The Everyday Life Reader brings together a wide range of thinkers from Freud to Baudrillard with primary sources on everyday life such as the Mass Observation survey and key texts by Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, to provide a comprehensive resource on theories of everyday life. Ben Highmore's introduction surveys the development of thought about everyday life, setting theories in their social and historical context, and each themed section opens with an essay introducing the debates. (...) Sections include: * Situating the Everyday * Everyday Life and National Culture * Ethnography Near and Far * Reclamation Work * Everyday Things. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRumination and worry are two perseverative, negatively valenced thought processes that characterise depressive and anxiety disorders. Despite significant research interest, little is known about the everyday precipitants and consequences of rumination and worry. Using an experience sampling methodology, we examined and compared rumination and worry with respect to their relations to daily events and affective experience. Participants diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, co-occurring MDD–GAD, or no diagnosis carried an electronic device for one week and reported on (...) rumination, worry, significant events, positive affect, and negative affect. Across the clinical groups, occurrences of everyday events predicted subsequent increases in rumination, but not worry. Further, higher momentary levels of rumination, but not worry, predicted subsequent decreases in PA and increases in NA. Thus, in these clinical groups, rumination was more susceptible to... (shrink)

After modernism and postmodernism, it is argued, the everyday supposedly is where a democracy of taste is brought into being - the place where art goes to recover its customary and collective pleasures, and where the shared pleasures of popular culture are indulged, from celebrity magazines to shopping malls. John Roberts argues that this understanding of the everyday downgrades its revolutionary meaning and philosophical implications. Bringing radical political theory back to the centre of the discussion, he shows how (...) notions of cultural democratization have been oversimplified. Asserting that the everyday should not be narrowly identified with the popular, Roberts critiques the way in which the concept is now overly associated with consumption and 'ordinariness'. Engaging with the work of key thinkers including, Lukacs, Arvatov, Benjamin, Lefebvre, Gramsci, Barthes, Vaneigem, and de Certeau, Roberts shows how the concept of the everyday continues to be central to debates on ideology, revolution and praxis. He offers a lucid account of different approaches that developed over the course of the twentieth century, making this an ideal book for anyone looking for a politicised approach to cultural theory. John Roberts is a Senior Research Fellow in Fine Art at the University of Wolverhampton. He is the author of The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday (Manchester University Press, 1997) and The Philistine Controversy (Verso, with Dave Beech, 2002), plus other books and numerous articles, in Radical Philosophy and elsewhere. (shrink)

This article explores the practice of simulation modeling by investigating how parameterizations are constructed and integrated into existing frameworks. Parameterizations are simplified process descriptions adapted for simulation models. On the basis of a study of meteorological research, the article presents predictive and representative construction as two different ways of developing parameterizations and the trade-offs involved in this work. Because the overall aim in predictive construction is to improve weather forecasts, the most practical solutions are chosen over the best theoretical solutions. (...) In representative construction, the situation is reversed, but while discourse focuses on theory and models, the everyday work is often tied to computer programs. These different ways of construction work are closely related to the role of the simulation models as epistemic or technical objects, and this characterization is also used to compare the results with previous research. (shrink)

The notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk as a modern political phenomenon – the merging of art and life and the artistic transformation of life in its totality – has been limited to public political spectacle and the theatrical enactments of state programs. In contrast, this article about the Soviet 1920s and 1930s looks at everyday life or, in Russian, byt, as the primary domain of modern aesthetico-political intervention. The successful ordering of everyday life according to the principles of communism (...) would mean that even the most intimate aspects of citizens’ lives become part of a total work of art, which now encompasses not only the public but also the private sphere. The author traces the evolution of byt reform from the aesthetic associations between bureaucrats and artists of the 1920s to the 1930s mobilization of ordinary citizens as artists who mould their everyday environments in accordance with Stalinist politics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Seeking the Everyday Meaning of Autonomy in Neurologic DisordersGeorge J. Agich (bio)The Socratic aphorism that the unexamined life is not worth living and dictums like "Know thyself" remind us of the centrality of self-understanding in the history of philosophical reflections on autonomy. These traditional concerns with autonomy may seem far removed from the neurologic impairments to which Joel Anderson and Warren Lux draw our attention. Nonetheless, Anderson and (...) Lux have provided an important discussion that links the traditional philosophical commitment to self-knowledge with an account that parses these concepts in the context of neurologic disorders. Theirs is a potentially productive approach for improving our understanding of autonomy, one that Emilio Mordini and I advocated in a paper entitled, "Autonomy and the Ethics of Neurosurgery" (Agich and Mordini 1998, 54). We argued that the focus of bioethics on issues such as informed consent misses the more challenging and potentially fruitful collaboration that neurosurgery and neurology affords for advancing the philosophical understanding of the conditions of autonomy. The challenge is in the integration of concepts used in one context of meaning with other domains of discourse. A good example of the challenges embedded in pursuing this kind of project can be found in Anderson and Lux's discussion of the concept of accurate self-assessment.Anderson and Lux argue that accurate self-assessment is a requirement for one to act autonomously. On first hearing, this phrase sounds unsurprising and consistent with standard approaches that assume a higher degree of awareness of one's capacities. Their characterization, however, derives from their observations of cases involving severe neurologic impairments, which point to more basic processes than the reflective awareness or knowledge that is often assumed. Paradoxically, the language of accurate self-assessment sounds remarkably like an intellectual function. It appears to fall squarely within the traditional philosophical tendency to define autonomy in terms of ego-centered, intellectual functions involving relatively high-level reflective capacities. Despite their terminology, Anderson and Lux stress that their account requires a type of reflexivity that is not the same as self-conscious reflection understood in the highest degree. They stress this in a number of places. For example, they see the neurologic concept of executive function as involving basic feedback mechanisms that are "broadly isomorphic with capacities associated [End Page 295] with autonomy;" these include anticipation, goal seeking, planning, initiation, sequencing, monitoring, error detection, self-correction, as well as initiation of novel responses, a clearly heterogenous set of capacities (Anderson and Lux 2004, 285). These capacities are not capacities of the "mind," but basic neurologic functions of the intact embodied agent who is actively engaged in the world. Thus, these concepts capture or express a practical (or clinical) as opposed to a theoretical understanding of the basic conditions or capacities defining autonomy. Similarly, their talk of "self-assessment" does not need to be understood as explicit or conscious; rather, it typically operates in the background (Anderson and Lux 2004). They term this character of self-assessment "mundane" (Anderson and Lux 2004, 289), which strikes me as exactly the right way to characterize this key feature of autonomy (Agich 1995). Their phenomenological and clinically based insights are quite sound, but the reader struggles with a terminology that seems to run in a different direction. To be sure, they stress that they intend their language of "autonomy" and "accurate self-assessment" to involve ordinary, background, and everyday functions that do not require high levels or significant capacities for reflective self-assessment, but their very insistence underscores the problem inherent in this terminology.Anderson and Lux argue that the capacity for self-assessment has a task-relative dimension that requires a degree of "accuracy." They characterize accuracy in a way that may promote rather than forestall misunderstanding. They state that "an adequate degree of precision" (281) is required in such assessment. For example, in assessing whether one is able to jump a hurdle, they say "one must accurately estimate not only the strength of one's legs but also the height of the hurdle" (Anderson and Lux 2004, 281). They further characterize their account of "accuracy" as involving an epistemological externalism, which might lead some readers to assume... (shrink)

