Mundane Methods: Innovative ways to research the everyday

List of figures

5.1 An inherited, well-used casserole dish (Source: Helen Holmes)

5.2 Heather's seat fashioned from her grandmother's wardrobe (Source: Helen Holmes)

5.3 Participant's spade inherited from his father (Source: Helen Holmes)

6.1 Photographs documenting food transformations (Source: Sarah Marie Hall)

7.1 An example of one of Lynne's sketches: an overlooked corner of the office (Source: Lynne Chapman)

7.2 The chain sketchbook on the theme of weather (Source: Morgan Centre Sketchers)

7.3 A sketch from the ‘dormant things’ book (Source: Hazel Burke)

7.4 Hebden Bridge sketchcrawl (Source: Lynne Chapman)

7.5 ‘A bottle of holy water left by the previous owners and that I am too superstitious to discard…’ by Susanne Martikke (Source: Morgan Centre Sketchers)

8.1 A photo collage of Roger Barton's stand, Billingsgate Fish Market, London (Source: Dawn Lyon)

8.2 A still from Billingsgate Fish Market (Source: Dawn Lyon and Kevin Reynolds, see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw_kf32GfHY)

9.1 Floral tributes in memory of a neighbourhood cat (Source: Becky Tipper)

9.2 Encountering tiny frogs in a garden tour (Source: Becky Tipper)

10.1 Smellmap Le Marais (2018) exhibited at MAIF Social Club, rue de Turenne, Paris comprises two versions of the visual smell map on either side of a wall and sniffing bottles (hidden beneath a surface) containing essential oils and raw materials of the featured and mapped smells of bamboo, leather, painter's varnish, perfume, peach and wood (Source: Kate McLean)

10.2 Smell walk participant holds her smell notes as she explores the Marais area of Paris anticipating the potential smells of a recharging unit (Source: Kate McLean)

10.3 Detail from ‘Smell Harvest from the Marais during July Smellwalks’ (2018) ©Kate McLean. Smellscape Visualisers

10.4 Detail from ‘Smellmap: Le Marais’ (2018) ©Kate McLean

14.1 Mobility scooter user navigates road crossing in Wollongong, 2014 (Source: Theresa Harada)

14.2 John demonstrates how he must leave the marked zones for pedestrians at a crossing to be able to access the ramps, Albion Park, 2015 (Source: Theresa Harada)

14.3 Judy and her husband own two mobility scooters and had installed a ramp and hoist to enable them to store these on their raised veranda area, Albion Park, 2015 (Source: Theresa Harada)

14.4 Cecil's homemade trailer could easily be attached to the back of the mobility scooter to enable him to carry larger or heavier items, Corrimal, 2015 (Source: Theresa Harada)

15.1 Funny faces: the author demonstrating why participants may be discouraged by a rear facing camera. (Source: Lyndsey Stoodley)

15.2 That's better! Seeing what the surfer sees (Source: Lyndsey Stoodley)

15.3 Ready to go (Source: Lyndsey Stoodley)

List of contributors

Les Back is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Key themes in his work include developing collaborative forms of research writing and new styles of research craft. These issues are developed his books The Art of Listening (Oxford: Berg, 2007) and, with Shamser Sinha, Migrant City (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

Thomas Birtchnell is Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography and Sustainable Communities, University of Wollongong. A confluence of interest in his work is critical techno-futures and sustainable development with a regional focus on South Asia. His latest book, co-authored with John Urry, is A New Industrial Future? 3D Printing and the Reconfiguration of Production, Distribution, and Consumption (London: Routledge, 2016).

Megan Blake is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Sheffield. She has an established international reputation for her research focusing on 1) surplus food chains and practices of redistribution; 2) community organisations, social innovation and practices of resilience; and 3) social inequalities. She is the creator of Food Ladders, a multi-scaled and asset-based approach that uses food to increase everyday food security, connect communities and increase local resilience by reducing vulnerability. Her film, More Than Just Food, illustrates the ways that community-based food ladders can change places.

Lynne Chapman is a freelance reportage-sketcher, recording events and research, currently working with universities in England and Australia. She is author of Sketching People (Kent: Search Press/Barrons, 2016) and co-authored (with Sue Heath and the Morgan Centre Sketchers) ‘Observational sketching as method’ (International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 21 (6): 713–728, 2018). Lynne is also an award-winning children's book illustrator, an Urban Sketchers Correspondent and founder of Urban Sketchers Yorkshire.

