Everyday life is made up of the activities, routines, and habits that we are most familiar with. Our own daily habits take on a veneer of normality and yet everyone’s differ slightly, from our morning rituals, use of language, and how we think about ourselves. These subjective differences create our identities, interpersonal conflict and misunderstanding, and preferences and taste. Often, however, the motivations behind our everyday activities and what structures them go unnoticed and fade into the background as a matter of tradition, whether personal, familial, or cultural.

In an endeavour to better understand what shapes our daily activities, this course examines everyday life to explore what social forces influence the shape our everyday lives. The course is structured according to three broad themes: language, dialogue and communication; subjectivity, self, and social identity; and how the places, activities, and things of everyday develop persistent structures. Through these themes the course will explore how meaning comes to be established through language, how tensions between differences in understandings and interpretations of meaning are negotiated and disputed, and the power dynamics that produce dominant and persistent understandings. These dynamics will be explored through theoretical concepts including situatedness, tradition, and the status quo in order to relate these discussions through everyday experiences. We will investigate these everyday experiences for the signs and meanings that are at play within each of them to better understand the world they produce.

As this is a third-year Writing (W) course, students are expected to do a significant amount of weekly reading and writing. Course assignments include critical article analyses, short argumentative essays, a term paper, and final exam. The short assignments are intended to provide students with the opportunity to practice fundamentals of writing: close reading, writing often, editing thoroughly, and argumentation.