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Sociologies of Everyday Life. Special issue of Sociology

We are pleased to invite papers for consideration in the Sociology Editor’s Special Issue in 2015. The theme will be the Sociologies of Everyday Life. The deadline for submission is 31 August 2014.

Rationale

Everyday life sociology is a well-established tradition in the discipline and interest in ways of understanding day-to-day worlds continues to be significant. These engagements are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, across the social sciences as well as outside them. It is in this context that the 2015 Special Issue aims to provide a timely opportunity to take stock. This is intended to be a reflective moment – where has sociology arrived at in its attempts to think through the everyday? It is also intended to be an anticipative moment – what are the new logics, foci, approaches, uses, limits of sociologies of the everyday?
Sociological approaches to everyday life attempt to capture and recognize the mundane, the routines in (and of) social relations and practices. In doing so they not only give importance to the ordinary and take the ordinary seriously as a category of analysis, but they also highlight that everyday life social relations, experiences and practices are rarely simply or straightforwardly mundane, ordinary and routine. Rather they are dynamic and surprising, characterized by ambivalences, perils, puzzles, contradictions and possibilities and continually influenced by things, contexts and environments. From Simmel’s money, De Certeau’s resistances, Elias’ manners, the relationalities of Bourdieu, ANT’s interdependencies to a more recent focus on the experiential and the sensory, it is evident that the micro, ordinary, banal and the familiar constitute, and are constitutive, of the wider complexities, structures and processes of the contemporary social world. In short, everyday life can be thought of as the site of translations and adaptions in which the social gets to be made - and unmade.
Recently Sarah Pink (2012)1 has helpfully noted that the rise of interest in, research into and publication on everyday life - the hidden, the slight, ordinary, the mundane - effectively stops it being ‘hidden’. But in many ways recognizing this also confirms the seduction of everyday life as a field of sociological and interdisciplinary inquiry – the more extensive the gaze, the more apparent the complexity and the compelling nature of the field.
We aim to be able to collect together a series of papers that variously reflect the breadth and diversity of sociology’s enchantments and engagements with everyday worlds as well as the imaginative and innovative ways in which the discipline has sought to analyze and respond to it.

Call for papers

We invite papers that explore, through the lens of everyday life, one or more of the following indicative themes and/or areas:

  •  Theories of everyday life and conceptual approaches
  • Materialities, cultures and senses
  • Social practices, activities and interactions
  • Social divisions and exclusions
  • Animals, entities and the more-than-human
  • Senses of community and belonging
  • Selfhood and identifications
  • Public, semi public spaces and the built environment
  • Domestic spaces and routines
  • Institutions and organisations
  • Affect and intimacies
  • Landscapes, localities, places and place making
  • Convivalities and socialities and social interdependencies
  • Everyday racism, cultural difference and everyday multiculture
  • Environmental practices and consumption
  • In/security and violence
  • Methods - researching the everyday

Submission details

Deadline for submissions: 31 August 2014 (full papers)
Word limit: 8000 words
Queries: To discuss initial ideas or seek editorial advice, please contact the special issue editors by email on [email protected]
Submit: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/soc
Full submission instructions are available on this site on the ‘Instructions and Forms’ page. Please read these in full well before submitting your manuscript.
All manuscripts will be subject to the normal referee process, but potential authors are welcome to discuss their ideas in advance with the editors.

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