Walking with: understandings and negotiations of the mundane in research

Abstract

Disruptions, and indeed spectacular disruptions, are understood and experienced by people in many different ways. They serve to both highlight and embed deep-rooted inequalities, changing experiences of the everyday and even challenging the very right to have an everyday. In this joint article we critically engage with conceptualisations of the mundane, exploring how people negotiate everyday life in contexts of unprecedented change. We take up Georges Perec’s call to take account of the everyday, focusing on examples from two ethnographically informed projects, both of which engage with creative practice. The first is long-term research in forced migration settings in North-Western Finland, which explores how people negotiate and re-negotiate linguistic citizenship and everyday life, in a policy context which restricts and limits. The second is a community arts and wellbeing project in the North of England, which investigated creative approaches to re-emergence from the Covid19 pandemic among people who had been particularly affected by isolation, including new mothers. In both projects, our data are drawn from fieldnotes from observations, reflections from our own participation, interviews and creative artefacts made by participants. In our analysis and discussion, we foreground ephemeral everyday moments and how individuals aim to hold up the mundane in the middle of major, internal and international crises. We consider how the ‘right to an everyday’ is central to understandings of being human, and draw on these experiences to show how ethnographic research, with particular emphasis on language(s) and creative practice, can shed light on lived experiences of the mundane and unequal experiences of and rights to the everyday.