Toward a Psychology of Everyday Living

INTRODUCTION

Charlotte Højholt and Ernst Schraube

This book is about the psychological study of the conduct of everyday life in contemporary society. Presenting a body of critical and interdisciplinary work, it takes psychological theory and research practice out of the laboratory and into the real world. With its focus on the question of how human beings as active sensuous subjects live their everyday lives, it explores the conduct of life as a basis for understanding the dilemmas and contradictions we are confronted with in our daily lives.

From the earliest days of its formation as an independent discipline, psychology has been concerned with human experience, activity and self-reflection, but the question of how to conduct one's life has not received much attention. The growing awareness of this discrepancy over recent years has turned discussions within psychology toward the practice of everyday living and the concept of conduct of everyday life is getting incorporated into psychological theory and research practice.

The importance of the conduct of everyday life for psychology lies in its conceptual relevance in exploring and understanding the everyday activities of individual subjects to organize, integrate and make sense of the multiplicity of social relations and contradictory demands in and across the different contexts in which they are engaged in their daily life. The concept takes into account how people collaboratively produce and reproduce their life through daily activities, habits, routines and personal arrangements of things and social relations. It directs attention to the social conditions in and with which people act, participate and live their everyday life and includes the question of how people are subjected to socio-material dispositions of power, knowledge and discourse. Furthermore, it facilitates an exploration of emerging new ways of everyday living and how these contribute to remaking the social world. Hence, working with the “conduct of everyday life” and refining this concept can support an understanding of psychological phenomena as they unfold in the reality of everyday living, and promote a fundamental renewal of psychological theory, methodology and practice.

In the following we will first indicate how the study of the conduct of everyday life builds on the study of everyday life, as well as how a turn toward a psychology of everyday living relates to the scientific self-understanding of conventional psychology and what kind of theoretical challenges it raises. Then we describe in more detail the practice of everyday living, including its conflictuality and collective coordination, and finally present an outline of the different chapters of this volume.

Formation and Challenges of a Psychology of Everyday Living

Since the mid 20th century, when scholars came to recognize the central significance of everyday life in understanding human affairs, the study of everyday life has become a major concern within the social and human sciences. Rather than everyday life merely consisting of trivial and banal day-to-day activities, scholars have realized that it constitutes the nucleus of human life and the space in which our social relations are produced and reproduced. Everyday life comprises all human activities situated in and across a multiplicity of spaces and contexts (home, work, educational institutions, shopping venues, recreational arenas, digital spaces, etc.). As Henri Lefebvre explains in his seminal work, Critique of Everyday Life (1947/1991):

Everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond and their common ground. And it is in everyday life that the sum total of relations which make the human – and every human being – a whole takes its shape and its form.

(p. 97)

During the twentieth century, starting from the actualities of people's lives, the study of everyday life emerged as a distinct subject of research across a variety of disciplines (e.g., history, sociology, philosophy, anthropology) as well as interdisciplinary programs (e.g., cultural studies, media studies), developing a detailed vocabulary to explore the everyday world in its complex and problematic socio-historical relations (de Certeau, 1984; Ferguson, 2009; Gardiner, 2000; Goffman, 1959; Highmore, 2010; Pink, 2012; Sheringham, 2006; Smith, 1987, and many others).

The study of the conduct of everyday life builds on this substantial body of work and expands it with a new focus. Drawing on a “turn to the subject” and elaborated conceptualizations of subjectivity and the human being (e.g., Blackmann et al., 2008; Butler, 1989; Holzkamp, 2013; Walkerdine, 2002), it concentrates even more on human activity and systematically centers on the lived experience, agency and efforts of how human subjects live their everyday life. This entails a shift of focus toward the study of everyday living from the perspectives and standpoints of the human subjects. By structuring research through the experiences and involvement of human subjects, the complexity and problematic nature of everyday life can be dealt with more consistently. As a result, it becomes possible to explore what the world means

for human life through everyday living and consider how this can be transformed for the better.

