treatment become part of everyday life. Aim The study explored how older adults make meaning of everyday life when undergoing treatment for their lung cancer. Material and methods A qualitative study using semi-structured interviews was conducted with 12 older adults with lung cancer undergoing various treatments. The analysis followed Giorgi’s phenomenologic five-step method. Results The analysis revealed three partly overlapping themes: meeting the health care system, losing identity, and struggling for meaning in everyday life. The patients appreciate clear and coherent communication at the oncology clinic. They had different needs for support from organised support groups, friends, communities, or relatives to make meaning of everyday life. Conclusion Creating meaning in everyday life is essential despite the disease and the treatments’ side effects. Interpersonal relationships create meaningfulness in everyday life through a salutogenic perspective that makes everyday life comprehensible and manageable. Significance The patients need an everyday life perspective on the disease and the side effects, which a salutogenic approach in the encounter with the health care system could support.

The Intimate and Everyday Geopolitics of the Russian War Against Ukraine

ABSTRACT The contributions in this Forum analyse the Russian war against Ukraine from the micro perspective of everyday life, conveyed by scholars who have been impacted at a variety of personal levels. Framed within the existential threat that continues to endanger Ukrainians and Ukraine, the contributions collected here embrace the messiness of lived experience away from the grand narratives that circulate at global scales. Instead, the authors explore a variety of processes of situated bordering that fracture not just territory, but also families and individual lives. In so doing, they shine light on the people and places where geopolitics takes shape on the ground. Taken together, this collection provides a nuanced and human-scale exploration of one of the most momentous geopolitical events in recent history.

‘We lost a type of job for a type of person in this country’: changing expectations of working in the UK scientific civil service

Organisational change in UK government research establishments (GREs) during the late twentieth century profoundly affected the scientific civil servants who worked in them.[1] Civil service reforms in the 1980s and 1990s led to the reconfiguration of career management frameworks, alterations to physical working environments, the introduction of new management practices and an increasingly commercial outlook in GREs, yet we know very little about the how these changes were experienced by the scientists themselves. A new series of oral history interviews with former scientific civil servants offers the personal perspective of everyday working life in a GRE. Through extensive use of interviewees’ own words this article reveals the norms and values associated with working in the scientific civil service and articulates the processes of organisational change that led to a fundamental shift in how government scientists felt about their work. In so doing it offers a record of a type of scientific working life in the UK that has largely disappeared as a consequence of bureaucratic reform and commercialisation.

Czechoslovak Folk Music and Dance Ensembles and the World Youth Festival in the 1950s: An Ethnomusicology and Oral History Perspective

One of the most significant mass manifestations of the state-subsidised cultural expres- sions of the Socialist Bloc in the second half of the 20th century was “Red Woodstock”, the World Festival of Youth and Students. The first edition took place in the summer of 1947 in Prague. Incidentally, this festival featured Czechoslovak amateur and professional folk music and dance en- sembles in a preliminary line-up, which later became the most important established ensembles in the country. Some of these ensembles then appeared regularly at Youth Festivals. Such festival performances were considered very influential performance opportunity for ensembles of folk music and dance in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. The present article, based on data gathered through interviews grounded in oral history and archival research, explores the role of the World Youth Festivals in the process of foundation of Czechoslovak ensembles of folk music and dance and their repertoire negotiation of the traditional music and dance within the vague framework of socialist realism on the one hand, and an everyday-life perspective and ordinary desire to perform pronounced by the ensembles’ members on the other.

The prison space: a critical approach to inhabiting the prison in overcrowding

This work is the result of the project “A pedagogy for reunion” of IDELA. It proposes a theoretical approach for the definition of an overcrowded prison, using as a methodological strategy the testimony and poems of people deprived and formerly deprived of liberty in Costa Rica. Who, from their narratives, describe the experience of inhabiting a penitentiary center from the perspective of everyday life.

Living with suicidal thoughts: A scoping review.

