Course Code: SOCI 2005
Academic Year: 2024-2025
Our everyday leaves are taken up with a myriad of practical accomplishments, and we routinely carry out activities and conversations and patterns often without thinking about how the world is constituted and negotiated in such work. Sociology of the everyday topicalizes the ways in which we as social actors animate the work and establish its order and sensibility through our ongoing practices, while simultaneously acting as if the world is something outside and external to us. It makes a distinction between our orientation as everyday actors, who are caught up in successfully accomplishing and achieving what we need to do in the course of a day and our orientation as social inquirers, who are interested in understanding the accomplishment of the world in and through what we routinely do and say. The readings and examples developed in this course will make vivid how we stand as both the everyday person who is immersed in the 'natural attitude' of daily life and the social inquirer who seeks to raise the question of what in such practices and talk is taken-for-granted. In this difference and tension, the 'seen but unnoticed' qualities and characteristics of everyday life can be brought into view, allowing us not only to orient to what actually occurs in our practices of living, but to what also could be. Sociology can then serve as an imaginative aid, inviting us to temporarily bracket our commonsense orientations in the interest of reflective understanding.