This chapter examines the modes of learning associated with a practice deeply embedded in Brazilian society: football (soccer). Recognizing its unique position in the country – as part of everyday life, with minimal formal instruction, varying levels of participation, and strong historical, cultural, and identity dimensions. The ethnographic analysis focuses on the participation contexts of young footballers in the periphery of a Brazilian metropolis (Belo Horizonte, MG). Drawing on the perspective of learning as inherently embedded in social practices (Lave 2019), the chapter explores both the formation of young footballers and the historical development of the practice itself. By focusing the analysis on learning, it articulates the concepts of access and participation, seeking to trace the dynamics of football practices while acknowledging the foundational complexity that characterizes them. The aim is to foreground the discussion on how each participant is constituted, simultaneously and through the very relationships to which they contribute.

This chapter explores processes of learning in everyday life from the point of view of children that participate from marginalized positions in school. The chapter analyzes how these marginalized positions develop over time through slopes of exclusion (Kousholt 2012). The slope of exclusion is an analytical concept formed by many years of theoretical and ethnographic work, as I moved in and across the different social practices of children’s everyday lives. The concept is meant to grasp social processes of exclusion and alienation produced over time and across contexts. It involves restrictive conditions and conflicts on many levels that interweave and produce a slippery slope of exclusion, where children end up giving up on their belonging with other children. The chapter shows how individualized understandings and explanations of children’s behavior displace problems outside of the school, limiting or preventing explorations of how different personal struggles are also connected to dealing with common matters in a contradictory school life.

Danish production schools in the period 1970–2000, had a remarkable and ambitious vision for marginalized young people: Those attending the schools should, through their collaborative engagements in learning/work, leave the schools with a stronger grasp of their own future possibilities. Neither the process of realizing this goal nor the outcome of the process could be simple. So how did participants engaged in producing commodities in woodworking, metal, catering or other workshops, at the same time create possibilities for self-transformation so that they could change themselves with respect to their pasts and futures? In this counterhegemonic project unusual everyday practices emerged from a perspective on learning, not conceived as a thing in itself but always as an aspect of changes by/for/in participants’ participation in the historically politically constituted contradictory everyday lives in which they are engaged.

Chapter 1 provides an overall introduction to the book and its underlying motivations. It proposes and defines the concept of Clever Computing. It presents the historical emergence of the Internet of Things, AI, and Ubiquitous Computing, and analyses the risks of technological visions of the future which often neglect current social and human needs in favour of techno-led solutions. It explores the need to account for human needs in design and, by extension, legal values. The term Clever Computing is contextualised by exploring different examples of how AI and IoT are increasingly converging. This focuses on the ways AI is changing and improving interaction techniques with IoT; how AI is being used to make sense of IoT data and enabling distributed data analysis; and how AI is augmenting the existing functionality and increasing the autonomy of IoT systems.

Japanese society embraces a rich variety of cultural forms that reflect its tradition, stratification, and regional expanse. To examine the internal diversity of Japanese culture as thoroughly as possible, this chapter first looks at two manifestations of its duality and then analyzes mass culture, folk culture, and alternative culture as three major spheres of popular culture. After confirming the culture’s plurality, the end of the chapter turns to the Japanese cultural presence in the transnational context.

The introduction outlines the main issues tackled in the volume and presents urban collectivization during the Great Leap Forward as a case study for the search of a socialist everyday, different from and alternative to the capitalist one. It highlights how this search embodied a specific understanding of the political economy, and how it highlighted contradictions within the Maoist project of revolution. Finally, it describes the sources and methodology adopted in the book.

This chapter describes the initial phase of the urban commune campaign, in the second half of 1958, and it investigates both Party official rhetoric and archival sources from the early communes in Beijing to show how early models of collectivization were presented as “prescriptive descriptions” to be followed, but also how contradictions between the different goals of this mass movement surfaced almost immediately and framed the praxis of activists and workers at the street level.