Unlike many countries across the world, in Chile after 1968 a radical socialist government came to power with the electoral victory of Salvador Allende and Popular Unity underpinned by a whole range of movements toward a socialism “from below”. Using fragments gathered from workers’ newspapers produced during the 1930s, 1950s and 1970s, the aim of this article is to identify the changing content of radical socialist politics that coalesced by the time of this electoral victory in and through the “ (...) class='Hi'>everyday” experience of workers in the textile industry. Workers in this sector were at the forefront of the profound changes underway during the prior period of import-substitution industrialisation from the 1930s and the “pre-revolutionary” moment of 1970-1973, where major textile firms were amongst the first to be occupied and nationalised under the Allende government. By tracing the evolution of socialist ideas in these publications —published by trade unions, political parties and, in the 1970s, by workers in the occupied factories themselves— I unravel the development of a radical socialist politics through these decades that then coalesced with the electoral victory of the UP in 1970. Methodologically, I draw on the work of Chilean sociologist Tomás Moulian (1993) and his concept of ideas “en uso” to examine how radical socialist ideas developed and changed in their interaction with workplace conflicts of the time. Consequently, I identify four areas in which these ideas developed: expression of the changing workplace; interpretation of discontent through legalist and radical discourse; the complexities of Chilean socialist and anti-imperialist ideas; and the construction of historical memory. I demonstrate how the interplay of these four features of Chilean socialist ideas were represented in an “everyday socialism” that informed the factory occupations and nascent social transformations after 1970. (shrink)

This book works with the literature of the everyday, memory studies, and non-representational geography to open up a novel understanding of memorials not just as everyday objects, but also as fundamental to urban modernity.

Shaili Jain's The Unspeakable Mind (2019) is an impressive examination of the stress experienced by a veteran community that too often is handled with a sense of clinical sterility that borders on inhumanity, or a that of pandering condescension. However, what is striking about Jain's text is the lack of analysis of how trauma manifests in what Heidegger would refer to as average everydayness. This, to me, seems like a missed opportunity, especially as it pertains to trauma-based ethics since all (...) too frequently manifestations of trauma do not occur as they are portrayed to in popular culture, but in the day-to-day and moment-to-moment living of those who deal with trauma. In this article I interrogate everyday manifestations and ideal manifestations of trauma using a comparative lens. My hope is that by focusing my analysis on my process of engagement with traumatic experiences I can help develop new discussions about trauma that will both allow for the discovery of new modes of thinking-about trauma as well as illuminate more nuanced methodologies of healing for those effected by post-traumatic stress in future research. (shrink)

The focus on the everyday in this Special Issue reveals different kinds of emotional practices, their political effects and their political contestation within both micro- and macro-politics in int...

This special issue on emotions and the everyday represents a provocative intervention in the literature on emotions in International Relations. A strong theme that emerges is the ambivalence of emo...

In the relatively fragmented field of everyday aesthetics, some issues have gradually become the subject of increasingly heated debate. One of the primary disputes concerns aesthetic experience and how that concept should be understood. This article defends the view that the conception of aesthetic experience developed by John Dewey offers a much more promising foundation for a theory on the aesthetics of everyday life than some scholars have believed.

This article explores the influence of Émile Durkheim on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in order both to open up the political significance of Levinas’s thought and to develop more expansive meanings of moral and political community within education. Education was a central preoccupation for both thinkers: Durkheim saw secular education as the site for promoting the values of organic solidarity, while Levinas was throughout his professional life engaged in debates on Jewish education and conceptualized ethical subjectivity as a condition (...) of being taught. Durkheim has been accused of dissolving the moral into the social, and his view of education as a means of imparting a sense of civic republican values is sometimes seen as conservative, while Levinas’s argument for an ‘unfounded foundation’ for morality is sometimes seen as paralyzing the impetus for concrete political action. Against these interpretations, I argue that their approaches present provocative challenges for conceptualizing the nature of the social, offering theoretical resources to deepen understanding of education as the site of an everyday ethics and a prophetic politics opening onto more compelling ideals for education than those dominant within standard educational discourses. (shrink)

