Explore the vast range of titles available.

Everyday life is a central element for understanding the (sub)urban. Broader forces shape the (sub)urban and manifest in both its geographical structures and everyday life. These forces also shape globalized and complex urban contexts. Recent debates have addressed the question of which research designs best decipher this interplay. We argue that the struggles of everyday life could be a fruitful starting point for (sub)urban studies. Our research on socio-spatial changes in suburbia shows that these struggles emerge in a multidimensional field of tension. The concept of struggles of everyday life simultaneously acknowledges the relevance of the everyday and the impact of structural forces. We demonstrate this with our research design, the essential elements of which are literature work, narrative-episodic interviews, expert interviews, vignettes, and a hermeneutic, iterative research process. Conceptually, our research is based on the epistemological framework of planetary urbanization and Henri Lefebvre’s perspective on everyday life. We outline which conceptual and methodical approaches are useful for deciphering the interweaving of everyday life and structural forces, through the example of a suburb of the City of Cologne, Germany. Thereby, we provide remarks on recent questions of comparative urbanism in conceptual and methodological terms.

This book explores the moral lives of mental health clinicians serving the most marginalized individuals in the US healthcare system. Drawing on years of fieldwork in a community psychiatry outreach team, Brodwin traces the ethical dilemmas and everyday struggles of front line providers. On the street, in staff room debates, or in private confessions, these psychiatrists and social workers confront ongoing challenges to their self-image as competent and compassionate advocates. At times they openly question the coercion and forced-dependency built into the current system of care. At other times they justify their use of extreme power in the face of loud opposition from clients. This in-depth study exposes the fault lines in today's community psychiatry. It shows how people working deep inside the system struggle to maintain their ideals and manage a chronic sense of futility. Their commentaries about the obligatory and the forbidden also suggest ways to bridge formal bioethics and the realities of mental health practice. The experiences of these clinicians pose a single overarching question: how should we bear responsibility for the most vulnerable among us?

A governmentality ethnographic approach is adopted to examine the everyday making of school in Buenos Aires slums. By addressing events at the intersection of the life of school and of the neighborhood, in this article we problematize schooling - how it is put together and the tensions that beset it on a daily basis. The notion of the self-made school is proposed as a way to delve into how management society calls on the population to manage itself. We identify micro-procedures that take the shape of silent struggles to turn the school/neighborhood into a place to live. As a hypothesis, we propose that school is produced at the intersection of everyday struggles and the struggle for the everyday in the context of the precarization of life in the age of management. From a methodological standpoint what are at play are not dichotomies, but rather the stickiness and tension of daily practices.

The following article focuses on the everyday struggles of precarious workers in Auckland, New Zealand. As an excerpt from an ethnography on lived precarity in Auckland City, it reveals structural constraints that precarious workers face daily. This includes insecure work, poverty, precarious housing and, consequently, living in a constant state of anxiety, stress and destroyed work-life balance. Structural constraints of precarious work create a state of precarity that goes beyond labour relations, revealing creation, reproduction and normalisation of precarity as a mode of domination and social control. In a short historical context, the article emphasises the existence of the Māori precariat and precarity among migrant workers that precedes neoliberal precarisation of labour and its imposition of precarity to broader segments of New Zealand society. Empirically, the article focuses on testimonies of precarious workers in Auckland, emphasising particular dimensions of precarious work and precarity.

On the basis of an ethnography of a group of boxers, this article questions pugilism as an experience of confrontation with the other, the reasons and effects of which lie beyond the ring. Using the boxers’ words to explain their everyday struggles, this article seeks to describe fighting figures by placing them in the full depth of their biographical paths. These boxers share the experience of immigration and their life stories have all been marked by profound feelings of strangeness, understood as a social disqualification of otherness that causes deep and private wounds. Like the shadow of the other, hanging over the ‘conversations of gestures’, the boxers’ wounds and the violence of their biographical paths can help explain how they experience their fights, through the idea of a bodily response to all the hardships they have endured, well beyond the ring and its rounds.