There is a significantly higher number of people experiencing severe levels of suicidal thoughts compared to that of suicidal deaths and suicide attempts. In suicide prevention research, there is a shift towards greater emphasis on people's experiences of living with suicidal thoughts. This can expand the existing evidence base, which is dominated by a biomedical approach. The aim of this review was to summarise and disseminate existing research on the lived experiences of living with suicidal thoughts. A scoping review by Arksey & O'Malley consisting of six stages: (1) formulating the research question, (2) identifying relevant studies, (3) selecting studies, (4) mapping data, (5) summarising the results and (6) consulting stakeholders. PubMed, PsycINFO and CINAHL were searched for studies in English, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. Peer-reviewed articles examining people's experiences of living with suicidal thoughts using qualitative methods were included. The search was supplemented with a citation pearl search in the Web of Science database. Twenty-eight studies were included. The findings were organised under two thematic headings: (a) the significance of social connections and (b) a loss of the personal self. There is a need for further qualitative research of people's experiences of living with suicidal thoughts from an everyday life perspective. Awareness about social connections and attachment in mental health prevention and governance is crucial. Trauma-informed care could be a useful approach to prevent suicidal thoughts as the review found that many participants had traumatic experiences in both childhood and adulthood. As part of the treatment of suicidal thoughts, it might be useful to have a focus on narrative and communicative methods and their clinical application.

Nationalities relations in a totalitarian state. The case of East Central Europe under Soviet occupation (1939-1941) – methodological issues and a research agenda

The aim of the article is to present the specific nature of research on the issues of national relations in a totalitarian state based on the example of the lands of Central and Eastern Europe under the Soviet occupation from 1939-1941. In order to achieve this, the literature on the subject (in English and Polish) was reviewed as well as the most important methodological problems encountered by researchers. The research program was also outlined, along with a proposal for their conceptualization in the form of signalling the main aspects of the above-mentioned issues, including the specificity of the Soviet occupation of 1939-1941, social and ethnic relations in this area, and the Soviet nationalities policy. Several research methods and postulates were proposed, as well as perspectives and theoretical approaches that could facilitate the study of this complex and controversial subject, e.g., the interdisciplinary nature of research, methods of bottom-up formation of political attitudes of the population (the so-called “bottom-up” method), application of theories of the totalitarian state, and different theories of ethnicity. As a result, an interdisciplinary program of comparative studies of ethnic relations in Central and Eastern Europe under Soviet rule (1939-1941) was outlined, taking into account the transnational character of historical processes and the need to conduct micro historic analyses and case studies that would allow capturing of the diversity of ethnic relations and verify the effectiveness of the policy of the central Soviet authorities. The article argues that it seems obvious that the specificity of the analysed problematics can be properly grasped only by consideration it in the historical and theoretical context, adopting a comparative and transnational approach, from a micro-historical as well as everyday-life perspective that highlights the most important social factors which facilitated changes in interethnic relations.

Looduslikud pühapaigad kui jutupaigad Rambynase mäe näitel

This article presents different cases of Rambynas Hill in south-western Lithuania. The first one discusses Rambynas Hill as a pagan sacred site. Sporadic mentions in written historical sources do not paint a clear picture of the place and of how it was used in pre-Christian times. Nevertheless, early mentions of Rambynas from as early as the 13th century confirm that the place was indeed significant at the time. No high-profile archaeological excavations ever took place at Rambynas and this limits our understanding of the place in the prehistoric context. Unfortunately, the most important part of the hill collapsed into the Nemunas River in the 19th century, which suggests that any future archaeological expeditions would probably be unavailing. Folklore remains the main source for understanding Rambynas’ importance as a sacred site, while some folktales are presumably of pagan origin. The cult stone on top of Rambynas, last seen in the late 19th century, also suggests that the place was a kind of pagan sacred site. However, its origins could not be verified because the stone was destroyed. It is important to note that despite the lack of additional data in some cases, Rambynas Hill is one of the best-documented and best-known sacred sites in Lithuania. The second case of Rambynas Hill demonstrates how the place regained its fame and importance at the beginning of the 20th century, at the time of creating national identity in Lithuania Minor. Rambynas became the pinnacle of the joint historical narrative between the inhabitants of Lithuania Minor and Lithuania Major in order to further include the former to the newly formed independent country. Rambynas also became the centre of summer solstice celebrations that grew larger with every year during the 1920s and 1930s. For these celebrations a local figure, Martynas Jankus, started The Eternal Book of Rambynas, where people wrote down their experiences of the place. This book represents the third case of Rambynas and is comprised of short writings from different people inspired by their immediate experience. It presents the main topics that were important for people visiting Rambynas Hill and also shows how the place was successfully re-storied in the 20th century and regained its fame as a sacred site of now romanticized pre-Christian religion, despite the fact that it had not been practiced for a few hundred years. The Eternal Book of Rambynas reveals a more personal approach, even though still highly influenced by collective ideas. It does not elaborate on each case of personal experience due to the limited scope of the records. The last case presented in this article discusses Rambynas as part of personal lifeworld, revealed in the memories of a local villager Elena Grigolaitytė. Her experiences are recorded in a short book titled Rojaus Kelias, in which the woman summarizes her life in Bitėnai village close to Rambynas Hill. The case of Elena shows how the same place could be presented in a different light when viewed from a personal perspective of everyday life. All the cases presented in the article serve the purpose of showcasing the possibilities of studying sites as story-places. Research of ancient sacred sites in Lithuania is often limited by historical and ethnological data, and researchers try to include these places in pre-Christian narratives. Due to phenomenological approach, story-places allow to temporarily suspend these values and discuss these places as part of human experience and everyday life. However, the phenomenological approach works best as a part of complex research. Historical facts and written sources about the hill introduce Rambynas as a part of pre-Christian sacred site, probably important during prehistoric times and later in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Investigation carried out by the 19th and early 20th-century press, written memories, historic documents and other data introduce the modern restoration of Rambynas and how the hill functioned as a cultural and even political centre of Lithuania Minor. Lastly, by analysing records in The Eternal Book of Rambynas, folk stories about the place and personal memories, it is possible to understand how people were experiencing the place. This approach paints a complex picture of the place and, most importantly, does not automatically reject modern stories as irrelevant.