Ethics is a foundational competency in healthcare inherent in everyday nursing practice. Therefore, the promotion of qualified nurses’ and nursing students’ moral competence is essential to ensure ethically high-quality and sustainable healthcare. The aim of this integrative literature review is to identify the factors contributing to the promotion of qualified nurses’ and nursing students’ moral competence. The review has been registered in PROSPERO (CRD42023386947) and reported according to the PRISMA guideline. Focusing on qualified nurses’ and nursing students’ moral competence, (...) a literature search was undertaken in January 2023 in six scientific databases: CINAHL, Cochrane Library, PsycINFO, PubMed Medline, Scopus and Web of Science. Empirical studies written in English without time limitation were eligible for inclusion. A total of 29 full texts were retrieved and included out of 5233 citations. Quality appraisal was employed using Joanna Briggs Institute checklists and the Mixed Method Appraisal Tool. Data were analysed using inductive content analysis. Research about the factors contributing to the promotion of qualified nurses’ and nursing students’ moral competence is limited and mainly explored using descriptive research designs. The contributing factors were identified as comprising two main categories: (1) human factors, consisting of four categories: individual, social, managerial and professional factors, and ten sub-categories; and (2) structural factors, consisting of four categories: educational, environmental, organisational and societal factors, and eight sub-categories. This review provides knowledge about the factors contributing to the promotion of qualified nurses’ and nursing students’ moral competence for the use of researchers, nurse educators, managers, organisations and policymakers. More research about the contributing factors is needed using complex intervention, implementation and multiple methods designs to ensure ethically sustainable healthcare. (shrink)

In this paper, drawing upon Tosaka Jun’s response to Interwar debates on historicism and his account of everydayness, I offer an explanation for why contemporary secular apocalyptic claims lack convergence by focusing on the historical dimension of such claims. Everydayness, organized the routines of work and rest, is shown to be the basis for a sense of historical time, and theoretical journalism is outlined as the kind of collective epistemic procedure needed to produce a collective sense of a community’s place (...) in historical time. I defend the claim that the cause of starkly opposed responses to apocalyptic claims is due to qualitative differences in the work and rest that organize the everyday temporality. In the absence of a theoretical journalism, whether one subscribes to an apocalyptic claim will be contingent on heterogeneous personal circumstance. I conclude by outlining a limit case of indigenous post-apocalyptic claims under settler-colonialism. (shrink)

In recent years, facial difference is increasingly on the public and academic agenda. This is evidenced by the growing public presence of individuals with an atypical face, and the simultaneous emergence of research investigating the issues associated with facial variance. The scholarship on facial difference approaches this topic either through a medical and rehabilitation perspective, or a psycho-social one. However, having a different face also encompasses an embodied dimension. In this paper, we explore this embodied dimension by interpreting the stories (...) of individuals with facial limb absence against the background of phenomenological theories of the body, illness and disability. Our findings suggest that the atypical face disrupts these individuals’ engagement with everyday projects when it gives rise to disruptive perceptions, sensations, and observations. The face then ceases to be the absent background to perception, and becomes foregrounded in awareness. The disruptions evoked by facial difference call for adjustments: as they come to terms with their altered face, the participants in our study gradually develop various new bodily habits that re-establish their face’s absence, or relate to its disruptive presence. It is through these emergent habits that facial difference comes to be embodied. By analyzing the everyday experiences of individuals with facial limb absence, this article provides a much-needed exploration of the embodied aspects of facial difference. It also exemplifies how a phenomenological account of illness and disability can do justice both to the impairments and appearance issues associated with atypical embodiment. (shrink)

Everyday aestheticians have had relatively little to say about literature. Inspired by Peter Kivy’s philosophy of literature as laid out in his books The Performance of Reading and Once-Told Tales, I examine reading literature as a part of everyday life. I argue that not only do Kivy’s views help explain the value that avid readers place on their daily silent engagement with a book, but that his philosophy of literature also shows how literary works can have an aesthetic (...) presence in our everyday lives even during periods in-between reading a book. In light of the paper, literary reading turns out to be an artistic routine that fills avid readers’ everyday lives in a very literal sense. (shrink)

Acidity provides an interesting example of an everyday concept that developed fully into a scientific one; it is one of the oldest concepts in chemistry and remains an important one. However, up to now there has been no unity to it. Currently two standard theoretical definitions coexist ; the standard laboratory measure of acidity, namely the pH, only corresponds directly to the Br⊘nsted-Lowry concept. The lasting identity of the acidity concept in modern chemistry is based on the persistence of (...) the quotidian concept. This is suggestive for considerations of other scientific concepts. (shrink)

In Paradoxes of Delusion, Sass aims to use passages from Wittgenstein to characterize the feeling of “mute particularity” that forms a part of delusional atmosphere. I argue that Wittgenstein’s discussion provides no helpful positive account. But his remarks on more everyday cases of the uncanny and the feeling of unreality might seem to promise a better approach via the expressive use of words in secondary sense. I argue that this also is a false hope but that, interestingly, there can (...) be no interesting or substantial explanation of this failure. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: The Intentional Domain Four Questions Special Aims Utterances Semantics and Pragmatics Extending the Utterance Model When Do We Interpret? Conceptions of Interpretation Monism and Pluralism Notes.