Rebecca Collins is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Chester. Her research focuses on the intersection of youth geographies, material cultures and everyday (un)sustainabilities. She is particularly interested in the cultural production of waste and excess.

Simon Cook is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Health, Education and Life Sciences at Birmingham City University and a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research concerns the everyday practices of daily life: the ways in which they happen, how they change, and what they can tell us about societies and spaces. This is currently manifest in a project exploring the rise of run commuting.

Sarah Marie Hall is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on the everyday impacts of economic and political change, particularly as they intersect with gender and other forms of social inequality. She is the author of Everyday Life in Austerity: Family, Friends and Intimate Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Theresa Harada has a PhD in Human Geography and works as an ethnographer at the Australian Centre for Culture, Environment, Society and Space, University of Wollongong. Her interests include mobilities, energy efficiency and sustainable practices, and innovative social science methods.

Sue Heath is a Professor of Sociology and co-directs the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives at the University of Manchester. In addition to her methodological interests, she has published widely in the fields of youth studies, housing and intergenerational relations. Her most recent book is Shared Housing, Shared Lives: Everyday Experiences Across the Lifecourse (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

Helen Holmes is a Lecturer in Sociology at the Sustainable Consumption Institute/Sociology Department, University of Manchester. Her work explores materiality and consumption focusing on the lived everyday relationships we have with objects. Recent projects include a three-year fellowship investigating contemporary forms of thrift and a current study exploring lost property and the potency of absent objects. She has published in leading journals including: Sociology; Sociological Review; Work, Employment and Society; and Geoforum.

Dawn Lyon is Reader in Sociology in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent. She has published in the fields of the sociology of work, time, gender, migration, youth studies, and visual and sensory sociology. She is particularly interested in the rhythms of work and everyday life. Her book, What is Rhythmanalysis?, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2018.

Kate McLean is a designer working at the intersection of human-perceived smellscapes, cartography and the communication of ‘eye-invisible’ sensed data. She leads international public smell walks, translating the resulting data using digital design, watercolour, animation, scent diffusion and sculpture into smellscape mappings. She is Programme Director for Graphic Design at Canterbury Christ Church University.

Susanna Mills is a public health specialty registrar and National Institute for Health Research Clinical Lecturer at Newcastle University. She is a medical doctor by background and her PhD focused on home food preparation. Her current main research interests are public health nutrition and the intersection with food sustainability.

Chris Perkins is Reader in Geography at the University of Manchester. His interests lie at the interface between mapping technologies and social and cultural practices, with ongoing research into performative aspects of contemporary mapping behaviour and play, alongside an emerging interest in island studies. His most recent book is Time for Mapping: Cartographic Temporalities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

Laura Pottinger holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Manchester. Her research explores consumption, alternative economies, and everyday forms of social and environmental activism, with a focus on food, gardens and young people's politics.

Christian Reynolds is a Knowledge Exchange Research Fellow at the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield. Christian's research examines the economic and environmental impacts of food consumption, with focus upon food waste, and sustainable, healthy and affordable diets. He is a co-editor with Lazell, Soma and Spring of the upcoming Routledge Handbook on Food Waste, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1073-7394.

Morag Rose is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Liverpool. She is also a walking artist and founder of psychogeographical collective The LRM (Loiterers Resistance Movement). Her research interests include public space, walking as a creative, political and cultural act, community mapping, gender and the built environment, and the geographies of Dr Who.

Alison Slater is a Senior Lecturer in Design History at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on encounters with dress, particularly working-class and everyday dress, using oral history and material culture approaches. She is interested in the relationships between objects and identity, and history and memory, particularly experiences that sit outside traditional historical and archival records, using primary research to gather new insights.

Lyndsey Stoodley is a PhD candidate in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University. Her research interests include environmentalism in surfing communities, artificial waves and water more broadly. She is the co-founder of the Institute for Women Surfers Europe, and enjoys surfing small waves on big boards.

Becky Tipper has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester, where she also spent several years as a researcher. She now works outside academia but maintains interests in the sociology of human–animal relations, ethnography, and the use of fiction and creative writing in social research.