This article deals with everyday work experiences in the two sectors of social and editorial work. It stems from two processes of co-research, involving a group of eleven editorial workers and journalists in Milan in 2011, and another group of 19 social workers in Turin in 2012. In both cases, co-research was understood as a tool by which to learn about conflicts and contradictions in everyday work, analyse one's own coping practices, understand the reasons for the absence of collective conflict capacities, and increase mobilisation. Both social and editorial work are traditionally associated with high work-force involvement, strong levels of identification with one's work, and intrinsic motivations related to personal interaction with the recipients of social services or the creative act of producing texts. This article explores how processes of precarisation affect such cognitive and emotional labour, and vice versa. This is done in two steps. First, current changes in work organisation and labour control are described, and a comparison is drawn between the sectors of editorial and social work. Second, workers' daily experiences with management's control strategies are analysed. Emerging areas of conflict and workers' daily coping practices are identified. The focus is on how professional identities are impacted by experiences of precarisation and by the losses in autonomy and work quality that result from changing patterns of work organisation. Two questions are raised. First, how does the evident destabilisation of professional identities affect workplace consent and workers' readiness to engage in emotional, creative, and/or social labour? Second, what are the consequences for workers' involvement in collective action, their conflict capacities, and strategies? Key words: precarisation, professional identities, everyday experiences, coping practices, labour struggles

This article investigates the interconnections between migration to Europe for asylum and the multiple ‘crises’ of the border regime that have occurred in recent decades. Drawing on 22 months of ethnographic research with refugees in Italy and Germany, the article highlights the tensions between migration policy and legislation at the structural level and the agency of refugees. The case study focuses on a protest staged by refugees in Berlin and the active involvement of its civil-society supporters. The everyday practices of refugees, including building relationships with local residents, cross-border mobility within Europe and ‘inhabiting’ the grey zones where different national jurisdictions intersect, generate frictions that open up spaces of autonomy: the ‘interstices’. Territorial, social and judicial interstices develop out of the power relations in Europe’s migration ‘battleground’.

The ambition of this paper is to say that if “cultural science” accepts the need to rethink culture along scientific rather than just critical lines, then at the same time physics must rethink its own commitment to “culture-free” methodology. That has only yielded what we might call “meaningless universe theory,” without addressing ways that physics as a discourse is strongly marked by culture, with the usual signs of gender, race, and hegemony present in its methods. It needs to take responsibility for applications of its discoveries that enter the cultural sphere only to threaten its total annihilation. An alternative to meaninglessness might be to take more seriously the marginalized and derided cultures of everyday thinking, as is attempted by Bogna Konior, and for physics-as-a-discipline to join the effort to reform science. If self-criticism is good for the cultural goose, then it’s good for the scientific gander; and a “cultural science” should say so. Since physics is the most scientific and least cultural of the sciences, this paper uses it as a limit case of knowledge realism. I argue that a science of culture requires reform of the ideology and applications of science as well as new models of culture.

Moral Laboratoriesis an engaging ethnography and a groundbreaking foray into the anthropology of morality. It takes us on a journey into the lives of African American families caring for children with serious chronic medical conditions, and it foregrounds the uncertainty that affects their struggles for a good life. Challenging depictions of moral transformation as possible only in moments of breakdown or in radical breaches from the ordinary, it offers a compelling portrait of the transformative powers embedded in day-to-day existence. From soccer fields to dinner tables, the everyday emerges as a moral laboratory for reshaping moral life. Cheryl Mattingly offers vivid and heart-wrenching stories to elaborate a first-person ethical framework, forcefully showing the limits of third-person renderings of morality.

Once celebrated as a model development for its progressive social indicators, the southern Indian state of Kerala has earned the new distinction as the nation's suicide capital, with suicide rates soaring to triple the national average since 1990. Rather than an aberration on the path to development and modernity, Keralites understand this crisis to be the bitter fruit borne of these historical struggles and the aspirational dilemmas they have produced in everyday life. Suicide, therefore, offers a powerful lens onto the experiential and affective dimensions of development and global change in the postcolonial world. In the long shadow of fear and uncertainty that suicide casts in Kerala, living acquires new meaning and contours. In this powerful ethnography, Jocelyn Chua draws on years of fieldwork to broaden the field of vision beyond suicide as the termination of life, considering how suicide generates new ways of living in these anxious times.