Everyday life. Everyday people. Most of us say "everyday" almost every day. Academically, it is a term that has been theorized, used as a concept and developed into narratives. But what does it really mean?
The Everyday: Experiences, Concepts, Narratives is an upcoming Graduate Program in Humanities conference looking at the "everyday" as it relates to politics and ethics, power and knowledge, ontology and history.
Keynote speakers Professor Miles Ogborn (left) of the School of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London, and York film Professor Caitlin Fisher, Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture and director of the Augmented Reality Lab in the Faculty of Fine Arts, will delve into the everyday further.
The conference will take place April 14 to 16 on York’s Keele campus. Click here for the conference program and venues.
Ogborn, who won the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2001 for his outstanding contribution to the discipline of geography, studies the "everyday" from a global and local perspective within the context of cultural geography and cultural history.
He will be talking about how spaces become "everyday" and what that means for how the world works. Drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau, among others, and on a range of historical material from diverse geographical settings from 17th-century Madras to 18th-century London and Jamaica, Ogborn will explore the making and unmaking of everyday geographies of walking, writing and talking. He will argue that the everyday has to be actively made through its geographies and that the process of that making has to be forgotten or obscured. The historical geographies of the production of everyday spaces, however, mean they can always be unmade.
Ogborn’s most recent books include Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Right: Caitlin Fisher
Fisher is working to construct and theorize spatial narrative environments and build expressive software tools for artists. Her current research interests include digital archiving, lifelogging, data visualization and experimental game structures for storytelling. She is an international award-winning digital storyteller.
In addition to the keynote speeches, there will be several panel discussions with graduate students from across North America and the United Kingdom presenting their research on the issue of the "everyday", visual artists Faye Mullen and Nathan Cyprys will unveil their work and poet Arun Nedra Rodrigo will perform.
The conference is organized by two York graduate students, Justin Derry and Martin Parrot, and funded by the Faculty of Graduate Studies, the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, the Department of Humanities, the Humanities Graduate Student Association, the Graduate Student Association and the York and Ryerson Joint Graduate Program in Communication & Culture.
For more information, visit The Everyday: Experiences, Concepts, Narratives conference website.
Republished courtesy of YFile– York University’s daily e-bulletin.