This volume examines the ways that sociological understanding can help with daily experiences, highlighting how everyday life can affect research agendas, and vice versa. The essays are organized around the notion of space - public spaces, family spaces, interior spaces, and workplaces.
This book is a ′survival guide′ for students and researchers who would like to conduct a qualitative study with limited resources. Brinkmann shows how everyday life materials such as books, television, the internet, the media and everyday conversations and interactions can help us to understand larger social issues. As living human beings in cultural worlds, we are constantly surrounded by ′data′ that call for analysis, and as we cope with the different situations and episodes of our lives, we are engaged in understanding and interpreting the world as a form of qualitative inquiry. The book helps its reader develop a disciplined and analytic awareness informed by theory, and shows how less can be more in qualitative research. Each chapter introduces theoretical tools to think with, and demonstrates how they can be put to use in working concretely with everyday life materials.
This book provides a contemporary and comprehensive examination of cancer in everyday life, drawing on qualitative research with people living with cancer, their family members and health professionals. It explores the evolving and enduring affects of cancer for individuals, families and communities, with attention to the changing dynamics of survivorship, including social relations around waiting, uncertainty, hope, wilfulness, obligation, responsibility and healing. Challenging simplistic deployments of survivorship and drawing on contemporary and classical social theory, it critically examines survivorship through innovative qualitative methodologies including interviews, focus groups, participant produced photos and solicited diaries. In assembling this panoramic view of cancer in the twenty-first century, it also enlivens core debates in sociology, including questions around individual agency, subjectivity, temporality, normativity, resistance, affect and embodiment. A thoughtful account of cancer embedded in the undulations of the everyday, narrated by its subjects and those who informally and formally care for them, Survivorship: A Sociology of Cancer in Everyday Life outlines new ways of thinking about survivorship for sociologists, health and medical researchers and those working in cancer care settings.
Qualitative Research in Sociology offers a hands-on guide to doing qualitative research in sociology. It provides an introductory survey of the methodological and theoretical dimensions of qualitative research as practiced by those interested in the study of social life. Through a detailed yet concise explanation, the reader is shown how these methods work and how their outcomes may be interpreted. Practically focused throughout, the book also offers constructive advice for students analyzing and writing their research projects. The book has a flowing narrative and student-friendly structure which makes it accessible to and popular with students. It will be an invaluable resource for students and researchers, helping them to undertake effective qualitative research in both sociology and courses in social research across the social sciences.
In Popular Culture and Everyday Life Phillip Vannini and Dennis Waskul have brought together a variety of short essays that illustrate the many ways that popular culture intersects with mundane experiences of everyday life. Most essays are written in a reflexive ethnographic style, primarily through observation and personal narrative, to convey insights at an intimate level that will resonate with most readers. Some of the topics are so mundane they are legitimately universal (sleeping, getting dressed, going to the bathroom, etc.), others are common enough that most readers will directly identify in some way (watching television, using mobile phones, playing video games, etc.), while some topics will appeal more-or-less depending on a reader’s gender, interests, and recreational pastimes (putting on makeup, watching the Super Bowl, homemaking, etc.). This book will remind readers of their own similar experiences, provide opportunities to reflect upon them in new ways, as well as compare and contrast how experiences relayed in these pages relate to lived experiences. The essays will easily translate into rich and lively classroom discussions that shed new light on a familiar, taken-for-granted everyday life—both individually and collectively. At the beginning of the book, the authors have provided a grid that shows the topics and themes that each article touches on. This book is for popular culture classes, and will also be an asset in courses on the sociology of everyday life, ethnography, and social psychology.
In Personal Sociology: Finding Meanings in Everyday Life, Jeffrey E. Nash transforms everyday experiences into sociological insights and understandings. This book has three parts. Part One illustrates the intersection of meanings in selected settings from the author’s own life such as barbershop quartet singing, wrestling, and how a medical procedure changed his identity. Part Two deals with humor and its intersection with social identities. An analysis of two television sitcoms separated by thirty years reveals how racial identity reflects larger changes in society. Using an indirect approach to teaching sociology to a group of elderly learners, the intersections of gender, race, class, and age are explored and explained through sociological concepts and theories. Part Three explores embedded meanings in local social contexts involving social beliefs and activism. The book concludes by engaging in public sociology through editorial opinion writing.
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.
This book is a ′survival guide′ for students and researchers who would like to conduct a qualitative study with limited resources. Brinkmann shows how everyday life materials such as books, television, the internet, the media and everyday conversations and interactions can help us to understand larger social issues. As living human beings in cultural worlds, we are constantly surrounded by ′data′ that call for analysis, and as we cope with the different situations and episodes of our lives, we are engaged in understanding and interpreting the world as a form of qualitative inquiry. The book helps its reader develop a disciplined and analytic awareness informed by theory, and shows how less can be more in qualitative research. Each chapter introduces theoretical tools to think with, and demonstrates how they can be put to use in working concretely with everyday life materials.
Efforts to reconstruct the reality of a social scene have evolved numerous theoretical and methodological strategies. Qualitative sociology fills the gap in existing literature by providing a comprehensive and detailed treatment of the broad range of non-quantitative methods currently being used in sociological research, with the conceptual rationales for each method. Recognizing the need for a clear, concise discussion of both the theoretical and practical aspects of "reality reconstruction" and "formal sociology," Drs. Schwartz and Jacobs draw on the theories and strategies of Weber, Mead, Blumer, Glaser, Straus, Simmel, Goffman, Schutz, Garfinkel, and Cicourel, among others, to justify, explain, and illustrate: field studies participant observation (ethnography) interviewing life histories and personal accounts the analysis of unobtrusive measures audio-visual techniques methods of studying and subjectivity phenomenology and more Thus, the authors not only describe the various theories and methods, but they add to the reader's understanding by providing insight into who has used the methods and why, and by evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each method. They also supplement the text throughout with a collection of case studies which illustrate the kind of substantive work qualitative research can produce. No other available text covers as many methods as are described in Qualitative Sociology. All the methods are examined in an informal, conversational style, making the discussion accessible to the student with no previous knowledge of qualitative theories and practices.
A Yale sociology professor discusses how everyday people meet the demands of urban living through islands of civility he calls "cosmopolitan canopies" and describes how activities carried out under this canopy can ease racial tensions and promote harmony.