[URBANTH-L]CFP: Out of the Ordinary: Urban Humdrum, Everyday Stuff, Public Things (Toronto)

[Angela Jancius]

Out of the Ordinary: Urban Humdrum, Everyday Stuff, Public Things
Date: Febuary 28, 2007

Oblivious to grand theories, city dwellers go about their lives simply. They 
gamble and pray, drive and shop, work and rest: each routine taken for 
granted. Out of the ordinary emerges a study of urban culture. We are 
seeking Sociologies of Ordinary Culture that stop to consider humdrum habits 
as public acts, proposing that collective life is produced through everyday 
things that at first seem uninteresting. Done week-in-week-out: society is 
built upon the leisurely plod of the workaday. The collective rites of 
public life are, perhaps, precariously reliant on the mundane. Directly or 
indirectly, papers will rescue these routines from obscurity, transforming 
them instead into the tools city dwellers use to craft sense out of their 
milieu.

Papers may include but are not limited to the following topics:

- Driving and traffic
- Shopping and consumption
- Scanning, browsing, reading
- Fun and free time
- Cleaning, grooming, clothing
- Neighbors and strangers
- Watches, clocks and being on time
- Policing, inspecting, enforcing
- Maintenance and repair
- Garbage and recycling
- Lotteries and Prayers
- Coffee, Alcohol, and Cigarettes

Please submit your name, affiliation, paper title and a 300 word abstract to 
Paul Moore (psmoore at ryerson.ca) or Diego Llovet (dllovet at yorku.ca) by 
February 28th, 2007. Confirmations will be given by March 5th, 2007.

Panels are part of the annual meetings of the Canadian Sociological 
Association (CSA), in conjunction with the Congress for the Humanities and 
Social Sciences, in 2007 hosted by the University of Saskatchewan in 
Saskatoon. The conference will take place between May 29 and June 1, 2007.

Diego Llovet
Culture of Cities Project and
PhD Student
Department of Sociology
York University
Toronto, ON
M3J 1P3

Email: dllovet at yorku.ca