Why did it take psychology such a long time to engage in the conduct of everyday life as a major topic of research? Here, one reason can be found in conventional psychology's particular epistemology and scientific self-understanding. In conventional empirical research, the production of knowledge is situated in a specific setting. To investigate psychological phenomena, the researcher constructs an artificial situation – usually an experiment in a university laboratory. This construction establishes a dichotomy between this experimental reality and the everyday reality. Hence, while the experimental reality's artificial arrangement reduces the research matter's complexity to fit into the controlled and manipulable laboratory setting, this leaves open the question of how far knowledge of psychological phenomena produced in this duplicated reality can be transferred to and generalized in the reality of everyday life (Holzkamp, 2015, chap. 3 in this volume, p. 74f).

Such psychological research practice can be seen as a basis for the conspicuously abstract psychological knowledge and theory-building, since it confronts us with the dilemma of not knowing what the studied phenomena and problems are part of and connected with. Here, the interest in everyday life turns the endeavor of isolating “factors” and “variables” upside down, pointing instead to the need to explore how psychological phenomena and problems are endowed with content and significances precisely out of the contexts they are part of. For instance, personal ways of being involved in and experiencing dilemmas are connected to particular practices, relations, concerns and social structures. The concept of the conduct of everyday life might then open a route to overcome the abstract individualism of psychology (and its accompanying wordlessness) that encloses subjects in isolated psychological special functions and to contribute to a psychological epistemology grasping the richness, complexity and connectedness of psychological phenomena as well as the interrelations between human subjects and the world. Working with this concern implies situating empirical research and the production of psychological knowledge in the everyday reality in which psychological phenomena actually unfold.

Psychologists became increasingly aware of these epistemological dilemmas in psychological research practices during the 1970s, in particular through the discussion on the crisis of social psychology (Parker, 1989). The historical roots of this discussion can be traced back to the early work of Wilhelm Dilthey, Lev Vygotsky, Wilhelm Stern, Kurt Lewin and many others. But in the 1970s it induced new beginnings and a variety of alternative psychological approaches emerged, ranging from feminist psychology, phenomenology, discursive psychology and social constructionism to cultural historical activity theory and critical psychologies, taking psychological research out of the duplicated reality of the classical experimental setting into the reality of everyday life (e.g., Argyle, 1992; Brinkmann, 2012; Burkitt, 2004; Gergen, 2009; Hodgetts et al., 2010; Scheibe, 2000; Shotter, 1993; Stephenson & Papadopoulos, 2006). Within this broad movement and inspired by subject-oriented sociologists (Jurczyk & Rerrich, 1993; Voß, 1991; Jurczyk et al., 2015, chap. 2 in this volume), a group of critical psychologists paid increasing

attention to the significance of the conduct of everyday life for psychology, and systematically started to explore its formation. As Klaus Holzkamp explains: “The conduct of everyday life is ... the elementary form of human existence” (2013, p. 314), and he suggests defining the constitutive subject matter of psychology not as the individual, nor the individual subject in societal relations, but “the subject within the context of her/his conduct of everyday life” (ibid., p. 314).

The concept of the conduct of everyday life offers an approach to overcoming a variety of psychology’s fundamental internal challenges, discussed from different angles and theoretical backgrounds in the chapters of this book. In this discussion, some of the central challenges that emerge concern psychological knowledge’s continuing individualism as well as the question of its general societal relevance.

Although Wilhelm Wundt, one of the founding fathers of academic psychology, emphasized that psychology deals with the human subject’s experiences and activities in relation to others and the world (1897, p. 3), the conventional explanatory models in the history of psychology have consistently favored a radical individualism. As James Wertsch notes: within contemporary psychology “research is often based on the assumption that it is possible, even desirable, to study the individual ... in isolation” (1991, p. 2); despite “criticism” over decades, the “individualistic orientation is characteristic of the discipline in general” (ibid., p. 3). Furthermore, he explains:

We can answer detailed questions about neuronal activity or neonatal reflexes, but we have very little to say about what it means to be human in the modern world ... Psychology has become increasingly less capable of providing insights into the major social issues of the day.

(Ibid., p. 1f.)