Gordon Waitt is Professor of Geography in the School of Geography and Sustainable Communities, University of Wollongong. He has a research interest in the everyday and seemingly mundane objects. He combines mixed-qualitative research methods with embodied theoretical approaches to address questions of social, mobility, energy and environmental justice. His recent work focuses on household sustainability, liveability, fuel poverty and mobilities. He works and lives in Dharawal Country.

Karin Widerberg is a Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo. Time, work and work-life, the body, family life and sexual violence are her research fields. Methodology, however, is a key issue in all her writings, and exploring qualitative approaches such as Institutional Ethnography and Memory Work, is a main concern and activity. Her most recent book is In the Heart of the Welfare State: An Invitation to Institutional Ethnography (Oslo: Cappelen Damm, 2015).

Samantha Wilkinson is a Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Youth Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has a background in Human Geography, and has conducted research into diverse topics, including young people's alcohol consumption experiences, home care for people with dementia, Airbnb, and hair and identity.

Sophie Woodward is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester. She carries out research into material culture, materiality, everyday lives and consumption. She is carrying out research into dormant things (things people keep but are not using). She is the author of several books on fashion and clothing as well as on creative methods – Material Methods: Researching and Thinking with Things (London: Sage, 2019) – and feminist theory – Birth and Death: Experience, Ethics, Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019 with Kath Woodward).

Wendy Wrieden is Principal Research Associate at the Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University. She is a Registered Nutritionist (Public Health) and has led research projects concerned with dietary interventions, surveys and dietary assessment methodology, including a project to monitor the Scottish diet. Her research interests include working with community organisations in social and policy aspects of nutrition, qualitative research and food choice.

Foreword: making the mundane remarkable

Les Back

A few years ago I was invited to participate in BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed edition on studying everyday life. It's my favourite radio show and Laurie Taylor – the show's host – has a special talent for bringing the best out of his guests. Not that the conversations are easy or without challenge because Laurie also has an equal flair for the deceptively simple question. That is, a question that seems straightforward on first hearing, but then the more you think about it the more elusive an adequate answer becomes. Laurie asked me: ‘given everyday life is all around us why don't more sociologists study it?’ Mmm …

I want to start here because I think my answer chimes with the contents of this wonderful collection that takes mundane everyday things seriously. Is one reason why sociologists are hesitant to train their minds on the everyday or quotidian trivialities because we run the risk of being made fun of: ‘You are writing an article about Christmas lights or the social behaviour in cafés or caffs? That's like being paid for sunbathing!’ I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the researchers in this book have been subject to similar indignities. But as anthropologist Clifford Geertz once commented, one of the ‘psychological fringe benefits’ of anthropological research is that it teaches us what it feels like to ‘be thought of as a fool … and how to endure it’ (Geertz, 2000: 30). Maybe we shy away from the banal to avoid the accusation of seeming trivial or commonplace.

Strangely, it is the humdrum nature of our subject matter that makes it so difficult to study. The second reason why everyday life is not studied more is because it is incredibly hard to do. Social scientists depend on the specular aspects of society's problems to justify the significances of our mission. Focusing on society's bad news gives us a sense of purpose and importance somehow. Georges Perec, the eccentric bard of the mundane, sums this up so well when he writes: ‘railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more they exist’ (Perec, 1997: 209).

Perec had an extraordinary life and was part of post-war French alternative literary culture. He was a Polish Jew and his father was killed fighting the Nazis and his mother was taken and murdered in Auschwitz. He was orphaned by the spectacular murderous power of the fascist machine. His uncle and aunt took the place of his parents and raised him. I wonder in a way if his ear for what he referred to as ‘banal facts, passed over in silence’ provided an anchor for him through those dark times (Perec, 1997: 174).

He never finished his degree in history at the Sorbonne but worked as an archivist in a science laboratory up until just before the end of his life. He characterised his writing as part ‘sociological … looking at the ordinary and the everyday’, part autobiographical, part ludic or playful, and part novelistic (Perec, 2009: 3–4). He had an extraordinary attentiveness to things. He manages to enchant the mundane through noticing detail and its significance. I see the same quality in Erving Goffman (1956) or the brilliantly attentive Rachel Hurdley (2015) or Sophie Woodward (2015).

