Mundane Methods

Innovative ways to research the everyday

Helen Holmes, Sarah Marie Hall

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526139726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Researching the everyday is more important now than ever before: beyond a fad or cultural currency, understanding the mundane is key to critical and conceptual social science. But what is the everyday, and how do we research it? Bringing together a range of interdisciplinary approaches, this collection provides a practical, hands-on approach for scholars interested in studying the mundane and exploring its potential. Outlining innovative and original methods for studying materials and memories, emotions and senses, and mobilities and motion, Mundane Methods provides a distinctive methodological and empirical contribution to research on the everyday. Collecting research from established and up-and-coming scholars, this collection offers a range of truly unique methods – from loitering, smell-mapping and memory work – that promise to embrace and retain the vitality of research into everyday life.

1
Introduction: mundane methods and the extra-ordinary everyday

Sarah Marie Hall and Helen Holmes

Researching the everyday

Researching the everyday is more important and significant now than ever before: beyond a fad or cultural currency, understanding the mundane is key to critical and conceptual social science. But what is the everyday, and how do we research it? These questions have long perplexed social and cultural theorists. While no firm consensus has ever been reached, what scholars do agree on is that there is no ‘one’ everyday – that everyday lives are multiple, messy and full of methodological possibilities. Though, as Cloke, Crang and Goodwin (2014: 926) note, the everyday is ‘a notoriously difficult term to define, … we can generalise that it is an arena of social life that includes repetitive daily cycles and routines that we learn but eventually take for granted’. This academic interest in everyday life, while not an especially new phenomenon, can contemporaneously be traced back to the ‘cultural turn’ within the social sciences, from around the early 1970s, when engagements between cultural studies and philosophical traditions were raising questions about ‘how we make sense of the world around us’ (Clayton, 2013: 1).

As a result, scholarly interest in everyday life has grown considerably since 2010, with the ordinary and mundane now at the fore of social science research. Where previously interested in the spectacular and the extraordinary, social science has turned away from a focus on grand structures and functions to pay attention to the grounded, the experiential and the ‘blindingly obvious’ (Woodward and Miller, 2007: 335). In trying to make sense of the everyday, it is common for authors (and we are no exception!) to pepper their work with synonyms like ‘mundane, familiar and unremarkable’ (Scott, 2009: 2), and to draw attention to the habitual, rhythmic and banal; ‘the things that people do on a day-to-day basis’ (Holloway and Hubbard, 2001: 1). This can, at times, give the impression that the everyday is limited to the realms of the prosaic and parochial, and can have the effect of making the everyday seem (for some) an unexciting avenue for research.

It would be a misunderstanding, however, to assume this – or that a conceptual or empirical focus on the everyday provides a narrowing of scale or practice: that which is close, localised, observable. Rather, the everyday can be a window into ‘the ongoing problematic of the relationship between the local and the global, in the context of global flows of capital, information and people that have produced a heightened interconnectedness of different parts of the world’ (Dyck, 2005: 234). Moreover, researching the everyday is not an unproblematic endeavour, and by raising concerns about the practice and performance of knowledge and power, ethical considerations also surface (Rose, 1993). Furthermore, positionality and reflexivity play an important role, where everyday life and academic life collide (Hall, 2014).

So, instead of limiting our understanding of human societies and cultures, the lens of the everyday offers possibilities, both big and small. In addition to offering micro-, meso- or macro-level analysis, ‘theoretical perspectives that inform our understanding of everyday life … cut across the disciplines of the social sciences, from psychology to philosophy and sociology’ (Scott, 2009: 10). We adopt a similar approach within this collection, exploring social science as broadly defined and recognise, like Aitken and Valentine (2005: 8), that ‘disciplinary boundaries are not cast in stone; they are fuzzy and chameleon-like, changing before our eyes as we focus deeper’. Everyday life, as a result, is an exciting and expanding field incorporating a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars, attempting to engage with the vivacity of the (extra)ordinary everyday. In doing so, scholars tune into recent theoretical and methodological advances in the fields of new materialism, sensory and embodied approaches and the ever growing mobilities turn, while also paying homage to longer histories, such as the influence of feminist methods – of the humble interview and intimacy of Memory Work. By exploring the minutiae of daily experiences and ways of making sense of the world we inhabit, such work also highlights their cultural, ethical, social and political significance.

Methods for exploring everyday life

While research on the everyday is rapidly growing (Back, 2015; Pink, 2012; Rinkinen, Jalas and Shove, 2015), methodological approaches for studying the mundane seemingly lag behind. As Back (2007: 8) notes, ‘we need to find more considered ways to engage with the ordinary yet remarkable things found in everyday life.’ Social scientists, it seems, are no longer content with research designs comprising only traditional methods such as interviews, focus group or observation, and there is a real need to expand the empirical toolkit. This is not to argue against using the traditional interview, or other staples in the researcher's toolkit (see also Les Back's foreword in this collection), but rather to think about ways in which we can broaden our methods and techniques to fully encounter everyday life in all its sensory, multifarious glory.

To date minimal literature or resources exist which explore methodological approaches for studying the everyday. While such methods are undoubtedly occurring in varying disciplines and involve a multitude of settings and subjects, the practicalities of how one may undertake such research are seldom documented. Exceptions to this include the methods-based texts of Mason and Dale (2011) and Back and Puwar (2010), whose ground-breaking work has opened up the arena for research into the everyday, renewing and invigorating social science research. In doing so, Mason and Dale (2011) present a range of mixed, creative methods for studying the fields of personal life and relationships; places and mobilities, and socio-cultural change: from working creatively with longitudinal survey data; to considering socio-technical methods; to innovative approaches to mapping. Similarly, Back and Puwar's Live Methods (2010) engages with the experimental and serendipitous nature of research on the everyday, exploring ‘storying’, ‘art’-based and digital approaches to sociology. Sarah Pink's (2013) work has also been an influential voice on visual methods, dealing with all aspects of the visual methods, including photographs, video and also digital media; focusing on the practicalities of conducting such methods, as well as considering theoretical and analytical perspectives. Buscher, Urry and Witchger (2010) apply a similar focus to advance mobile methods for social science research. In their key text, Mobile Methods they draw upon the interdisciplinary work of scholars in the field of mobilities to discuss the challenges and opportunities of researching movement.

Aside from the more contemporary inroads into methodological approaches to studying the everyday, we must also credit two key qualitative methods texts which we believe have provided the foundations for such innovative work. These include, but are no means limited to, Mason's (2017) comprehensive guide to conducting qualitative research, a go-to guide for social science undergraduates; and Cook and Crang's (2007) practical toolkit for conducting all aspects of ethnographic research. These hands-on texts have paved the way for bottom-up, grounded approaches to research; a prerequisite for conducting research on the everyday.

With this in mind, we should also mention the influence of feminist perspectives on methods for studying the everyday. Work such as that of Roberts (1981), Bell and Roberts (1984) and the Women and Geography Study Group (1997) implicitly explor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword: making the mundane remarkable
• 1 Introduction: mundane methods and the extra-ordinary everyday
• Part I Materials and memories
• Part II Senses and emotions
• Part III Mobilities and motion
• Index