A highly original and interdisciplinary study of the philosophy of the everyday.

If intense pain is “world-destroying,” as Elaine Scarry has argued, one of the ways nurses respond to that loss is by re-enacting the commonplace—both in practice and in writing—through daily, accumulating acts of care. Such care poses a critique of medicine’s emphasis on the exceptional moment and stresses forms of physical tending that are quotidian rather than heroic, ongoing rather than permanent or conclusive. I develop this view of care through the writings of nurses like Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, (...) Cortney Davis and Joyce Renwick. (shrink)

Although the first ‘pragmatist aesthetics’ was devised by John Dewey in his Art as Experience, Richard Shusterman has been the only scholar to use the notion of “pragmatist aesthetics” in his Pragmatist Aesthetics. In this paper, I show that Dewey already refuses the gap between the practices of the ‘artworld’ and that of everyday life. In Art as Experience, he criticizes the ‘museum conception’ of art to argue that some aesthetic experiences in our daily life have the same essential (...) structure as the experience of art. While Rorty has revised Dewey’s basic premises, Shusterman has rather restated them. Since the end of the 1980s, he has started developing his own philosophical project, named ‘somaesthetics’. Shusterman’s somaesthetics does not simply incorporate many Deweyan views, but also develops them further. Accepting a Deweyan framework, Shusterman rejects the sharp dualism of the so-called “lower and higher levels of art”. What is more, he considers philosophy as an art of the living, embracing in somaesthetics the ancient Greek and Asian traditions. (shrink)

Robert Stecker investigates the universal human need for aesthetic experience of the world around us. He examines three contexts where aesthetic value plays a central role: art, nature, and the everyday. He explores how the aesthetic interacts with moral, cognitive, and functional values, and considers the place of the aesthetic in a good life.

The article traces the evolution and crystallization of Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. It focuses on his consideration of the epistemological and ontological issues attendant to the principium individuationis, the subject of his doctoral dissertation of 1904. Culminating with the publication of Ich und Du in 1923, this process was punctuated by life experiences that led him to affirm rather than to seek to transcend the principium individuationis as the ontological ground of being manifest in the matrix of everyday life, (...) which we are beckoned to sanctify through I-Thou relations. (shrink)

