Tinkering with Method as We Go

This chapter presents the qualitative method we developed to document a phenomenon that we have called ‘working out loud’ (WOL) on social media. Working out loud is a mundane practice where workers of all kinds communicate something about their daily experience of doing their work and being at work. This character makes WOL simultaneously widespread and difficult to grasp and, with little prior knowledge of people’s sharing behaviour, our investigation started in a very open fashion. Because only the general contours of the practice labelled ‘working out loud’ were known, our methodological approach had to be devised and regularly adjusted in order to explore the phenomenon. The chapter discusses the approach that we elaborated as the collection of digital traces necessary to flesh out the concept of WOL progressed. This also makes visible the backstage work involved in data collection and analysis.

Translating philosophical aesthetics: Peritext as a win­dow into the translator's mind. Part 2

Providing space for elucidating key translational issues is not a mundane practice but a privilege only hand-picked texts enjoy, philosophical writings among them. The challenge of translating philosophical discourse is widely recognized but scarcely explored. In this article, translation of philosophical texts is regarded as a procedure of knowledge transfer from one intellectual space into another and of knowledge-making through reconceptualization of key terms. This process is made partly observable in various types of notes — a special cluster of additional information known as translational peritext where translators are given an oppor­tunity to explicate their decisions made in the course of translation. Among translation hur­dles in philosophical discourse are technical terms which are often either in­vented or re-conceptualized by the scholar and then need to be re-contextualized by the trans­lator. Seeking to reflect on translation as a heuristic process, this paper will focus on the reso­lution of the potential cognitive dissonance and the translator’s justification of sense-oriented strategies in dealing with such key concepts as ‘connoisseur’, ‘grace’, ‘sublime’, and ‘je ne sçai quoi’ in the translation of the seminal work on the philosophy of aesthetics Analysis of Beauty by the celebrated 18th century English artist William Hogarth.

Digital housekeeping: Living with data

The availability and affordability of memory and other services formats to store digital material has proliferated over the past 15 years. Making, sharing and storing digital material is now a mundane practice that is part of a broader ecology of living with different kinds of data. This article examines routines of managing networked technologies in the home: digital housekeeping through three core practices of sharing and storing everyday data. The first, what we will call tidying, involves the everyday routines of cleaning up the mess of data through practices such as syncing material ‘in the cloud’, creating inboxes and manually moving digital data such as pictures and videos to ‘folders’. The second set of practices comprises more periodic, but deeper forms of sorting, spring cleaning. During digital spring cleaning, the focus is upon decluttering digital data by disposing, editing and other forms of curation whereby digital materials can be ‘located’ when desired in the future. The final set of practices, moving house, consists of the shift or relocation of digital data from one device or service to another. Depending upon the age and functioning of the device or service, this often involves changes in format to render digital data useful into the future, the realisation of lost data, as well as an additional assessment of the value of moving such digital material. Through fine-grained attention to the ways in which households live with digital materials, this article considers the engagement with and consequence of everyday data in our lives.

Full Lives

After a preliminary discussion on how and where opinion, resilience and/or resistance against a nuclear power plant might emerge, Chapter 5 profiles three people—Josef, Savitri and Rajesh—from different walks of life who navigate competing challenges in their lives. It will be made evident that perceptions of risk were the main catalysts in altering the calculus of criticality, and that these risks need be viewed through a socially embedded lens rather than through a focus on the nuclear power plant alone or an abstracted theory of modernity. Nuclear risks did not emanate from the solar plexus of the reactor alone, but in a circuitous fashion, were rerouted through mundane practice—revisited in terms of changes and challenges to peoples’ health, diets, homes, livelihoods, the expense of living, the future of their children, marriage prospects, and worldviews. Significantly, a focus on their lives demonstrates how resistance was fermenting indigenously and not at the behest of outsiders such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and foreign funders or agencies as state officials were wont to say.

