Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning interest in the study of everyday life within the social sciences and humanities. In Critiques of Everyday Life Michael Gardiner proposes that there exists a counter-tradition within everyday life theorising. This counter-tradition has sought not merely to describe lived experience, but to transform it by elevating our understanding of the everyday to the status of a critical knowledge. In his analysis Gardiner engages with the work of a number of significant theorists and approaches that have been marginalized by mainstream academe, including: *The French tradition of everyday life theorising, from the surrealists to Henri Lefebvre, and from the Situationist International to Michel de Certeau *Agnes Heller and the relationship between the everyday, rationality and ethics *Carnival, prosaics and intersubjectivity in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin *Dorothy E. Smith's feminist perspective on everyday life. Critiques of Everyday Life demonstrates the importance of an alternative, multidisciplinary everyday life paradigm and offers a myriad of new possibilities for critical social and cultural theorising and empirical research.

Critiques of everyday life

In this paper I investigate how the effects of the disordered spaces of industrial ruins can interrogate and contest the normative ways in which memory is spatialised in the city. By focusing upon confrontations with the ghosts which haunt ruins, I will suggest that the affective and sensual memories conjured up act as an antidote to the fixed, classified, and commodified memories purveyed in heritage and commemorative spaces. In contradistinction to the didactic and constrained remembering that prevails across Western cities, a form of remembering which is inarticulate, sensual, and conjectural allows improvisatory scope to supplement and challenge ordered forms of social remembering.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1068/d58j

The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins: Ordering and Disordering Memory in Excessive Space

On the 2nd we were at the Wenglers in the afternoon. It once again made an enormous impression on me when they put on the wireless and leapt from London to Rome, from Rome to Moscow etc. The concepts of time and space are annihilated. One must become a mystic. For me radio destroys every form of religion and at the same time gives rise to religion. Gives rise to it twice over: a) because such a miracle exists, b) because the human intellect invests, explains, makes use of it. But this same human intellect puts up with the Hitler government.1

/pdf/complicity-and-collusion-in-the-mediation-of-everyday-life-29ptxjx20g.pdf

Complicity and Collusion in the Mediation of Everyday Life

By exploring the disordering effects of ruination, this article critically explores the ways in which the material world is normatively ordered. The yet to be disposed of objects in ruins have been identified as ‘waste’, an assignation which testifies to the power of some to normatively order the world, but also is part of an excess, impossible to totally erase, which contains rich potential for reinterpretation and reuse because it is under-determined. Through processes of decay and non-human intervention, objects in ruins gradually transform their character and lose their discreteness, they become charged with alternative aesthetic properties, they impose their materiality upon the sensory experience of visitors, and they conjure up the forgotten ghosts of those who were consigned to the past upon the closure of the factory but continue to haunt the premises. In these ways, ruined matter offers ways for interacting otherwise with the material world.

Waste Matter - The Debris of Industrial Ruins and the Disordering of the Material World:

Community gardens have been identified as providing a model for promoting sustainable urban living. They can also contribute to individual and community reconnection to the socio-cultural importance of food, thus helping facilitate broader engagement with the food system. Such processes may offer pathways to developing a deep engagement and long-term commitment to sustainable living practices predicated on the development of new forms of environmental or ecological citizenship. However, little attention has been paid to how this can be adequately harnessed. Based on an ethnographic study of community gardeners in the Australian Capital Territory, this article argues that fostering an embodied form of sustainability, which accounts for individual embodied engagement in these collective spaces, may play a critical role in achieving these outcomes.

Embodied connections: sustainability, food systems and community gardens

Practice of Everyday Life: Volume 2: Living and Cooking

Preface General Introduction PART I: A VERY ORDINARY CULTURE I. A Common Place: Ordinary Language II. Popular Cultures: Ordinary Language III. Making Do: Uses and Tactics PART II: THEORIES OF THE ART OF PRACTICE IV. Foucault and Bourdieu V. The Arts of Theory VI. Story Time PART III: SPATIAL PRACTICES VII. Walking in the City VIII. Railway Navigation and Incarceration IX. Spatial Stories PART IV: Uses of Language X. The Scriptural Economy XI. Quotations of Voices XII. Reading as Poaching PART V: WAYS OF BELIEVING XIII. Believing and Making People Believe XIV. The Unnamable Indeterminate Notes

Pierre Mayol

Papers

Practice of Everyday Life: Volume 2: Living and Cooking

Practice of Everyday Life

L'invention du quotidien / 2 Habiter, cuisiner

Living and cooking

Feux Persistants : Entretien Sur Michel De Certeau