Perec wrote a little book, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, which I think is the best realisation of Clifford Geertz's notion of thick description (Geertz, 1973). At the beginning of the book Perec introduces Place Saint Sulpice, the subject for his weekend study, and lists the existing public knowledge about it. Then comments: ‘My intention in the pages that follow was to describe the rest … that which has no importance: that which happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds’ (Perec, 2010: 3). What a brilliant invitation to the study of everyday life but equally what a difficult challenge. It makes me think of Jennifer Mason's wonderful project on the weather in Hebden Bridge that states with tender confidence that ‘weather is woven into every aspect of social life’ (Mason, 2016: 2).

Perec does not really give us many clues with regard to how he does his work. How do we write something interesting when nothing seems to be happening? ‘I find my direction by following my nose’, he comments (Perec, 2009: 5). It is hard, very hard, to practise endotic (as opposed to exotic) sociology – spectacular social problems somehow seem to offer us better clues. It makes us think though about attentiveness as a vocation – a matter of training our senses and then sifting imaginatively what we find for significance, like panning for gold on the mundane surface of life.

For fifty years the qualitative research imagination was held hostage by the tape recorder. To do qualitative research meant to conduct interviews, transcribe them and present the idiomatic voices of our participants in anonymous block quotations. I have written elsewhere about my own love affair with the tape recorder as both a research companion and a device. In the digital age this has all changed: we are thinking, working and inquiring in a very different informational environment. We are encountering unprecedented opportunities to work differently as a result and communicate and circulate the fruits of our work in new ways combined with the old established conventions. Indeed, it seems that some of our old conventions are being made new again in this environment, from drawing to Polaroid photographs to fieldnotes.

Despite the constraints placed on our research environment by the institutional structures for measuring value in an increasingly commercialised university environment, we are on the cusp of what I want to claim is a renaissance in qualitative research. I think the book you are holding in your hands now might be read as evidence in support of this claim; the skills we need to practise endotic sociology are demonstrated within its chapters.

I cannot think of a better metaphor for the work we do as researchers than C. Wright Mills's suggestion that social research is a craft. Carol Smart – co-editor of a beautiful book called The Craft of Knowledge (Smart, Hockey and James, 2014) – commented that craft is also interesting because it is not necessarily tied to professionalised forms of expertise. She wrote to me in an email:

I think craft has strong feminine meanings. OK I know many crafts are/were male preserves but so were many associated with women e.g. sewing, knitting, cooking. My reading is that men abandoned the association with craft as more kudos and income was linked to professionalisation (eg medics versus midwives). Women were denied access to professions and so their association with ‘mere’ craft led to a diminution notion of the status of craft. Craft has been seen as rather humble and undervalued – hence feminine (or working class). (Carol Smart, personal correspondence, 21 July 2014)

Perhaps what is interesting about craft is the idea that knowledge is about doing and making things with words but not only with words. People are documenting and sharing their lives through their smartphones at an unprecedented frequency and quantity. There is almost no version of culture now that exists independently of the melding of lives on-screen and off-screen.

Research is not only a matter of sitting down and talking but also involves getting up on our feet or going out on a mobility scooter, as some chapters in this book explore. Talking to people, moving alongside them, can often produce a different quality of conversation, as Maggie O’Neill's fantastic work on the everyday landscapes of migrants reveals (e.g. O’Neill and Perivolaris, 2014).

Culture here would be written within, but also beyond, words. Texts collaged alongside pages that also become screens including moving images, still photography, drawing, soundscapes and music. Suzanne Hall's wonderful fieldwork that plots the threads of globalised networks on a single south London street is a good example (Hall, 2012). I am also thinking of the ways in which drawing here is not just representational device but also a mode of discovery and analysis. Rachel Hurdley, who writes brilliantly about design and office spaces and the things people bring to work to make them habitable, uses sketching as a way to discover, to look closely and outline the shape of significance (Hurdley, 2015). What is striking in the Lynne Chapman drawings included in this volume (see Heath and Chapman, this collection) is the impression that this is exactly what she does as she sketches. Attentive film practice is another example of how the mundane can be made remarkable. Jennifer Mason and visual anthropologist Lorenzo Ferrarini do this successfully in their extraordinary film on Living the Weather (see Mason, 2016 for the accompanying book), and Jennifer's work on social atmospheres I think is so much in the spirit of Perec at the same time achieving something beyond it.

