Everyday Life and Practice
How cultural theory takes the ordinary, routine and overlooked textures of daily life seriously as a site of meaning, power and creativity.
Definition
Everyday life is the taken-for-granted, recurrent and ordinary dimension of human existence; in cultural studies it is theorised as a domain in which power operates, meaning is made, and people exercise creativity through routine practices.
Scope
This area covers the study of everyday life as a distinct object of cultural analysis. It examines the major theorists of the everyday, the idea that ordinary people creatively make do within imposed systems, the rhythms and routines that structure daily existence, and the spatial dimension of everyday practice. It draws together strands of French social theory, British cultural studies and feminist thought to treat the ordinary as anything but trivial.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- Why and how did the everyday become an object of serious cultural theory?
- How do ordinary people creatively 'make do' within the structures that organise their lives?
- What roles do rhythm, routine and habit play in everyday experience?
- How is everyday life shaped by, and lived through, space and place?
Key concepts
- the everyday
- tactics and strategies
- making do
- alienation
- routine
- habit
- the ordinary
Key theories
- Tactics and strategies
- De Certeau distinguishes the 'strategies' of institutions that control space from the 'tactics' of ordinary people who creatively use, divert and make do with what those systems impose.
- Critique of everyday life
- Lefebvre argues that everyday life under capitalism is both colonised by commodification and bureaucracy and a potential site of disalienation, festival and transformation.
- The invention of the everyday
- Felski and Highmore trace how 'the everyday' became a theoretical category, cautioning that it is often gendered and that its meanings shift across the traditions that invoke it.
History
Theorising the everyday has roots in Surrealism, phenomenology and Western Marxism. Lefebvre's multi-volume Critique of Everyday Life (from 1947) treated the ordinary as a key terrain of alienation and possible liberation; de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (1980, English 1984) reframed consumption as creative tactical practice. From the 1990s, cultural theorists such as Felski and Highmore consolidated everyday-life studies as a field and interrogated its assumptions.
Debates
- Creativity versus colonisation
- Whether everyday life is primarily a space of creative agency, as de Certeau emphasises, or one increasingly colonised by commodification and administration, as Lefebvre warns.
Key figures
- Michel de Certeau
- Henri Lefebvre
- Ben Highmore
- Rita Felski
Related topics
Seminal works
- lefebvre1991
- decerteau1984
- highmore2002
Frequently asked questions
- Why would scholars study something as mundane as everyday life?
- Because the everyday is precisely where culture, power and meaning are lived out most pervasively but least noticed. Examining routines, habits and ordinary practices reveals how social order is reproduced and where people quietly exercise agency.