processes and practices, one whose proven-
ance lies betweenstructuralismandphe-
nomenology, and one that raises lived
experience to the level of a critical concept
(Kaplan and Ross, 1987). The subject crosses
disciplinary boundaries and indeed brings
them into question, as suggested by references
to an emerging ‘everyday life studies’
(Highmore, 2002). It has also found promin-
ence in recent arts and cultural practice.
Important for understanding the spaces and
places of everyday life have been theorists such
as Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau and
Lefebvre, whose belated translation into
English has been a significant spur to
Anglophone scholarship. But geographical
interest in the subject is long-standing, and
other significant approaches in recent decades
are associated with humanistic geography
andfeminist geography.
Recovering everyday geographical experi-
ences against their erasure within spatial
science concerned many humanistic geog-
raphers who, influenced by phenomenology
and writings by Edmund Husserl and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, turned attention to
thelifeworldand to emotional and subject-
ive encounters with and attachments to places,
often privileging notions of home. In the
process, they stressed theworkinvolved in
interpreting geographies of the everyday,
including the need for self-reflexivity. But
while humanistic geographers debated the
necessity for philosophical rigour, with some
preferring a looser constitutive phenomen-
ology derived from Alfred Schutz to concen-
trate on how the lifeworlds of ordinary social
groups are intersubjectively constituted in par-
ticular places, and with others distancing
themselves fromtheoryto embrace ‘experi-
ence’ as such, feminists and Marxists criticized
their neglect of thepowerrelations that struc-
ture everyday experiences ofplaces, including
within the home, and hence their inability to
advance deeper critiques of exploitation and
oppression. It is with that in mind that many
feminist geographers have focused on ordinary
activities and repetitive social interactions, con-
sidering how they are bound into structures that
discriminate against women and reinforce gen-
der hierarchies (cf.structuration theory).
According to Susan Hanson (1992), finding
significance in the everyday is a core analytic
tradition shared byfeminismand geography.
She shows how this focus can undermine the
common opposition between home and work,
for example, by demonstrating their inter-
connections at the level of everyday lives
and practices with important implications for
understanding locallabour marketsand gen-
der divisions of work in both. To bring daily
activities into focus, many feminists have
employedtime-geography, which was devel-
oped by Torsten Ha ̈gerstrand and colleagues
at the University of Lund during the 1960s
and 1970s, in a context in which ideas about
everyday life had been central to Swedish wel-
fare and urban planning. Plotting women’s
daily space–time paths enabled insights into
the role ofgenderrelations in the temporal
and spatial structuring of social action, and
hence into ‘the reproduction ofpatriarchy
in the banal activities of everyday life’ (Rose,
1993, p. 25). Gillian Rose nevertheless criti-
cizes time-geography’s universal depiction of
space and its claim to exhaustiveness, which
she depicts asmasculinist, along with its
inability to address differential embodiment,
emotion and passion. Her concerns relate to
those frequently raised more generally about
the appropriateness or otherwise of different
ways of apprehending the everyday, the actual-
ity of which always exceeds attempts at capture.
Feminist interest in the geographies of the
everyday is also often connected with debates
aboutsocial reproduction,whichforCindi
Katz (2004, p. x) is ‘as much the fleshy, messy,
and indeterminate stuff of everyday life as it is a
set ofstructured practices that unfold india-
lecticalrelation to production, with which it
is mutually constitutive and in tension’. Yet she
insists that social reproduction must be under-
stood as a critical practice marked by the refusal
to see the process as inevitable or natural, and
by attentiveness to resilience as well as to pos-
sibilities of reworking, resistance and even revo-
lution. In that sense, Katz likens it to Lefebvre’s
influential double-sided concept of everyday
life, which he developed over many decades
and which is central to his writings onurban-
ismand theproduction of space. On the one
hand, Lefebvre used the terms ‘the everyday’
and ‘everydayness’ critically as referring to the
entry of daily life intomodernity,ashedevel-
oped Marx’s account ofalienationto address
how everyday life has been colonized by the
commodityand thestatethrough the impos-
ition of an abstract space. But he also sought
redemptive possibilities within the everyday,
arguing that it harbours traces of more authen-
tic living as well as the potential for radical
change and for the production of other differ-
ential spaces. It is therefore a key terrain of
struggle.
Challenges to characterizations of everyday
life as self-evident, immutable and universalGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_E Final Proof page 224 1.4.2009 3:17pmEVERYDAY LIFE