CFP Out of the Ordinary

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@ryerson.ca) or Diego Llovet (dllovet@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@yorku.ca