The new discomforts of precarious workers: Wardrobe matter, insecurity and the temporality of calibration in dress work

This article provides a study of precarisation through the lens of dress work: the mundane practice of dressing the body for work. Based on intimate in-depth wardrobe interviews and analyses of workers’ narratives about their dressing practices, we develop a perspective on what insecure work feels like for workers in the interactive services and creative industries. We understand dress work as a materially mediated practice in which workers often aim to achieve a level of comfort: a state in which they are allowed to become less reflexive about their bodies. One of the ways in which precarisation makes itself known, we contend, is through the temporal logic of the interruption. The temporality of zero-hours contracts and short-term, insecure labour interrupts the achievement of comfort as workers are not allowed the time to experience their work, colleagues and spaces. The discomfort and sometimes pain of insecurity of post-Fordist labour is thus felt on the body.

Elements of practice in the analysis of auto-ethnographical cooking videos

This article analyses cooking videos recorded at home by means of the practice-theoretical approach. It employs two conceptualisations of the elements of practice that have stood out in recent applications of practice theories in sociological consumption and food studies. The first conceptualisation comprises understandings, procedures and engagements and the second materials, competences and meanings. To study cooking as a situationally performed mundane practice, auto-ethnographical videos of cooking were filmed using the first author’s family. To analyse the practice of cooking as a composition of doings and sayings, the videos were coded with a video analysis program, Interact, into visual charts, and the discussions related to cooking performances were transcribed. The analysis suggests that the cooking practice involves interplay among the elements of the two conceptualisations: procedures join materials with competences, engagements link competences with meanings and understandings connect meanings with materials. This is visualised as a triangle in which understandings, procedures and engagements represent the sides of the triangle between the apexes of materials, competences and meanings. By combining an auto-ethnographical perspective with a video method and by analysing the practice of cooking as a situational and embodied performance, the study contributes to the current understanding of the elements of practice and introduces a novel empirical application of practice theory.

Institutionalizing Inequality: Calculative Practices and Regimes of Inequality in International Development

This paper focuses on the institutionalization of inequality in relations between donors and NGOs in the international development sector. We argue that these relations operate within a neoliberal and competitive marketplace, which are necessarily unequal. Specifically, we focus on the apparently mundane practice of impact assessment, and consider how this is fundamental to understanding the performative enactment of institutional inequality. For our analysis we draw upon Miller and Rose’s work on governmentality and calculative practices. We develop our argument with reference to a case study of a donor driven impact assessment initiative being conducted in India. Specifically, we consider an impact assessment initiative that the donor has piloted with one of the NGOs they fund that seeks to improve the livelihoods of Indian farmers. We will argue that institutional inequality can be understood in the way the market as a social institution becomes enacted into mundane calculative practices. Calculative practices produce different kinds of knowledge and in so doing becomes a way in which subjects position themselves, or become positioned, as unequal.

Toiveikkaan talvimielen mainosretoriikka

The Marketing Rhetoric of Hopeful Winter Spirit. Persuasive Power and Appeal to Senses in the Imagery of Veikko Huovinen’s Hamsterit This article offers a rhetorical reading of Veikko Huovinen’s Hamsterit (”The Hamsters”, 1957). I view the protagonist Hamsteri as a persuasive orator, whose eloquent speeches enhance the mundane practice of gathering winter storage with his literature-influenced aesthetics of survival in the arctic wild. While I focus my analysis on Hamsteri’s speeches, I also consider how authorial designs, the narrator, and other characters echo and complement each other and participate in Hamsteri’s rhetorical and aesthetic effort in a way that creates a poetics of unanimity into the novel, thus powerfully inviting also the reader to join the unanimity. I see similarities between Hamsteri’s rhetoric and TV commercials. is similarity is based on Hamsteri’s vivid imagery, which appeals to all the five senses in order to attach positive associations to the food and clothing that he persuades his friend Rurik to buy, when they prepare for the winter. A recurring device in Hamsteri’s speeches is the speculative description, which grows from vivid imagery and embeds micro stories into the main narrative, while also giving full freedom for his comically imaginative speculations. In surveying the comic aspects of Hamsteri’s speculative descriptions, I combine narratological and stylistic analysis by employing both the audience concepts of rhetorical narratology and the classical rhetorical figures as my conceptual tools.