Researching the Everyday: An Interview with Amanda Wise

Could you tell me about your work on the sociologies of everyday life and sociologies of multiculture and how you have brought them together?

Yes okay, so I came to sociology in a rather circuitous fashion. I’m a bit of an accidental sociologist! I trained in sociology as an undergraduate but my PhD was an interdisciplinary one involving supervision from cultural studies and anthropology. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University (ANU) I was working mainly among anthropologists and I began my ethnographic research into suburban multiculture at that time. I spent several years in an interdisciplinary research centre and only landed back in a sociology department in 2012.

I suppose there have been two main threads to my work: the research around everyday multiculturalism, which is probably what I’m most known for, and the other trajectory has been my work on transnational communities. This began with my PhD research back in the 1990s which was an ethnographic study among East Timorese refugees in Australia pre and post independence. I was interested in questions of exile, religion, ritual, embodiment, memory and identity and how political activism for East Timor’s independence shaped formations of belonging among this refugee diaspora. This interest in transnational community formations shifted to South Asia with a series of articles on the ‘moral economies of a translocal village’, authored with my long-term collaborator (and now husband), Selvaraj Velayutham. He comes from a very small community in South India, some of whom moved to Singapore and some to Australia, so we have been tracking this over the years. I became quite interested in processes of community formation … and thinking about the moral economies, embodied practices and symbolic resources that go into knitting and reconfiguring community across extended space (see Wise and Velayutham, 2005, 2008).

This led me to think a little bit more about what that might mean across cultural difference in place in diverse communities; how new formations of community might emerge. How the traditional anthropological focus on questions of ritual, embodiment, practice, gesture, gift exchange, habitus and so forth might cast light on emergent forms of community in a diverse urban locality. Some of this interest was sparked much earlier though, during my research among the East Timorese (see Wise, 2006). There was a really strong grass-roots solidarity movement in Australia at that time. Aside from the usual activists, there was this strong network of suburban Catholic churches involved in supporting East Timorese refugees and their political campaign. I was coming across networks of elderly Anglo ladies at churches running fundraisers – cake stalls and so on – to support East Timor. This attuned me, I guess, to everyday solidarities and affinities across difference – and to look for these among everyday, average suburban communities.

There is another thread that evolved over time. I have been interested throughout these projects in material culture and materialities … and the urban came into the picture in that way. The urban is a space of encounter but it is also a material place, [so I am interested in] the materialities of urban place and urban space. And I suppose I came to that a bit more through the material culture studies and the urban sociology tradition. Obviously when you start to look at the minutiae of everyday life you start to think about the ways in which the material world sorts and frames people and how we are connected to it in quite embodied, sensuous ways. Geographers like Yi-Fu Tuan, Paul Rodaway, Ash Amin, and some of the non-representational theory (NRT) people have been very important to developing my thinking. This has, over time, meshed with insights from the classical sociologists of everyday life – Goffman, Garfinkel, Schutz – and, more broadly, writers like Becker and Sennett. And obviously in urban sociology people like Les Back have been influences.

Some of that approach, some of that interconnectivity that you began to put together and build from, came out in Everyday Multiculturalism in 2009, so tell me about that project and the thinking behind it.

I suppose that stemmed out of the 2002 postdoctoral fellowship at ANU when I did the fieldwork on Ashfield, published eventually as, ‘Hope and Belonging in a Multicultural Suburb’ (2005), and ‘Sensuous Multiculturalism’ (2010). When I began that research I started to look around, at least in the Australian context, for work that might be useful for me. And it was incredibly frustrating, the dominance of overly textual readings of race and ethnicity which were completely divorced from lived reality meant that there was really no space to be able to deal with the ambivalence and complexity that I was coming across ethnographically, it wasn’t actually reflected in the literature of the time. During that early ethnographic work, I was finding all these complex layers of affinity, disjuncture, racisms alongside forms of conviviality and hopefulness and none of that was really accounted for in this fairly singular discursive reading of race and ethnic relations that was, I guess, dominant at the time. There really wasn’t anyone doing much in the way of … doing an ethnography of what it means to live with difference. There are obviously points at which racism comes up, but there is also a lot of life in which that isn’t the most salient dimension of living together.

So that was that project and then because of the lack of scholarship in that space we organized a conference focused on these issues and there was a bit of a shift going on I think at that time. The Everyday Multiculturalism book (Wise and Velayuthan, 2009) came out of the conference and we gathered up some new papers as well to get a more international spread of work. I think it did mark a turn in the field of scholarship. There were already people working in that space around the place but it just marked a point where it started to be recognized as a field of research.

