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Situating Everyday Life
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Situating Everyday Life
Practices and Places



April 2012 | 176 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
The study of everyday life is fundamental to our understanding of modern society.

This agenda-setting book provides a coherent, interdisciplinary way to engage with everyday activities and environments. Arguing for an innovative, ethnographic approach, it uses detailed examples, based in real world and digital research, to bring its theories to life.

The book focuses on the sensory, embodied, mobile and mediated elements of practice and place as a route to understanding wider issues. By doing so, it convincingly outlines a robust theoretical and methodological approach to understanding contemporary everyday life and activism.

A fresh, timely book, this is an excellent resource for students and researchers of everyday life, activism and sustainability across the social sciences.
 
Introduction: (Re)Thinking about Everyday Life and Activism
 
Theorizing the Familiar: Practices and Places
 
Researching Practices, Places and Representations: Methodologies and Methods
 
Beyond Doing the Dishes: Putting Kitchen Practices in Place
 
Making the Sensory Home: Laundry Routes and Energy Flows
 
Tracing Neighbourhood Flows: Making a Garden Place
 
(Re)Making Towns: Sustainable Activist Places, Practices and Representations
 
The Digital Places of Everyday Life: Thinking about Activism and the Internet
 
Conclusions: Sustainable Places, Activist Practices and Everyday Life

Pink provides an engaging study of everyday life analysing it through the prism of activism and focusing on a diversity of environments and practices, from the kitchen sink to the use of internet. By investigating the practices and places implicated in the makings of sustainable everyday living, she successfully links the empirical and theoretical to provide a stimulating read for scholars and students alike. Pink offers a rich interdisciplinary analysis of daily life
Monica Degen
Senior Lecturer, Sociology and Communications, Brunel University


Drawing on and developing recent formulations of practice and place-as-event, and deploying a novel range of multi-sensorial methods, Sarah Pink impressively and insightfully engages the everyday in its concrete, relational and processual complexity. As if this were not enough, she also uniquely rethinks activism and sustainability as they are enacted, experienced and mediated in and through everyday life. It is a rare treat to read a book that so successfully addresses and integrates such a broad array of conceptual, methodological and political issues
Mike Michael
Professor of Sociology of Science and Technology, Goldsmiths



Sarah Pink’s latest book Situating Everyday Life is propelled by the twin urge, yes, to situate everyday life studies amongst the textually engraved intellectual furnishings of sociology, human geography and anthropology, but also, to have us, ethnographers and others, over-burdened by the intellect, register a tangible settlement we have made with the fast and hydrocarbon hungry furnishings of home, garden and Facebook...Here is an ideal book for introducing students at all levels to how to understand and study the everyday and to appreciate the misery of a soggy towel or the heart-lifting gift of a homegrown lettuce from a neighbour.

Eric Laurier
University of Edinburgh, UK

In this book Sarah Pink attempts to join ethnography of the mundane domestic practices of everyday life with a call to arms for an activism embodied in those very same processes. Rejecting the simple binary opposition of the everyday as mundane versus activism as public, explosive and explicit she argues that, ‘Indeed it is possible to understand everyday life as a site that has equal potential for activist practices as those of a global political arena’ (p. 5).

Michael Bull,
University of Sussex, UK

I have long been an admirer of Sarah Pink’s work – not least for her uncanny knack of bringing innovative methodological approaches to bear on topical substantive issues. In Situating Everyday Life, she brings together material from a number of ethnographic projects to engage with theories of place and practice, and apply them to questions of sustainability (about which I know something) and activism (about which I know a lot less)...As might be expected, Pink’s work is fascinating, well written and a pleasure to read.

David Evans
University of Manchester, UK

a great supplementary text to help my students think more broadly around the activities of everyday life.

Dr Jackie Taylor
School of Health Care Professions, Salford University
April 30, 2013

A strong addition to the literature exploring everyday life - it will be very useful to students.

Dr Deborah Lee
Politics and Sociology, Nottingham Trent University
November 6, 2012

Interesting approach, but a bit too specific for all students

Dr Lmm Houweling
Instituut voor Ecologische Pedagogiek, Hogeschool Utrecht
September 13, 2012

Sample Materials & Chapters

Chapter One


For instructors

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