Describe and analyse an aspect of your life which has been affected by COVID-19, using what you have learned in this unit.

Sociology of Everyday Life Week 1:Making something out of nothing?

Dr Charlotte Overgaard

Overview of lectures

• What is the course about

• Why is the Everyday exciting and worth

our time

• Some key messages about the study of

Everyday Life

• Some thinking frames

• The practicalities of how this unit runs

W h a t i s t h i s c o u r s e a b o u t ?

S o c i o l o g y – t h e s t u d y s o c i a l b e h a v i o u r a n d s o c i a l p r o c e s s e s a n d h o w t h e y s h a p e o u r l i v e s .

E v e r y d a y L i f e – t a k e n f o r g r a n t e d , c o m m o n s e n s i c a l , m u n d a n e , o r r o u t i n e a s p e c t s

o f d a i l y l i f e

S o c i o l o g y o f e v e r y d a y l i f e – i s i n t e r e s t e d i n i n v e s t i g a t i n g / i n t e r r o g a t i n g p r a c t i c e s , a c t i v i t i e s

a n d i n t e r a c t i o n s i n o u r d a i l y l i v e s .

The Sociology of Everyday Life

This unit is designed to introduce students to key concepts in sociology through topics and debates in everyday life. Everyday life is characterized by mundane and taken for granted activities that all of us partake daily. The term also relates to insignificant and seemingly superficial practices. But everyday life is much more. It is an invaluable resource of information about social life and how we live it.

Developing the theme that everyday life tells us a great deal about society and how it changes over time, the unit introduces students to a range of sociological concepts and invites them to consider how these concepts help us understand the everyday and how we experience it.

The sociology of everyday life attempts:

• To explain what is going on in mundane contexts such as the street, home, public space, workplace, neighbourhood etc.

• It treats the mundane as significant and full of meaning; and the unusual or abnormal as having its own logic

• It focuses on meaning and artefacts, cultural values and social conduct.

• Presupposes that everything is of interest to the inquiring mind.

• Understand our social existence

The Discipline of Sociology SOCIOLOGY is the study of society and how society shapes our lives. SOCIOLOGY is also a tool or way of understanding the world.

American Sociologists C. Wright Mills (1959) proposed that sociology involves a particular quality of mind and he called it the sociological imagination - the vivid awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the wider society. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

It is about ‘thinking yourself away from the familiar routines of everyday life’ and being aware how underlying the messy reality of the everyday is a social structure that we are often unaware of’.

Sociology is a discipline that covers everything from family structures, work and employment, consumption; identity; race and ethnic relations, aging; the way we vote to the level of inequality in society.

Making something of nothing?

In Invitation to Sociology, Peter Berger (1970) suggests sociologists are:

(a) People who try to understand society in a ‘disciplined’ way ( for e.g. tries to be systematic, careful with terms and methods).

(b) Person intensively, endlessly, shamelessly interested in the doings of human beings (for e.g. fascinated by customs, strange behaviour, etc.).

(c) Person who is tempted to look through keyholes (observes humans while they are doing things).

(d) Person who is not afraid to preoccupy him or herself with what others find ‘too sacred’ or ‘too distasteful’ to study and analyse.

(e) Fascination with ‘discovery’ but also with ‘defamiliarizing’ the familiar (researching cultures that are not mainstream and questioning what we mean by the mainstream).

(f) Someone who radically questions the way we live and wants to transform the consciousness of society (wants to challenge dominant myths and fight injustices).

What’s going on when nothing much is happening? If, when asked ‘what have you been up to?’ or ‘what’s been happening’ you reply ‘nothing much’ then what is this ‘nothing much’ referring to? In the court of ordinary life there is never ‘nothing’ going on, just nothing ‘much’ (Ben Highmore 2011: pg3).

This unit is about trying to find a critical language to talk about these empty, purposeless moments of daily life, filled with activities such as commuting, waiting, and office routines, that we generally take for granted but that take up so much of our lives.

Defamiliarising the familiar

Affordable wheelchairs made from monoblocs and bicycle wheels in Cambodia (some children have lost their limbs while stepping on uncleared landmines left behind by the Americans during the Vietnam war)

To summarise

the Everyday

Life

• Everyday life is which we presume to be

mundane, familiar and unremarkable.

E.g. why do we queue?

• Everyday life is that which is routine,

repetitive and rhythmic: we do the

same things in the same places at the

same time, day after day.

• Everyday life appears private and

personal

How do we study it?

We will talk much more about this in the

first five weeks, but some key messages

early on:

• Make the familiar strange

– Question the unremarkable

– Ask: ‘what is going on here?’

– Stand back as if you never saw them

before

• Search for underlying rules, routines

and regularities in the behaviour you

observe

• Challenge our taken for granted

assumptions about the world

Thinking frame 1: Material/ Cultural

• Stuff, things, places are material. They exist.

• Here, try to think about the meaning too.

• That is, the cultural dimension.

• Connect items, bodies, play lists, coffees we drink, how we express ourselves to the social, historical and material contexts.

Thinking Frame 2:

Structure/ Agency

• Structure are durable, enduring patters of social life, such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, customs.

• Examples are capitalism, gender inequality

• BUT, we also have agency

• We are all bound by and dependent on structures. Within those structures, some individuals have more room to exercise their agency

Thinking Frame 3: Micro/ Macro

• It’s about connecting the small, mundane and everyday rituals to macro structures: institutional, national and international

• How is your own choice about which phone to buy connected to trading of Cobalt and the working conditions of miners in Congo?

SHOPPING DURING C-19

The organisation of this unit

Week Clusters Lecture and tutorial topics Assignments

1 Introduction to

the everyday

Making something out of

nothing

Tutorials start

2 The meaning of everyday

life

Weekly quizzes

start

3 Studying the mundane

4 Spaces Homes

5 Cities

6 Living in

consumer

society

Stuff! Essay due

7 You are what you eat

8 Coffee and class

9 Fitting in and

standing out

Love, marriage and friends

10 Bodies, gender

11 A unique identity and

looking good

Last weekly quiz

12 Play lists and phones Last tutorial

13 No new material Take home exam

Assessment Name Weight Submission method

Due Date Return Date

Online Quizzes 20% Link on Ilearn From week 2-11, between Monday 00.01am and Sunday 11.59pm each week

The following Monday

Reflection essay 20% Via Turnitin Week 6, Sunday 11.59pm

Within 2 weeks

Participation 20% Online, via Zoom or written in discussion forums, depending on how you have enrolled

Ongoing Ongoing feedback, marks at the end of the semester

Take-home Exam 40% Via Turnitin Week 13, Sunday 11.59pm

Within 3 weeks

Each week between Monday

and Sunday

Prepare

- All students prepare by reading typically one reading

Activities

- All students listen to the lectures and engage in the lecture material in their own time between Monday and Sunday of the week they are in

- From week 2, note that there is a quiz every week

Consolidate

- All students engage in tutorial exercises

- However, the mode depends on your enrolment mode – your tutors will guide you through

Charlotte Overgaard

[email protected]

Zoom every Tuesday at 12 Noon –

look out for Zoom links in

Announcements

TAKE A SIT, MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE AND LOOK AROUND