Reconceptualising the Mundane and the Extraordinary: A Lens through Which to Explore Transformation within Women’s Everyday Footwear Practices

Abstract

This article explores the transformatory potential of the lived realities of people’s everyday social lives, seen here to be patterned by a dynamic interplay between the ‘mundane’ and the ‘extraordinary’. Their interaction acts as an interpretive device that can generate new, empirically grounded theoretical insights. Thus, I argue for greater recognition and focus on relationality and connectedness, or rather, that is to say, a meso-level in between structure and agency that individuals both contribute to and are influenced by within everyday life. Using data from a qualitative three year ESRC-funded study of identity, transition and footwear, the article weaves these concerns together with a focus on women’s agency, as seen through the interpretive capacity of the mundane and the extraordinary. In so doing, the boundaries and relationship of the mundane and the extraordinary are reconceptualised.