The collectivization of one profession, hairstyling, is the focus of this chapter. Barbershops, with bathhouses and photographers, were considered an essential service for city residents and were therefore part of those benefits that had to be provided under the commune umbrella. Yet during the Great Leap not only did hairstyling fashions and a correspondent hierarchy of hairdressers persisted, but they were recognized and actively fostered by local and state authorities. The case of hairdressers and barbers in Great Leap Beijing thus shows not only the attentiveness some cadres paid to the minute aspects of the quotidian but also the resilience of subtle (and not so subtle) social differences in the midst of what was supposed to be one of the “egalitarian” moments in the Maoist era.

Rising dog ownership increases demand for dog-friendly public spaces. This need produces new kinds of interactions and relationships, and new sources of conflict and cooperation between park users. This chapter examines how the human–dog relationship mediates and modifies interpersonal relationship development and human friendship practices in public space. Drawing on 150+ hours of participant observation at dog parks, our analysis demonstrates the importance of public space to supporting “simple and single-stranded friendships” (Pahl & Spencer 2004). Through identifiable social patterns and rituals, the forced interactional work of dog-facilitated human–human interaction between regular users creates opportunities for meaningful relationship development, despite (and sometimes because of) incidences of dog-facilitated conflict also present in these spaces.

This introduction offers an overview of the volume’s variety of literary critical approaches to reading William James, and its account of James’s equally various approaches to literature. We draw out some of the generative through-lines among these approaches and spell out some of their broader implications for how we read, teach, and respond to literature. In outlining the three sections of the book – Style, Influence, and Method – we show how James historically informs and prospectively transforms the way we think about the bedrock premises of literary study. As we contend, the persistent richness of James’s work and the ongoing relevance of literary study itself are rooted in similar commitments: For both, any critical investigation must synchronously value expression, edification, and application. Our volume foregrounds these stakes – the aesthetic, the transmissive, the practical – because together they comprise an ideal bridge between James and literary study, a mutual paradigm that we contend is fundamentally pedagogical in nature.

This chapter explores how multinationals were both embedded in gender norms and actively shaped representations of masculinity, femininity, and domesticity. Multinationals influenced gender roles through the products they marketed to male and female consumers, their gendered labor organization in production sites and company towns, and their hiring practices, which either expanded or restricted opportunities for women. Rather than following a single pattern, multinationals often created hybrid systems, adapting to local gender norms. Through case studies on household technologies – such as Singer sewing machines and Tupperware – and consumer and cultural products – such as Barbie, cosmetics, films, and gendered labor structures in company towns and managerial hierarchies – the chapter highlights multinationals as “gender accomplices.” It examines the factors that led them to reinforce rather than challenge existing norms, shedding light on their role in both maintaining and shaping gendered social structures.

The chapter analyzes folk music and performance practices in a contemporary Indian and South Asian context. It covers the meaning and deployment of the term ‘folk’, its wider implications relating to caste, class, and taste, as well as its status in existing practices and scholarship. Whereas colonialists saw folk song as part of the enterprise to understand indigenous minds to better control and administer them, nationalists viewed it as a great resource to reconstruct the nation. After India’s independence, the state along with its middle class tried to institutionalize and appropriate folk song to cater to their tastes, however, it remained largely outside of their control and continues to maintain local and communitarian connections. Adopting a decolonial perspective, this chapter also addresses local hierarchies based on caste and cultural dispossession. Finally, it views folk song and music both as part of everyday life as well as a critique of everyday life that opens up an emancipatory discourse for the future.

This chapter explores the key context in which food-related goods were used, seen, and kept by peasants: home. Attention is given to the physical appearance and internal organisation of peasant homes in late medieval Valencia, as well as to the place that daily meals occupied within peasants’ everyday activity, labour, and way of life. The purpose of this chapter is to set a basic framework for the rest of the chapters of Part I, on the usages and practices surrounding food-related objects.

This introductory chapter provides a brief overview of the book layout. It contextualises the topic historically and defines the key terms of the debate. It also illustrates key issues, with illustrative examples of how nationalism permeates different spheres of social, political, economic, and cultural life.