Developing a concept of the conduct of everyday life addresses this challenge by opening up a specific approach to understanding the relationship between the individual and society. Since the conduct of life refers to the subject’s integrative and constructive activity, it goes beyond a deterministic perspective merely conceptualizing the individual as a set of dependent variables of societal structures. On the one hand, the question of the conduct of life cannot be limited to how people adjust to some given conditions, since living one’s life implies arranging conditions, together with others, revising plans and pursuing perceived interests. On the other hand, this concept goes beyond the voluntaristic perspective of autonomous individuals and recognizes that individual life is not just determined as each person would like, but is co-created through the fabric of the societal world. The conduct of everyday life represents a mediating category between the individual subjects and societal structures, articulating in particular the subjects’ experiences and the scope of action as they grapple with these structures through collective and structuring actions. As Ole Dreier notes, a shift toward the conduct of everyday life enables us to bring our “analyses closer to what it means and takes to be a subject living in a society” (2015, chap. 1 in this volume, p. 17; see also Dreier, 2008).

The interest in the study of the conduct of everyday life is related to current transformations in society. Globalization, financial and environmental crisis, debt, migration, war and large-scale conflicts influence and change the patterns of social and individual life all over the world (e.g., Caffentzis, 2015, chap. 9 in this volume; Federici, 2015, chap. 10 in this volume). As a result of these changes, psychological theory, research and practice is confronting complex problems and challenges. Psychologists are now dealing with people whose social realities and forms of life are undergoing changes toward increasing individualism, as well as greater social and cultural heterogeneity and complexity. This sets the stage for new complex problems to emerge through advances in technologies, digitalization, new forms of work and modes of production, unemployment and poverty, increasing individual mobility, lifelong education and a readiness for change, etc. In this context, there is a growing need for psychology to move out of the laboratory to investigate and understand how people confront and experience local changes in relation to social systems, institutions, technologies and daily life practices in the course of their everyday life. Psychological theory and research, in turn, thus have to relate their understanding of human sensuous activities and experiences to the social practices and structures in which people live and experience their problems. Here, the theories developed on how people conduct their lives need to be sensitive to complex movements, trajectories and shifts as well as to the historical, cultural, local and global conditions of life. In addition, this requires reflecting on the new methodologies and research practices facilitating the empirical investigations of the everyday realities and problems in people's lives.

The Practice of Everyday Living

Conceptualizing the conduct of everyday life involves three essential dimensions. Human activities often come to be seen as “everyday” when they are processes involving a daily repetition such as, for example, getting up in the morning, making breakfast, discussing who is going to buy the food for dinner, taking the children to nursery school, going to work, etc. This elementary cyclical organization of everyday living, which includes rhythms, routines and habits, constitutes a fundamental dimension of the conduct of everyday life. However, these rhythms and routines of daily life are not just mechanisms and do not happen automatically, but are active achievements of an individual subject. Since they include not only arranging and resolving practical daily tasks and demands, but also coordinating and integrating these in an overall arrangement, Karin Jurczyk, G. Günter Voß and Margit Weihrich have described the conduct of life as the “arrangement of the individual arrangements” (2015, chap. 2 in this volume, p. 46). The rhythms and routines relieve us of the need to constantly observe, negotiate and justify what we do or do not do, and provide a basic foundation for our lives.

However, the conduct of everyday life involves more than just the ordinary repetitiveness and cyclical structure of everyday living. The practice of everyday

living requires not only a reproductive dimension, but also a productive one, where we transcend ordinary routines and cycles either deliberately or through necessity. The productive dimension allows us to organize and come to terms with the different, contradictory and often unforeseeable demands, disruptions and challenges we are confronted with in the various arenas of our daily life. Therefore, the conduct of everyday life also always involves a dimension of transcendence and extra-ordinary experience and activity, situations in everyday living where we enter unknown territory, engage in serious challenges and struggles, experience exceptional moments of happiness, joy or insight (or the opposite) in which we may sometimes even have the impression that these extra-ordinary moments are precisely where life “really” happens.

