The Geographies of Everyday Life: Critical Inquiry in Marxist and Feminist Literature

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The Geographies of Everyday Life: Critical Inquiry in Marxist and Feminist Literature Abstract In this paper I trace how a focus on the geographies of everyday life is used in Marxist and Feminist literature in order to exhibit the power of this focus in critical geographical inquiry – enabling the geographer to thoroughly and reflectively study topics that greatly affect people’s lives. I explore how everyday life is both the site of study within which geographical phenomena unfolds as well as a vital ontological and epistemological position for the geographer to undertake during research. Starting with the work of Henri Lefebvre, I trace this focus on the geographies of everyday life through Marxist and Feminist literature, highlighting the latter with the works of Doreen Massey and Cindi Katz among others, for truly revolutionizing the everyday by bringing into view people, places and experiences often sidelined and misrepresented in geographical thinking.

Everyday Life in Geography In Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction, Tim Cresswell draws inspiration from the Greek geographer Strabo of Amasia to present Geography as a profound discipline due to its focused inquiry on questions of everyday life. This “everydayness of geographical concerns” contains inherent profundity and knowledge that is evident when met with the act of geographical inquiry (Cresswell 2013, 2). As we investigate geographical phenomena, the material arenas within which these unfold, percolating in and out of lived experiences, imaginations, and representations is what I am identifying as the geographies of everyday life. The knowledge power of everyday life, present regardless of our presence, is found when we critically position ourselves within the everyday with a reciprocal mindset (Sayer 2015), through tuning in, thinking, inquiring, and wholeheartedly immersing ourselves within it. This however needs further questioning on the positionality of the geographer as well as the nature of the everyday we wish to engage with, which I aim to do in this paper by asking - what does it mean to critically position oneself within the geographies of everyday life? Positioning oneself in the everydayness of geographical concerns faces some challenges as the familiar day to day unfolding in repeated patterns in recognized places may not at first seem valuable (Hall 2020, Highmore 2002). But Highmore (2002) asks, what happens when that familiar world is disturbed and disrupted by the unfamiliar? He asserts that the unfamiliar everyday, a constant effect of modernity, is often more present than the familiar everyday. This is especially pertinent for the lives that bear marks of everyday oppression and resistance within these most familiar activities and places (Harvey 2019). The appearance of the everyday as mundane and banal is the alienation capacity of modernity at work, Sneha Sumanth | GEOG 5000 Review Essay


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