Teaching research methods is often the most unloved part of any social science degree programme. It is the orphaned part of the curriculum. Yet, it should be the most exciting part of what students learn and what we teach. There is much in the pages of this book that gives fresh resources for teaching the craft of research.

In order to embrace the opportunities that lie before us, we need to be bold and license experimentation of the kind being done by the authors in this volume. Shaking off those fears of being made fun of for taking seriously the seemingly trivial, scholars of everyday life are faced with the difficult task of finding ways to make the mundane remarkable. This collection brings together some of the best examples of scholarly work that does precisely this. The result is a kind of re-enchantment of the things we so often take for granted and the mundane aspects of social life can be celebrated and read with a new sense of wonder.

Bibliography

Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books.

Geertz, C. (2000) Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Goffman, E. (1956) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Social Sciences Research Centre.

Hall, S. (2012) City, Citizen and Street: The Measure of the Ordinary, London: Routledge.

Hurdley, R. (2015) ‘Pretty pants and office pants: making home, identity and belonging in a workplace’, in E. Casey and Y. Taylor (eds) Intimacies, Critical Consumption and Diverse Economies, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 173–196.

Mason, J. (ed.) (2016) Living the Weather: Voices from the Calder Valley, Manchester: Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives, University of Manchester.

O’Neill, M. and Perivolaris, J. (2014) ‘A sense of belonging: walking with Thaer through migration, memories and space’, Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, 5 (2&3): 327–338.

Perec, G. (1997) Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, London: Penguin Books.

Perec, G. (2009) Thoughts of Sorts, Boston: Verba Mundi Book.

Perec, G. (2010) An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press.

Silverman, D. (2013) A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Qualitative Research, London: Sage.

Smart, C., Hockey, J. and James, A. (eds) (2014) The Craft of Knowledge: Experiences of Living with Data, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Woodward, S. (2015) ‘The hidden lives of domestic things: accumulations in cupboards, lofts, and shelves’, in E. Casey and Y. Taylor (eds) Intimacies, Critical Consumption and Diverse Economies, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 216–232.

1

Introduction: mundane methods and the extra-ordinary everyday

Sarah Marie Hall and Helen Holmes

Researching the everyday

Researching the everyday is more important and significant now than ever before: beyond a fad or cultural currency, understanding the mundane is key to critical and conceptual social science. But what is the everyday, and how do we research it? These questions have long perplexed social and cultural theorists. While no firm consensus has ever been reached, what scholars do agree on is that there is no ‘one’ everyday – that everyday lives are multiple, messy and full of methodological possibilities. Though, as Cloke, Crang and Goodwin (2014: 926) note, the everyday is ‘a notoriously difficult term to define, … we can generalise that it is an arena of social life that includes repetitive daily cycles and routines that we learn but eventually take for granted’. This academic interest in everyday life, while not an especially new phenomenon, can contemporaneously be traced back to the ‘cultural turn’ within the social sciences, from around the early 1970s, when engagements between cultural studies and philosophical traditions were raising questions about ‘how we make sense of the world around us’ (Clayton, 2013: 1).

As a result, scholarly interest in everyday life has grown considerably since 2010, with the ordinary and mundane now at the fore of social science research. Where previously interested in the spectacular and the extraordinary, social science has turned away from a focus on grand structures and functions to pay attention to the grounded, the experiential and the ‘blindingly obvious’ (Woodward and Miller, 2007: 335). In trying to make sense of the everyday, it is common for authors (and we are no exception!) to pepper their work with synonyms like ‘mundane, familiar and unremarkable’ (Scott, 2009: 2), and to draw attention to the habitual, rhythmic and banal; ‘the things that people do on a day-to-day basis’ (Holloway and Hubbard, 2001: 1). This can, at times, give the impression that the everyday is limited to the realms of the prosaic and parochial, and can have the effect of making the everyday seem (for some) an unexciting avenue for research.

It would be a misunderstanding, however, to assume this – or that a conceptual or empirical focus on the everyday provides a narrowing of scale or practice: that which is close, localised, observable. Rather, the everyday can be a window into ‘the ongoing problematic of the relationship between the local and the global, in the context of global flows of capital, information and people that have produced a heightened interconnectedness of different parts of the world’ (Dyck, 2005: 234). Moreover, researching the everyday is not an unproblematic endeavour, and by raising concerns about the practice and performance of knowledge and power, ethical considerations also surface (Rose, 1993). Furthermore, positionality and reflexivity play an important role, where everyday life and academic life collide (Hall, 2014).

So, instead of limiting our understanding of human societies and cultures, the lens of the everyday offers possibilities, both big and small. In addition to offering micro-, meso- or macro-level analysis, ‘theoretical perspectives that inform our understanding of everyday life … cut across the disciplines of the social sciences, from psychology to philosophy and sociology’ (Scott, 2009: 10). We adopt a similar approach within this collection, exploring social science as broadly defined and recognise, like Aitken and Valentine (2005: 8), that ‘disciplinary boundaries are not cast in stone; they are fuzzy and chameleon-like, changing before our eyes as we focus deeper’. Everyday life, as a result, is an exciting and expanding field incorporating a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars, attempting to engage with the vivacity of the (extra)ordinary everyday. In doing so, scholars tune into recent theoretical and methodological advances in the fields of new materialism, sensory and embodied approaches and the ever growing mobilities turn, while also paying homage to longer histories, such as the influence of feminist methods – of the humble interview and intimacy of Memory Work. By exploring the minutiae of daily experiences and ways of making sense of the world we inhabit, such work also highlights their cultural, ethical, social and political significance.

Methods for exploring everyday life

While research on the everyday is rapidly growing (Back, 2015; Pink, 2012; Rinkinen, Jalas and Shove, 2015), methodological approaches for studying the mundane seemingly lag behind. As Back (2007: 8) notes, ‘we need to find more considered ways to engage with the ordinary yet remarkable things found in everyday life.’ Social scientists, it seems, are no longer content with research designs comprising only traditional methods such as interviews, focus group or observation, and there is a real need to expand the empirical toolkit. This is not to argue against using the traditional interview, or other staples in the researcher's toolkit (see also Les Back's foreword in this collection), but rather to think about ways in which we can broaden our methods and techniques to fully encounter everyday life in all its sensory, multifarious glory.

To date minimal literature or resources exist which explore methodological approaches for studying the everyday. While such methods are undoubtedly occurring in varying disciplines and involve a multitude of settings and subjects, the practicalities of how one may undertake such research are seldom documented. Exceptions to this include the methods-based texts of Mason and Dale (2011) and Back and Puwar (2010), whose ground-breaking work has opened up the arena for research into the everyday, renewing and invigorating social science research. In doing so, Mason and Dale (2011) present a range of mixed, creative methods for studying the fields of personal life and relationships; places and mobilities, and socio-cultural change: from working creatively with longitudinal survey data; to considering socio-technical methods; to innovative approaches to mapping. Similarly, Back and Puwar's Live Methods (2010) engages with the experimental and serendipitous nature of research on the everyday, exploring ‘storying’, ‘art’-based and digital approaches to sociology. Sarah Pink's (2013) work has also been an influential voice on visual methods, dealing with all aspects of the visual methods, including photographs, video and also digital media; focusing on the practicalities of conducting such methods, as well as considering theoretical and analytical perspectives. Buscher, Urry and Witchger (2010) apply a similar focus to advance mobile methods for social science research. In their key text, Mobile Methods they draw upon the interdisciplinary work of scholars in the field of mobilities to discuss the challenges and opportunities of researching movement.

Aside from the more contemporary inroads into methodological approaches to studying the everyday, we must also credit two key qualitative methods texts which we believe have provided the foundations for such innovative work. These include, but are no means limited to, Mason's (2017) comprehensive guide to conducting qualitative research, a go-to guide for social science undergraduates; and Cook and Crang's (2007) practical toolkit for conducting all aspects of ethnographic research. These hands-on texts have paved the way for bottom-up, grounded approaches to research; a prerequisite for conducting research on the everyday.

With this in mind, we should also mention the influence of feminist perspectives on methods for studying the everyday. Work such as that of Roberts (1981), Bell and Roberts (1984) and the Women and Geography Study Group (1997) implicitly explores the everyday through its focus on the experiences, narratives and stories of research. Such work encourages us to consider the reflexivity and positionality of ourselves, and the ethics of our own research practices (Davies, 2008). This now essential component of qualitative research is vital to studies on the mundane and everyday. Reflexivity urges us to pay attention to how we as researchers are active participants in the construction of knowledge and to listen closely to the multiple voices of other parties and