Both the ordinary cyclical and the extra-ordinary transcending aspects of everyday living are integrated in a third central dimension of the conduct of everyday life. Living one’s life includes what we could call the subject’s specific integrative sensibility and way of sense-making without which the conduct of life would not be possible. Hence, the conduct of life does not just refer to the day-to-day organization and integration of the various demands, it is also connected to the subject’s conception of his/her history as well as future. It is related (and we might not always be aware of it) to a broader imagination of how we see the world and what we want with our life, and out of this broader imagination of our life and the anticipation of action possibilities, the concrete ordinary and extra-ordinary everyday activities and arrangements become meaningful and accomplishable. The personal experience of cohesion in life is also related to social conflicts, for instance between contradictory demands in life, and how such conflicts develop and are unlocked or reach an impasse. In the following, we discuss in more detail how personal sense-making is interlaced with the social conflictuality of the conduct of everyday life.

All the different approaches presented in this book discuss the conduct of everyday life as a fundamentally collective process. The concept of conduct of life is applied and developed in analyzing how subjects conduct their lives in collaboration with other subjects and in relation to different matters in their lives. Such conceptualizations seek to capture the inherently social dimension of our lives as human beings and, in this way, set the subject in the plural. This focus points to social coordination and conflicts as the central problems of the personal conduct of life (Axel, 2011; Chimirri, 2014). Shifting the notion of the conduct of life from single persons’ lives to the processes of arranging different but interwoven lives changes our understanding of routines in everyday life. Developing routines is not just an individual project. Our routines are created, maintained and negotiated in the context of coordination with others’ conducts of life, which may also entail conflict or struggles with them. Those involved in each other’s everyday lives – whether as family members, colleagues, neighbors or friends – cooperate and disagree over how to establish preferences, make plans, prioritize and carry out simple everyday routines as well as more comprehensive alterations, rebuildings and diversions.

In today’s Western countries people live their everyday lives in a plurality of contexts. In these different contexts, the lives of participants are connected with each

other in fundamentally different ways, and their activities are structured in relation to different purposes and conditions. In these interconnected practices, problems at one place (e.g., in the family) are often related to conflicts between diverse contexts (e.g., school and home, or different workplaces) where those involved take part. Thus, in the trajectory across everyday contexts, very different issues and concerns have to be taken into account and related to one another. Therefore, when people conduct their everyday lives they are taking part in reproducing, negotiating and changing social structures, and arranging lives involves exploring structural possibilities, connections and restrictions in everyday life. In this way we may investigate social structures through the personal ways subjects relate and ascribe meanings to these in everyday living – as expressed in their personal participation and experiences as well as in their dilemmas and conflicts.

Analyzing such aspects of everyday living builds on theoretical insights from research highlighting the historical and conflictual nature of social processes (e.g., Chaiklin, Hedegaard & Jensen, 1999; Holland & Lave, 2001; Juul Jensen, 1999; Lave, 2008, 2011). Such an approach points to the nature of everyday living as fundamentally conflictual, rather than conflict as an intermittent experience linked to disturbances or errors. Since conflict is regarded as an inherent part of social practices, this general conflictuality may be seen as an analytical background for understanding the specific dilemmas of the conduct of everyday life.

Focusing on the conduct of everyday life opens up personal as well as social and political perspectives and concerns. The growing individualization of core institutions (such as family, education and work) and of the ways to organize social life places new demands on our conduct of everyday life. Against this background, a scholarly interest in the concept may then itself tend to gravitate toward individualistic discourses of human life where knowledge of the conduct of everyday life appears to offer the potential to monitor, discipline and regulate the lives of others. However, it is precisely the knowledge of how people experience these ideologies and social changes in the conduct of their everyday lives, and how people work on transforming them, which could also reveal the forces of individualization and governing others.

A point of reference in the common life that subjects live in a shared world illustrates how interests and perspectives are not just different, but also connected and related through joint yet multifaceted issues, concerns and problems. The participants’ conflicts are an expression of that shared engagement, and provide an opportunity to expand our understanding of common problems (Busch-Jensen, 2015). In this way, a concept of the conduct of everyday life can potentially derive knowledge from different people’s experiences of dilemmas in their everyday life – not as knowledge about “other persons” but as knowledge about societal problems seen from these persons’ perspectives (elaborated in Kousholt, 2015, chap. 13 in this volume, p. 2456). By inquiring into the meanings, reasons and conflicts involved in everyday living, psychology can gain a new relevance in exploring, understanding and transforming social problems. We need to connect the different aspects of multifaceted concerns instead of reducing their complexity to dichotomies between “social interests” and “individual interests.” In this way, the concept of everyday

life may offer options for solidarity and a democratic research methodology where common problems are explored through the way they are experienced in everyday living and from different locations and positions. Here, the contributions in this book set out to advance this approach further by engaging in critical dialogues on how people actively seek to create and conduct their lives in and across the complex realities of today’s everyday life, and also to consider the related theoretical discussions and conceptualizations.

In various ways, the following chapters illustrate a move toward a situated, social and contextual understanding of psychological processes. Several chapters, for instance, underline the implication here of a need for methodological practices where researchers participate in everyday practices and cooperate with those outside academia as “co-researchers” in a shared exploration of social problems (instead of positioning the “other” as the object of research). Such methodologies conceptualize flexible ways of “fitting into daily life” through varies modes of participation, enriching the researchers with a situated insight from mundane and often unnoticed or even neglected perspectives. In the words of Darrin Hodgetts, Mohi Rua, Pita King and Tiniwai Te Whetu:

The style of research in which we engaged in our project operates in a more flexible manner where we try harder to fit into everyday events … A case-based methodology characterized by closer and more engaged relations between researchers and participants than is typically evident in psychology.

(2015, chap. 6 in this volume, pp. 141–142)

In this vein, this volume attempts to substantiate a variety of critically situated approaches to the experiences and actions of the conduct of life in today’s social and technological world, and to debate how the study of subjects in the context of their conduct of everyday life can contribute to the renewal of psychological theory, methodology and practice. How can we develop knowledge about and research into the active efforts of subjects to engage in everyday activities, tasks and participations across time and space? What kind of new forms of doing and thinking in everyday life are emerging and how do they contribute to the remaking of the social world? How can we reconceptualize subjectivity, agency and possibilities of social and political change? The 13 chapters in this volume are written by distinguished scholars working in psychology and other social and human sciences who are engaged in developing this field of research and, through their theoretical, methodological as well as empirical work, contributing to the study of the conduct of life in and across the different arenas of everyday life.

Explorations in Everyday Living

In the first chapter of this volume Ole Dreier highlights the power of the concept of the conduct of everyday life to reform the psychological gaze. He focuses especially

on the implications of the concept for critical psychology and explains how it can enable a shift in the approach of critical psychology from studying subjects in their immediate life situation vis-à-vis an overall social structure to studying how they conduct their lives in structures of everyday social practice. Such a shift, he argues, will change how we comprehend the psychological functioning of persons, their experiences, concerns, stances and self-understanding. It also changes how we comprehend the significance of an overall social structure for subjects by considering it from the standpoint and perspective of persons conducting their lives in structures of social practice.

In Chapter 2, Karin Jurczyk, G. Güter Voß and Margit Weihrich introduce a sociological approach to the study of the conduct of everyday life. They describe the development of their body of research over the years, conceptualizing the conduct of life as the discrete effort made by the individual in order to meet the different—and sometimes conflicting—demands that arise in the various spheres of everyday life, and to arrange them into a livable whole. Society can therefore be understood through the everyday lives of the individuals performing these actions. In the presentation of their extensive empirical research on the forms, methods, resources and strains of the conduct of everyday life under a variety of living conditions they illuminate how conducting one's life in the process of social modernization is becoming an ever-increasing challenge.

