Sociology of the Everyday World

Description

This course will critically reflect on our experiences of everyday life. It will draw on a variety of theoretical approaches to everyday life and examples from both New Zealand and abroad. In New Zealand, everyday life may be shaped by our experiences of living in the suburbs, eating at McDonalds, shopping malls, having credit card debts, holidays at the beach, having pets, working in tourism, and sharing this country with millions of cows and sheep.  Our online world shapes many of these experiences.
Everyday life is understood as those aspects of life which are often routine and unremarkable, but which provide an entry point to the key social processes. Daily practices are valued by ordinary people as it is in them that people are least controlled by institutions, and their potential to foster resistance to the structures of capitalist life has motivated recent scholarship in this field. As an introduction to the political potential of everyday worlds, the course questions whether the current problems (the environmental ones are a good example) appear too abstract and distant to ordinary people, and explores how lived experience provides a nexus for engaging more with them, how habit can be dynamic and facilitate radical change. For the example of the environment, this includes daily practices such as consumption choices, or recycling, or cleaning up favourite local places as well as joining organisations related to the environment.  The course will also situate sociology of every day worlds in the discipline of sociology as a whole.