"Everydayness"

I remembered talking about this notion with Sahera on our way back from Vancouver to Seattle in Jnue. We both like the term but not even sure who coined the word.

Interestingly, I revisited this idea in Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Amin and Thrift, 2002, p95). "Everydayness" was introduced as Lefebvre's idea about "spaces of representation, the lived space." As noted, "an everydayness located in Lefebvre's other two terms of the equation of everyday life(spatial practice, the percieved) and the everyday(representations of space, the conceived)which both embrace it and make it possible." (p95)

While i don't think it is necessary to add another term to describe the same notion, I feel like this subtle distinction of the three-"everydayness, everyday life, the everyday" is worth knowing.

BTW, I am going to Hong Kong for my field work tomorrow. I know that Sahera is leaving soon and Andrew has been home, right? Ozge should get most fruitful work done since you will be in the field for that period of time. Anyway, I hope i can try my best to keep field notes and share with you all. Acutally, I talked to some people in Taiwan about urban renewal in Taipei and their interactions with professionals in Hong Kong on this topic. I do have some thoughts, however, not to the point that I can clearly organize them and post them here. I will try to spend more time on it.

Take care, all my friends.

Participatory diagramming as an engaging method

I found a chapter on "Participatory diagramming" very useful, providing applicable techniques and also critically discussing strengths and weakness of this method. Examples of diagrams are presented as well. Perhaps you will be interested if this may be one of method applicable to your research. Besides, the book is a very recent, comprehensively collecting essays on Participatory Action Research. I personally feel like the book is worth keeping at hand.

"Participatory diagramming: A critical view from North East England" in Participatory action research approaches and methods, Sara Louise Kindon, Rachel Pain, Mike Kesby Eds. pp112-122
The book on google book:

Practical Intelligence and Explicit Knowledge

After coming back to Taiwan, I have found myself amazed by tons of information on the ground. They take shape in a variety of forms everywhere, everyday. I think i have to start taking notes and share them with you or i will just watch them going through my fingers without any footprint.

The first thing i wanna share is an intersting issue of "business weekly" published in Taiwan. While waiting in a bank,I noticed that cover story, "street wisdom."

"Isn't that something similar to what we wanna learn from the everyday life?" I was very much intrigued by how a notion as such will be discussed in a business journal. Interestingly, there are some reports focusing on how several successful business men established their know how from practices on the forefront instead of taught knowledge from business schools. Most important of all, it's a kind of tacit intelligence that is not easily shared and transferred. For example, how to make your baked goods more delicious than others by different hand efforts? How to manage social relations within a team in your office? I cannot but recall how Dr. Bob (my chair, also on Sahera and Ozge's committee) use riding bicycle as an example to talk about what we know is always larger than what we can make explicit.

However, as part of academia, we do our best despite impossibility to make it exaughstively explicit. However, i also feel more relaxed since we are then not the one who is supposed to "create" intelligence. Instead, we only need to have the willingness to approach them on the street, in everyday life.

The report also mention a scholar in human cognition, Robert J. Sternberg(an American psychologist and now the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University). He suggests three kinds of intelligences in human cognition:

-Analytical intelligence is the ability to analyze and evaluate ideas, solve problems and make decisions.
-Creative intelligence involves going beyond what is given to generate novel and interesting ideas.
-Practical intelligence is the ability that individuals use to find the best fit between themselves and the demands of the environment.
See more here.

i think Sternberg is largely echoing de Certeau's idea. I found this very interesting even though it is coming from a very different field. I believe this is a trend that we need to pay attention to.