The Geography of the Everyday

Toward an Understanding of the Given

Title Details

Pages: 216

Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 05/01/2020

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5167-4

List Price: $28.95

Hardcover

Pub Date: 12/15/2017

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5168-1

List Price: $62.95

eBook

Pub Date: 12/15/2017

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5166-7

List Price: $62.95

The Geography of the Everyday

Toward an Understanding of the Given

Looking at everyday values, customs, and habits through the lens of geography

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  • Description
  • Reviews

Anthropologists, psychologists, feminists, and sociologists have long studied the “everyday,” the quotidian, the taken-for-granted; however, geographers have lagged behind in engaging with this slippery aspect of reality. Now, Rob Sullivan makes the case for geography as a powerful conceptual framework for seeing the everyday anew and for pushing back against its “givenness”: its capacity to so fade into the background that it controls us in dangerously unexamined ways. Drawing on a number of theorists (Foucault, Goffman, Marx, Lefebvre, Hägerstrand, and others), Sullivan unpacks the concepts and perceived realities that structure everyday life while grounding them in real-world cases, such as Nigeria’s troubled oil network, the working poor in the United States, China’s urban villages, and ultra-high-end housing in London and Cairo.

In examining the everyday from a geographical perspective, Sullivan ranges widely across time, space, history, geography, Marxian reproduction, the body, and the geographical mind. The everyday, Sullivan suggests, is where change occurs and where resistance to change can begin. By locating the everyday through geography, we can help to make change possible. Whatever the issue, be it struggles over race, LGBT rights, class inequality, or global warming, the transformations required to achieve social justice all begin with transformation of the everyday order.

Rather than offering such a totalizing theory, this imperious work primes new debates on the everyday by pairing theories and scholars who have rarely been combined. The work should therefore be read by scholars of critical theory, sensory studies, and geography.

—Andrew Kettler, H-Net

About the Author/Editor

ROB SULLIVAN is a former lecturer in geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of Street Level: Los Angeles in the Twenty-First Century and Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography.