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The term “everyday” can be found in almost every qualitative sociological study done today, though its usage, meaning, and importance are often taken for granted. The everyday world has not always had such a prominent place, however. This paper examines the development of “the everyday” an as area of study through everyday life sociologies and cultural studies, using quilting to compare sociological usage to the development of the everyday as a topic in the arts in the 1960s. As a focal point for discussions of art hierarchies, as cultural resistance, and as a form of women's cultural production, quilting's role in everyday life illuminates the new way of seeing that everyday life sociologies developed.

My intellectual journey as a sociologist and a symbolic interactionist began when I was a 13-year-old eighth-grader in Catholic School on the working-class, southwest side of Chicago. My eighth-grade nun pulled me aside after school one day and gently told me that, now that I should think about what to be when I grow up. She suggested I study to be “either a sociologist or a priest.” After some serious thought, I eliminated the option of becoming a priest – yet, the word sociologist was intriguing. I had no idea what it really meant, but it had a certain ring to it in 1960, when society was becoming a viable and visible orientation in terms of major events we were learning a little bit about from the good nuns and television – like civil rights, the cold war, and the space race. I took her advice and set out on a 50-year journey to become a sociologist. The map of the journey has been elusive, though, in that what it means to be a sociologist – especially an interactionist sociologist – has changed over the years as events in my life and the social world have evolved. This journey has had three segments: sociology as something to do; sociology as something to know; and sociology as something to be. The journey has been profound as well as fun because, as I continue to discover what it means to be an interactionist sociologist, I discover who I am.

Many academic departments in the social sciences today are being called upon to justify the utility of their courses and tangibly demonstrate their contributions to the general college curriculum. Because it has traditionally lacked a clearly defined career path, has no consensual, conceptual core, and has few easily quantifiable pedagogical outcomes, sociology is particularly susceptible to such scrutiny. In this paper I outline several strategies and techniques sociology instructors can use to maximize the relevance of their courses and, by extension, the discipline.

A common charge against qualitative researchers in general and interactionist researchers in particular is that they produce descriptive, a-theoretical accounts of group life. We consider the problem of “analytic interruptus” in contemporary symbolic interactionism – that is, a failure to move beyond analyses of individual cases – and offer a potential to a solution via the pursuit of a generic social process (GSP) research agenda. A GSP approach involves developing, assessing, and revising concepts from the close scrutiny of empirical instances across diverse contexts. By considering criticisms of GSPs from feminist and postmodernist scholars, a more informed, qualified, and better-situated approach to the framework becomes possible. We argue that GSPs remain a quintessential analytical tool to explore subcultural realities and build formal theories of the social world.

This study used qualitative discourse analysis to explore how researchers use the concept of ingenuity to understand the everyday work of social entrepreneurs. Data were drawn from a sample of 69 research articles published across 41 academic journals between 1998 and 2018. The findings showed ingenuity to be an underdeveloped concept in the social entrepreneurship literature and revealed a paucity of research on the everyday work performed by social entrepreneurs. A framework for studying the work of social entrepreneurs at the “scale of the everyday” through the lens of ingenuity is proposed, and recommendations for future research are provided.

Focusing on everyday lives and relationships within the household, the purpose of this paper is to suggest that the quality of “home” is altered by the presence of animal companions. Conceptions of home as a haven have been critiqued on grounds of the elision of power relations, yet home has also been understood as a place of resistance to, and refuge from, an exploitative and exclusionary public world. Acknowledging differentiated relations of power and understanding homemaking as a process, this paper investigates the playing out of species relations within home space.

This paper draws on empirical material from a study of companion species in households and public spaces, deploying ethnographic material gained through extended observation and semi-structured and often mobile interviews with dog “owners” in urban and rural contexts in the UK.

Dogs transform domestic space through muddying human lives. This process is twofold. First, life in posthumanist households problematizes boundaries between humans and other creatures in terms of relationships, behaviour and use of space. Second, muddied living involves breaching and maintaining domestic order. Muddied living is characterised by tension, power and compromise. Homes are posthuman not just by including non-human animals, but through elements of dog agency in how home is made.

Little has been written of “home” within sociology, despite “home” capturing a range of social practice. Sociologists examining human–animal companion relations have not considered how relations play out in home space. This paper investigates home as a shared space of multispecies interaction, making the case for a posthuman sociology of home.

This chapter explores the unknown territory of a lost project: an ethnography of a public swimming pool. The discussion is contextualised within my broader sociological theory of ‘nothing’, as a category of unmarked, negative social phenomena, including no-things, no-bodies, no-wheres, non-events and non-identities. These meaningful symbolic objects are constituted through social interaction, which can take two forms: acts of commission and acts of omission. I tell the story of how this project did not happen, through the things I did not do or that did not materialise, and how I consequently did not become a certain type of researcher. I identify three types of negative phenomena that I did not observe and document – invisible figures, silent voices and empty vessels – and, consequently, the knowledge I did not acquire. However, nothing is also productive, generating new symbolic objects as substitutes, alternatives and replacements: the somethings, somebodies and somewheres that are done or made instead. Thus finally, I reflect on how not doing this project led me to pursue others, cultivating a different research identity that would not otherwise have existed.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the nature of everyday life as a context of information behaviour by examining how researchers have approached this issue. To this end, particular attention is directed to how they have characterized everyday life as a constellation of work-related and non-work constituents.

Evolutionary concept analysis was conducted by focussing on 40 studies on the topic. It is examined how the conceptualizations of everyday life and the relationships between work-related and non-work constituents have been evolved since the 1990s. The analysis is based on the comparison of the similarities and differences between the characterizations of the above constituents.

Early conceptualizations of everyday life as a context of information behaviour were largely based on Savolainen's model for everyday life information seeking. Later studies have proposed a more holistic approach to everyday life in times when the boundaries between work-related and free-time activities have become blurred, due to the growing use of networked information technologies and telecommuting. Since the late 1990s, the understanding about the nature of everyday life as a context of information behaviour has become more nuanced; thanks to a more detailed identification of the overlaps of work-related and non-work constituents.

As the study is based on a sample of studies examining the relationships of work-related and non-work constituents, the findings cannot be generalized to concern the contextual nature of everyday life as a whole.

The study pioneers by offering an in-depth analysis of the nature of everyday life as a context of information behaviour.

Reflecting on the contingencies and felicitous moments of life and career, a senior scholar celebrates the intellectual community and friends that inspired and sustained his efforts.