In your discussion of the everyday in the book you talk about a different kind of hopefulness and use the term ‘transversal enablers’ and discuss the significance of gift giving. Could you say more about some of your thinking around these issues?

The transversal enabler is the person who – we’ve all met them right? I mean that was the other thing with this field of scholarship [it’s often about what’s very familiar]. So we were like, ‘hang on, this is so obvious once you give “sociological” names to these people’. They are the ones who kind of zip around the locality or context, the ones who gather everybody in, who can be in the hallway and get everyone to lunch, but also there is a particular kind of disposition to do that. Transversality comes out of the tradition of feminist scholarship. It goes beyond connection to borders – I’m interested in how boundaries open up and can be reconfigured and transversality is pointing to that. These are figures that open up and connect across difference or even different sections of the community, together opening up borders. The gift, understood as both material culture, as well as gifts of hospitality, kindness or service, is really central here. The memories, sentiments, and biographies embedded in these chains. I drew quite a lot on Mauss and Simmel there – particularly around the centrality of trust and gratitude and how everyday rituals and material practices underpin these sentiments and, as Sennett so eloquently puts it, how exchange can turn people outwards. So it is these things, processes, this moral economy if you like, that can begin to knit together new moral communities (see, for example, Wise and Velayutham, 2005, 2008).

I think what is significant in your work is the ways in which you show how that happens through very slight exchanges, with caring but mundane interactions across cultural difference, with food or with gifting. Were you aware that you were really developing new thinking in this area?

The gift relation stuff actually goes quite a long way back. I mean I was thinking about it the other day, it was probably one of Greg Noble’s first year courses that I tutored in as a first-year PhD student. He was one of my supervisors and has been a really important influence. Anyway, he was teaching gift theory in that course and it kind of carried along and, the gift is obviously a major trope in anthropology – Mauss and so on. And in sociology too – Aafke Komter and David Cheal, some of those people. This is a really important tradition in anthropology about how it is that communities are tied together, how boundaries are formed, how inclusions and exclusions are formed, how identities are reconfigured, how relations are not just momentary but stretched across time and across space and that is obviously important in the transnational communities literature as well. I began to think about what it might look like in a suburb, when you take that into account – so the work I did in Ashfield [suburb in inner Sydney] was tracking things like people growing vegetables and handing them over the back fence. About neighbouring activities – small gestures – mowing the elderly lady’s lawn next door, an elderly lady helping the neighbour’s child with their homework. The gift relations of bringing a plate of food to a church social – these sorts of things are actually quite profound when you start to think about them … so thinking about that in very mundane suburban ways was quite eye-opening and took me in some quite stimulating directions. There is also a tradition of scholarship on the senses and material culture – people like Paul Stoller, David Howes – so along with the idea of food that travels, there is a sensory experience and I’m interested in how that is tied into memory and into biography and so forth. Once you focus on gifting and re-gifting across cultural boundaries it becomes possible to reflect on how this is embodied and re-embodied and carried across time. So it is all part of that interest in opening up and connecting across difference and tracing the emergence of new forms of community across difference or not – because, of course, aversion is also a big part of the story.

Yes. There is a nice phrase that you use in your 2005 (Wise, 2005) paper about the moment of encounter ‘making the abstract other into the concrete other’. Can you tell me about that moment?

Yes, I suppose there is an enduring interest in the paradoxical relationship between the concrete and abstract other, so that you can have your next-door neighbour as your best friend and they happen to be Chinese but 10 minutes later you can be ranting about how much you dislike the Chinese because Chinese people are taking over the suburb. We have all heard those stories, so I am quite interested in probing at what point that can tip over – so that your connection to the concrete other starts to reconfigure your view of the abstract other.

And is the ‘everyday’ central to notions of the concrete other?

Yes, yes and the gift relation is part of that. There are always a million forces at work so what matters is not the individual encounter, but those middle-level relational qualities of neighbouring and neighbourhood and repeated encounter through those sort of spaces. So they are not just kind of the stranger in the street but the product of … rhythm and habit, gesture, familiarity, minor civilities and incivilities. In that hope and belonging piece (Wise, 2005) I told the story about the profound qualities of the morning walk, you know when people go on a morning walk around the neighbourhood and they see the same faces and this can go on for a decade and there is probably never a conversation but there is the nod and you nod to the same person every day and the lady watering the roses or whatever. These are minor events but they are also hopeful encounters because they connect people to the world in profound ways.