ENLIGHTENMENT AND POLITICAL FICTION: -/- THE EVERYDAY INTELLECTUAL -/- (New York/London: Routledge, 2016). -/- Abstract -/- Advanced, theoretical ideas can be found in the most unlikely books. A handful of books—sometimes surprising ones—not only entertain the reader but also contribute to new ways of seeing the world. Indeed, some theorists explicitly cite literature. Adam Smith, for example, makes repeated references to Voltaire, and Marx later claims numerous literary sources, including Don Quixote. Why, though, should an historian of ideas direct (...) sustained scholarly attention to literature? And what, exactly, beyond high entertainment, should anyone not in literary studies expect when reading great fiction? -/- To address these questions, I examine the particular textures and peculiarities of thought in five famous works of fiction, written from 1600-1850. I have found a web of text-based, interrelated ideas that are attributed to the Enlightenment, and yet that existed considerably before the early-modern period, and, in many cases, that lasted well into our own time. Ideas ascribed to later thinkers—for example, John Locke, in the late seventeenth century, on private property—can be found in much earlier works of fiction. In this case, however, Locke himself acknowledged his debt to Cervantes, but this has been forgotten, as few modern readers read both the theory and the fiction of the past. The five works of fiction examined here, from five different languages, therefore, not only reflect European Enlightenment thinking, but in some cases they helped to create it. -/- Overall I argue that access to political and economic theory by way of fiction made it possible for any person, even someone beyond traditional scholarly circles, to become part of an ongoing, vital academic debate. Enlightenment and Political Fiction: The Everyday Intellectual is designed as an homage to E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) by telling the story of the making of the everyday intellectual. The stress here is on the abstract theory to be found in a few famous works of fiction, ideas presented in a format highly attractive to contemporary (and later) readers, yet also exhibited in a manner that showed respect for the intelligence of the average reader. Extrapolating from Thompson, I argue that it was not passive reception but active participation of readers—including those who listened to the book read out loud—that fostered Enlightenment from below. The decision to engage in this intellectual debate, grounded in ideas often first found in fiction, and much of it featuring less-than-gifted central characters, allowed everyday people—the vast majority of whom were wholly removed from both salons and universities—to participate in the questioning and eventually the decision-making of their own states. This led to greater political participation, which is often cited as one of the indicators of the shift to the modern age. -/- Looking at fiction alongside philosophy, political theory, and the history of economic thought enriches our notion of theorizing, and shifts our understanding about which texts should be addressed. Authors, in the midst of developing theories, take their source materials from ideas in their own cultures and then systematize particular concepts. In some cases, nascent political and economic ideas appear first in literature, as in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and, in other cases, theorists deliberately used literature to propound their theories to a much wider audience, as in Voltaire’s Candide, which might be considered a novelization of moral theory. It is not that the former case—abstract ideas breaking through first in fiction—is the rule in this period, and the latter—theorists manipulating fiction for their own purposes—the exception, but rather that there is a dialectical relationship between fiction and theory in the long eighteenth century. -/- See: http://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Political-Fiction-Intellectual-Routledge/dp/1138954179 AND https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138954175. (shrink)

The Argonauts combines high theory and the everyday. It does this by combining lofty thought, the quotidian, close attention to words and ideas and stray thoughts, and desire. It does this through form, the way it blends and refuses genre, the way it skips from one thought or story to another, and making them connect by virtue of contiguity. The Argonauts refuses form in a way that parallels how Maggie's and Harry's bodies and identities refuse gender taxonomy. It also (...) refuses genre, referred to variously as theory, memoir, and autotheory. While it queers form and family, it also queers feelings. (shrink)

Digital technologies have opened up new perspectives in thinking about the future of food and farming. Not only do these new technologies promise to revolutionise our way of meeting global food demand, they do so by boldly claiming that they can reduce their environmental impacts. However, they also have the potential to transform the organisation of agri-food systems more fundamentally. Drawing on assemblage theory, we propose a conceptual model of digitalisation organised around three facets: digitalisation as a project; “everyday (...) digitalisation”; and reflexive digitalisation. These facets reflect different relations between concrete practices and representations, imaginaries, and narratives, while representing different modes of agency: the collective, the distributed, and the individual, which, we argue, highlight contrasting ways for human and non-human actors to engage with digitalisation. With this model anchored in assemblage theory, we offer a tool for critically and comprehensively engaging with the complexity and multiplicity of digitalisation as a sociotechnical process. We then apply our theoretical framework to two ethnographic studies, one explores the growth of digital technologies in Switzerland as a way to govern and monitor national agriculture, the other focuses on Indonesia, where small digital startups have begun to dot the landscape. By identifying the material and semiotic processes occurring in each case, we notice similar issues being raised in terms of how digitalisation is co-constructed in society. (shrink)

Abstract:Concepts of the everyday typically correlate with the normal and regular, while narratives of climate change are structured by predictions that exceed the normal. Since extreme events of climate change are not assimilable into the everyday, their destabilizing effects heighten destructive feedback loops mediated through fear. Developing psychic and social resilience necessary for re-routing climate change predictions from their direst outcomes thus requires transformed relations to the everyday. After analyzing how a default conception of the everyday (...) hinders existential adaptation, I draw on Jean-Luc Nancy, Alfred North Whitehead, and William James to develop a concept of the everyday that emphasizes precarity, multiplicity, and creativity as better fostering social and psychic resilience amidst destabilization. This different concept of the everyday is necessary for learning how to live meaningful daily lives not predicated on an illusion that all is well or the fantasy that climate change can be resolved through a perpetuation of current norms of the everyday. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 5, August 2020, Page 595-599.