Mellem nærhed og specialisering

Coordinated care is part of a discursive turn towards a more patient-centered healthcare system. Coordinated care are defined as “The delivery of services by different care providers in a timely and complementary manner” (Langberg, Dyhr, and Davidsen 2019, 6). However, this easily overlooks the work that doctors put into involving patients, updating colleagues in other sectors and creating coherence with patients (Uijen et al. 2012). The article uses ethnographic co-creation as a method to examine doctors and general practitioners cross-sectoral collaboration on early diagnostics from a clinical everyday life perspective. Bakhtin’s dialogue theory and Foucault’s power/knowledge concept, provide an analytical framework to analyze collaborative practices. The article contributes with detailed knowledge of how relational strategies are used to handle cross-sectoral tensions. Furthermore, the article illustrates the co-creation of knowledge across a communication theoretical and biomedical perspective.

Changes in everyday life of rural China: a perspective of mobilities

This article aims to examine how rural everyday life has changed in the Chinese context in response to the process of urbanisation. Drawing on a mobilities perspective, changes in everyday life are represented by spatial mobilities and the impacts of social mobilities on them are assessed at a household level. Employing rural survey data for 2007 and 2017 conducted in Jianghan Plain, China, results reveal that everyday life in central rural China has undergone an uneven development and is significantly impacted by social mobilities. As one of the main agricultural production regions in China, the livelihood strategies in the study area have been shifting from full-time farming to part-time farming and non-farm. The effects of the process of social mobilities on working, consuming and leisure mobilities are also unevenly distributed. Our findings suggest that the perspective of everyday life deserves further investigation for its important role in exploring the human–land relationship in a rural context. And the mobilities paradigm can provide an alternative insight into rural restructuring and its social effects.

Журнал «Вестник полиции» как источник для изучения истории преступности Российской империи в годы Первой мировой войны

The paper analyzes the structure and content of the journal «Bulletin of the Police» on the basis of archival materials as a valuable historical source that allows reconstructing data on the dynamics and nature of crime in the Russian Empire during the First World War. From the standpoint of the theory of historical everyday life, it is argued that the distinctive features of the journal «Bulletin of the Police» are the regularity of coverage of criminal crime on the pages of the publication, a wide geographical coverage and a detailed description of events, as well as the publication of court photographs. At the same time, from a source point of view, this publication has a number of drawbacks, among which there is a onesided positive coverage of the work of the police in the fight against crime, the bureaucratic style of presentation of many published articles, as well as the silencing of many problematic issues in the field of studying crime during the war period and measures to combat it. The paper substantiates the conclusion that for a deep and comprehensive scientific analysis of the dynamics of crime in the Russian Empire during the First World War, this historical source contains extremely important information that allows revealing the state of the criminogenic situation from the perspective of everyday life and the activities of police agencies and displaying its results in the public mind.