Chapter 3 presents an unfinished manuscript by Klaus Holzkamp on the conduct of everyday life on which he was working before his death in 1995 (the text was published in German in the journal Das Argument; there exists a second unfinished manuscript by Holzkamp on the conduct of life published in English in 2013). During his research on learning Holzkamp became aware of the importance of everyday living for psychology. He realized that in the entire history of psychology the conduct of everyday life has not been to any extent systematically and comprehensively analyzed or conceptualized as a theoretical problem in its own right. Building on the work of the group of subject-oriented sociologists around Jurczyk, Voß and Weihrich, he began to delve into an exploration of the conduct of everyday life. This chapter presents some first insights on this route, including a discussion of the sociological approach, an analysis of why the concept has not so far been investigated within psychology, as well as reflections on how to study the conduct of life from the standpoint of the subjects.

In Chapter 4 the anthropologist Tim Ingold focuses on the importance of a specific practice of everyday living: walking and the practice of exposure as an alternative model of education. He argues for an educational practice that, rather than instilling knowledge into the minds of novices, leads them out into the real world. He compares these alternatives to the difference between the maze and the labyrinth. The maze, which presents a series of choices but predetermines the moves predicated on each, puts all the emphasis on the traveler's intentions. In the labyrinth, by contrast, choice is not an issue, but holding to the trail calls for continual attention. Education along the lines of the labyrinth does not provide novices with standpoints or positions, but continually pulls them from any positions they might

adopt. It is a practice of exposure. The attention required by such a practice is one that waits upon things, and that is present at their appearance. To "appear things" is tantamount to their imagination, on the plane of immanent life. Human life is temporally stretched between imagination and perception, and education (in the original sense of the Greek schole) fills the gap between them. He concludes that such a "poor pedagogy" provided by a mode of education that has no content to transmit, and no methods for doing so, nevertheless offers an understanding of the way to truth.

In Chapter 5, Thomas Teo discusses Holzkamp's approach to the conduct of everyday life in the context of critical psychology as an international progressive research program that can assimilate and accommodate critical traditions from inside and outside the West. He argues that Holzkamp provides a first-order solution to the relationship between society and the individual and a partial solution to the problem of how critical psychology should conceptualize the mediation between social structure and the conduct of everyday life. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler and Peggy McIntosh, he suggests that the study of the conduct of life needs to include concepts such as habitus, performativity and privilege that are grounded in critical theories of embodiment and not in a philosophy of consciousness.

Everyday living is often conceptualized in terms of the mundane or ordinary. Yet, for increasing numbers of people disruption and the extra-ordinary have become normative. In Chapter 6, Darrin Hodgetts, Mohi Rua, Pita King and Tiniwai Te Whetu explore how the ordinary re-emerges within the extra-ordinary lives of a group of older homeless Māori men when they spend Tuesdays and Thursdays at a Marae garden (a traditional Māori meeting place for the conduct of daily life). The chapter illustrates and reflects on how to carry out empirical research on everyday living and presents insights on how gardening provides homeless Māori men with an opportunity to reaffirm culturally patterned relationships, heritage and identities.

Based on empirical research on children's conduct of life, Charlotte Hojholt focuses in Chapter 7 on conflicts in everyday life and their relatedness to social, political and structural conflicts. With the concept of situated inequality, she draws attention to the social distribution of possibilities for taking part in and influencing the social coordination of everyday contexts. Discussing examples from children's conduct of everyday life across institutional arrangements, where several parties have different kinds of responsibility and conflicting perspectives on the children, she argues that the social (and political) conflicts about children lead to personal problems for children. In this way, the concrete dilemmas of children can teach us something about the social conflicts in and about school. Finally she discusses the challenges of how to conceptualize meanings of the children's social backgrounds as well as how to conceptualize their personal agency.

The starting point of Ute Osterkamp's exploration of everyday living in Chapter 8 is Adorno's famous dictum "there is no right life in the wrong one," and she argues that recognizing this dilemma is the first step out of it. Osterkamp

indicates that Adorno’s expression is often rejected with the argument that it denies any possibility of change and people’s responsibility for it. Such objections seem to proceed from a restricted notion of human agency and responsibility, reducing them to the best possible adjustment to given conditions and norms. In contrast, she discusses how, from the perspective of a psychology conceptualized from a generalized subject standpoint, both the “inhumanity” of such a limited view of human agency and subjectivity, and the subjective need to overcome inhumane conditions, become visible. However, to overcome such a restricted concept of human agency and subjectivity, it is necessary to become aware of the varied forms and ways in which we unwittingly support in our own thoughts and actions conditions that we want to overcome. This includes the need to recognize and resist the many pressures that lead us to ignore all contradictory information so as to keep up the semblance of being able to live our lives in the right way, in contrast to others.