In this article the authors1 approach material and symbolic violence through transdisciplinary readings of theoretical debates, fiction and empirical narratives. They make use of the concept of turning points which disrupt dichotomous and static categorizations of victim and survivor, and their association with passivity and agency respectively. In situations of violence, turning points represent temporality instead of timelessness, dialogism instead of monologism, multilayering rather than any fixed identity. The authors draw on the theorists Bakhtin and Certeau, whose work highlights the (...) significance of meaning-making between self and other. They analyse empirical and fictional narratives to understand the creation of dialogic spaces, a space that both subordinates and subverts. Pointing to the procedural nature of turning points within the everyday, the authors argue that women, despite the pain and trauma, are neither just a victim nor just a survivor in a violent relationship. (shrink)

Digital technologies have opened up new perspectives in thinking about the future of food and farming. Not only do these new technologies promise to revolutionise our way of meeting global food demand, they do so by boldly claiming that they can reduce their environmental impacts. However, they also have the potential to transform the organisation of agri-food systems more fundamentally. Drawing on assemblage theory, we propose a conceptual model of digitalisation organised around three facets: digitalisation as a project; “everyday (...) digitalisation”; and reflexive digitalisation. These facets reflect different relations between concrete practices and representations, imaginaries, and narratives, while representing different modes of agency: the collective, the distributed, and the individual, which, we argue, highlight contrasting ways for human and non-human actors to engage with digitalisation. With this model anchored in assemblage theory, we offer a tool for critically and comprehensively engaging with the complexity and multiplicity of digitalisation as a sociotechnical process. We then apply our theoretical framework to two ethnographic studies, one explores the growth of digital technologies in Switzerland as a way to govern and monitor national agriculture, the other focuses on Indonesia, where small digital startups have begun to dot the landscape. By identifying the material and semiotic processes occurring in each case, we notice similar issues being raised in terms of how digitalisation is co-constructed in society. (shrink)

Technology always provides a new perception of the world. However, it is not clear when technology produces “mere” new informations and when it provides something more such as a production of new objects in our world which start to “live” around us. The aim of this paper is to study how technology shapes our surrounding world. The questions which we are going to answer are: Is it really adding new objects to our world? If yes, does every technology have this (...) potentiality? We are going to tackle the problem using a phenomenological and post-phenomenological approach focussing our attention on the perceptual level. Using Husserl’s philosophy we will study how technology are deeply involved in our perception and, thanks to post-phenomenology and its concept of “embodiment relations,” we will be able to determine which kind of technologies have the potentiality to change our surrounding world introducing and producing new objects in it. (shrink)

Being a patient and living a life -- Clinical space and traits of healing -- False starts and frequent failures -- Three journeys : A.'Ibuprofen and love', B. 'Staying tuned up', C. 'We all want the same things' -- Being a patient : the moral field -- Rethinking healthcare ethics : the patient's moral authority.

From an ethnomethodological perspective, this article describes social actors’ everyday and virtual stances in terms of their practices of provisional doubt and belief for the purpose of fact-establishment. Facts are iterated, reinforced, elaborated, and transformed via phenomenal practices configuring relations of equipment, interpretation, and method organized as “other” than, but relevant to, the everyday. Such practices in scientific research involve forms of suspended belief; in other areas they can instead involve forms of suspended doubt. As an illuminating example (...) of this latter class of virtual fact-establishment practices, I offer an extended analysis of the “yes; and…” principle of information-establishment used in improvisational theatre to progressively develop the content of a performance. (shrink)

Continuous sedation is increasingly used as a way to relieve symptoms at the end of life. Current research indicates that some physicians, nurses, and relatives involved in this practice experience emotional and/or moral distress. This study aims to provide insight into what may influence how professional and/or family carers cope with such distress.