Situating Everyday Life: Practices and Places - Softcover

Pink, Sarah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0857020579 ISBN 13: 9780857020574

Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2012

Synopsis

The study of everyday life is fundamental to our understanding of modern society. This 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. Sarah Pink focuses on the sensory, embodied, mobile, and mediated elements of practice and place as a route to understanding wider issues. By doing so, she convincingly outlines a robust theoretical and methodological approach to understanding contemporary everyday life and activism.

About this title

About the Author

Sarah Pink is Professor of Design and Media Ethnography at RMIT University in Australia, and Professor in Applied Social and Cultural Analysis at Halmstad University in Sweden. She is a global leader in sensory and visual ethnography. Her work is usually interdisciplinary and international, connecting anthropological ethnography to design and engineering disciplines as well as to documentary and arts practice, in projects that challenge conventional ethnographic temporalities, and bring academic scholarship to applied research problems. Sarah’s other recent books include Doing Visual Ethnography (3rd edition) (2013), Situating Everyday Life (2012) and Advances in Visual Methodology (2012).  

Review

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.

Author: Eric Laurier Published On: 2014-02-04

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).

Author: Michael Bull, Published On: 2014-02-04

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.

Author: David Evans Published On: 2014-02-04

About this edition

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0857020579
• ISBN 13: 9780857020574
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176