Everyday Life in Suburbia

In the present article we generate theory-based categories for analyzing everyday life in order to gain a deeper understanding of sociospatial change in the urban fabric. Here, the metatheoretical framework of Planetary Urbanization by Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid (2011; 2014; 2015) offers us a fruitful approach. Their epistemological approach allows us to focus at different dimensions of urban and suburban life in an active tension and to analyze them with regard to different, constitutive moments. We further develop the perspective of everyday life, which the authors treat rather marginally, with our own conceptual approach, which starts at the point of struggles involved in everyday life in order to trace the sociospatial change.

To wszystko i sto innych czynności, i sto tysięcy innych czynności. Codzienność w poezji Tadeusza Różewicza

The main topic of the article is everyday life depicted in the poetry by Tadeusz Różewicz. Its reference point is the concept of everyday life constructed by Bernhard Waldenfels. He distinguishes three ways of perceiving it – it entails regular order, embraces everything that is palpable and tangible, as well as is closed-in-itself and restricted. According to Grażyna Borkowska, everyday life is synonymic to both daunting prose of life and heart-warming familiarness. Thus, everyday life embraces a wide range of human experiences and is valuated both positively and negatively. The category of everyday life understood as above functions as a frame for interpretation of selected Różewicz’s poems which represent different topics – religion and faith, humanity, death, and writing. Everyday life functions in Różewicz’s poetry as a space for religious experience; it enables formulating diverse universal conclusions about humanity and their relations with the world, allows the subject to speak about human mortality, and is the platform for self-referential deliberation about poetry and creating. Interpreting selected poems from the perspective of everyday life lets the reader capture deeper, ambiguous meaning of faith, perceive human existence in its double sense – both ordinary and extraordinary, bind everyday life with death and present it as a space for creating poetry. Those measures make discussed issues clearer and more concrete and combine them with human experience. Showing a specific tension between them and everyday life makes the interpretation richer and opens perspectives for discovering new meanings.

The Story of Laura. Eastern Bloc Surveillance of Spain in the Late Cold War (1967-1990)

ABSTRACT Based on Spanish, German, Polish and Romanian archives, this article explores some aspects of the Cold War that have hardly been studied until now: the activities of the Eastern Bloc secret services in Spain; the surveillance of Spanish diplomats; and Eastern European spies in Spain. The article examines the history of East-West relationships but adds the perspective of everyday life, using oral history and the records of the security police. The focus is on the importance of the surveillance of Spain as a Cold War country, which has almost never been researched in its connection to the Eastern Bloc.

Translation in the making: how older people engaged in a randomised controlled trial on lifestyle changes apply medical knowledge in their everyday lives

A recurring discussion in recent health studies relates to knowledge translation (KT), which deals with the questions of how to ensure and measure the uptake of knowledge from one medical situation to another and of how to move the right form of knowledge from one situation to another. Recently, however, this way of understanding KT has received criticism for presenting too basic an understanding of knowledge and not fully grasping the potential of the term translation. Based on qualitative material from a randomised controlled trial (RCT) and a follow-up study, this article takes the current discussion of KT one step further, focussing on how KT happens among healthy citizens participating in a lifestyle intervention. The overall argument is that even current critical understandings of KT often ignore the fact that the translation of medical knowledge does not stop at the clinical encounter but extends into the everyday health practices of the population. A more nuanced understanding of how and in which forms medical knowledge is adopted by people in their everyday health practices will give new insights into the complex mechanisms of KT and the encounter between medical knowledge and practice and everyday life. Hence, this article discuss how knowledge from a clinical trial—focussing on muscular training and increased protein intake—is translated into meaningful health practices. The article concludes the following points: First, constant, and often precarious, work is required to maintain the content of ‘medical knowledge’ in a complex social order. Second, focussing on translation work in everyday life emphasises that KT is an open-ended process, wherein the medical object of knowledge is contested and renegotiated and needs alliances with other objects of knowledge in order to remain relevant. Last, from an everyday life perspective, medical knowledge is just one rationale making up the fabric of people’s health practices; other rationales, such as time, feasibility, logistics and social relations, are just as relevant in determining how and why people pursue healthy living or comply with a medical regimen. CALM trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02034760. Registered on 10 January 2014; ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02115698. Registered on 14 April 2014; Danish regional committee of the Capital Region H-4-2013-070. Registered on 4 July 2013; Danish Data Protection Agency 2012-58-0004–BBH-2015-001 I-Suite 03432. Registered on 9 January 2015.