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Welcome to the 2015 Special Issue of Sociology. It is the journal’s policy that each editorial team has the opportunity to guest edit a Special Issue of Sociology during their editorial term. As a part of this editorial treat, the theme of the Special Issue is completely open and in the gift of the editors. Taking time to explain why we selected and settled on the sociologies of everyday life as the theme for our Special Issue provides a way for us to begin this Introduction. In many ways, it is difficult to overstate the significance of the everyday because it is, as Sarah Pink (2012: 143) observes, ‘at the centre of human existence, the essence of who we are and our location in the world’. The study of everyday life is a well-established tradition within sociology and interest and thinking about the quotidian continues to grow, with these engagements becoming increasingly interdisciplinary across the social sciences and beyond. In his worry about the drift of sociology into more generic social science, John Holmwood (2010) argues that the discipline has been particularly effective in working as an ‘exporter’ of concepts and methods (as well as personnel). With this ‘open borders’ character of sociology as a discipline in mind (see also Meer and Nayak 2013; Urry 2000), we saw our Special Issue as a timely moment for taking sociological stock. This means that the Special Issue can be thought of as both a reflective moment – where has sociology been and arrived at in its attempts to think through the everyday? – and as an anticipative moment – what are the new logics, foci, approaches, uses, limits for sociologies of the everyday? Everyday life-approaches attempt to capture and recognize the mundane, the routines in (and of) social relations and practices. In doing so, they not only give importance to the ordinary, and take the ordinary seriously as a category of analysis, but they also evidence how everyday life social relations, experiences and practices are always
Neal et al. (Tue,) studied this question.