Encountering the Everyday: An Introduction to the Sociologies of Everyday Life

Everyday life is something we tend to take for granted, something that just is, something unnoticed. However, everyday life is an important, perhaps the most important, dimension of society - it is where we live most parts of our lives with others. In order to understand society, we therefore, as sociologists, need to take everyday life seriously. This is the objective of this book.

Encountering the Everyday: An Introduction to the Sociologies of the Unnoticed provides the first comprehensive and updated globally applicable introduction to everyday life sociology for many years. The contributors present the theoretical, conceptual and methodological groundwork, historical developments and distinct perspectives of a variety of everyday life traditions and relate these to and exemplify them through actual empirical research.

Encountering the Everyday contains introductions to ‘classical' everyday life traditions such as Chicago sociology, phenomenology, American pragmatism, symbolic interactionism, existentialism and critical everyday life sociologies, but also to the later developments by Erving Goffman, French everyday life thinkers, the ethnomethodologists, conversation analysts and the absurdists. Finally, a section deals with the most recent approaches such as the specifically Scandinavian everyday life perspectives, the sociology of emotions, social semiotics, cultural studies and postmodern interpretive interactionism. The chapters all accessibly introduce the reader to the ‘core' of these traditions and perspectives and provide an entry-point for students and scholars alike into the world of the everyday.

The book is edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen, PhD, Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has previously published books on everyday life sociology and especially in connection to empirical investigations of deviance and death and dying.