In Chapter 9 the philosopher George Caffentzis examines everyday life in the shadow of the rise of the debt economy in the United States. Recognizing that major theorists of everyday life (from Marx to Lefebvre) did not attend to the impact of debt, in his investigation Caffentzis articulates the new structure of the satisfaction of needs the debt economy imposes that is quite different from the structure of needs in the previous wage-dominated economy. Furthermore, he analyzes four different kinds of debtor–creditor relationships with respect to class relations, and reflects on new forms of alienation and 20th-century theorists of everyday life had neglected. The chapter concludes with a historical sketch of the anti-debt movement in the United States that developed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and that potentially can challenge contemporary conduct of everyday life in the debt economy.

In Chapter 10, feminist activist and political philosopher Silvia Federici explores how the subsumption of everyday living to the needs of the labor market affects our social relations and subjectivity, as well as how we can re-appropriate our lives, our bodies, and overcome the reproductive crisis that we are facing. She discusses these questions by examining how the restructuring of the world economy has affected reproductive work and gender relations, the role that technology has played in this process, and the initiatives that women in particular are taking, worldwide, to construct more cooperative and equitable forms of reproduction. She argues that everyday living today must begin with a struggle against the ongoing, historic assault on the means of our reproduction and our social and ecological environment.

In Chapter 11 Ernst Schraube and Athanasios Marvakis investigate the contradictory significance of digital technology in students’ learning. The digitization of higher education is radically transforming learning and teaching relations, including the content of learning and the students' conduct of life. The chapter analyzes the relevance of digital technology for learners and their learning activities focusing on the question of learning. What is learning? How to integrate learners into learning theory and reflections on digital technology? Why, how and what end does learning take place, and what are the best possible conditions for learning? Building on situated and participatory learning theory the

chapter shows how learning is not just a transfer or internalization of knowledge, but a basic human activity for appropriating and changing the world, rooted in our conduct of everyday life. It argues for conceptualizing learning from the standpoint of the learners and describes decisive elements and phases of the learning activity including the crucial role of the fluid, mutual entanglement of learning and teaching. Based on a refined concept of learning it shows how the digitalization of students’ learning environment reconfigures the structures of participation and how it can catalyze but also freeze the fluidity of learning and teaching.

Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s thoughts on how theoretical concepts relate to common sense, Frigga Haug explores in Chapter 12 the relationship between theory and everyday understanding as a basic challenge in the study of the conduct of life. The chapter introduces memory-work as a possible approach to deal with this challenge and presents its individual steps, theoretical foundations and possibilities for an empirical inquiry into everyday living. Haug highlights how memory-work can contribute to empower individual subjects taking control of their own conduct of life and presents the political project Four-in-One-Perspective. This is a proposal to understand everyday living as taking place in four main areas (work-life, reproduction, self-development and politics) and addresses the challenges in bringing these four areas together in one conduct of life instead of spending one's whole life in only one or two areas, unhappily and subordinated. Finally the chapter illustrates how to substantiate such a political project in anticipatory memory-work and work with hope.

In Chapter 13 Dorte Kousholt expands the methodological discussion of how to empirically explore everyday living by focusing on the interconnections of subjective and structural aspects of persons conducting their everyday life in and across social practices. Kousholt discusses the possibilities for arranging participatory research collaboration that enables the development of knowledge about common problems and contradictory life conditions in their meanings to different persons. Based on examples from her own research, where she followed children's lives and transitions across their different life contexts, she demonstrates how to investigate practices from different positions and perspectives and how this provides knowledge about the complexity of social conflicts and possibilities for change.

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