In that early Ashfield work ageing was a focus. And we all know that a lot of vociferous racism comes from more elderly people. So why is that? You know one of the qualities of the shrinking lifeworld and the forms of social isolation etcetera, so there is a story there about the importance of connectiveness to the world and, I guess, the disposition of hope that comes through that; being able to nod to your neighbour. So it is nice to be able to track some of that stuff and see that it is actually quite important for people and that it happens across lines of difference as well. An old Italian lady who doesn’t speak a word of English but you know the most important person in her life is the lady that she nods to every day and says hello.

I think there is a sort of paradox there, isn’t there? About the transformative possibilities of something so ‘thin’. And of course that has been a question of debate, how transformative this is or superficial. What are your thoughts on how deep it goes?

There have been some legitimate questions around this, like Gill Valentine’s (2013) arguments around the ambivalence of civility, so that in England it is very important, everyone is very polite but then they will go behind closed doors and be awful about somebody. So civility is not necessarily a measure of fabulous relationships across difference or anything. That is true. But I think you can explore these issues further through ethnographic research. We always talk about the need to be careful not to assume that the interview represents the eternal point of view of the participant. However, if you get to know people over a year or so you can follow them and hear them say completely random and contradictory things, and you have got to be able to piece the different aspects together, recognizing how they coexist in practice. For me, conviviality can be understood as living togetherness rather than something that can be caricatured as happy-clappy – there are the lovers of difference and the despisers of difference and they coexist, but there are always tipping points with one or the other. In Australia at the moment, the discourse around the ‘Muslim question’ is so toxic, so paranoid, and the moral panic is so pervasive globally that however much of that great everyday conviviality there is, it is always going to be overloaded with the meanings that are circulated and come out of the wider context.

So I wouldn’t lay too much at the feet of the everyday. I don’t think that is the purpose of it. Power and histories of racism are as much a part of the everyday picture as convivialities and affinities. We are not saying that somehow the everyday is a solution to racism or anything. It is actually just adding another layer to our understanding.

Thinking back to your experience of the projects that you have done, the research that you have been involved in, how do we engage, how do we enter everyday life as researchers? And how can researchers research the micro and the intimacy of people’s lives?

That is actually a vexed question. It is a problem because what is of value in that kind of work is being able to tell very intimate, intricate stories and a lot of my writing is often just based on one or two characters and they are probably quite identifiable characters. So there are ethical dilemmas around that. And then the other side of it, I suppose, is just you get busier and older and as an academic you have less time to do that kind of work. So I still often come back to that work I did as a post doc where I had two years just to hang out in suburban Ashfield and I spent two hours a day sitting in a food court for a year, like I knew that place inside out and I knew every street and I knew every character in the suburb. In my recent research on work, which contrasts Singapore and Sydney, there are three or four characters and we have just stuck with them all the way through.

Can you tell us a bit more about your current research in Singapore and how the focus on what you have said about just a few participants’ narratives seems to work?

With Selvaraj [Velayutham] again, the current project puts the workplace front and centre as the context of encounter, the micro-public where difference is experienced and encountered daily. We are interested in the spatialities of work, the craft of work, and the temporalities of work, and of course neoliberal work cultures. How these sift and sort relations across difference. This qualitative ‘focus on a few’: I think individual researchers come at this question in different ways but I need to have a personal connection because the work I feel most connected to is the kind of deep engagement with a character. I need to feel I have some sort of material and emotional connection to the people and places I am writing about because I am really interested in drilling right down into the most intricate details of a situation, and encounter, a person. So for me to be able to do that off a large data set is really difficult. I suppose I just like understanding the setting and the context of individual characters. If I’m writing about someone at work I like to have sat in their lunch room and smelled the food that they are eating and have a sense of who is sitting with whom and of the materiality, rhythm and temporality of that workplace; its atmosphere.

So although we have got this massive data set and relied on the help of research assistants – we did 80 interviews in Singapore and 80 in Sydney – the workers Raj [Selvaraj] and I interviewed and the workplaces we observed personally, that little corner of our research, that is the stuff I will probably end up writing most about – maybe only a couple of characters. My enduring interests are around the kind of minutiae of ritual and materiality of space, the sensory qualities of being around difference. All of that requires slow time to be there. People can talk about issues and experiences in interviews but there is a thinness at some level when you are just getting that reported back to you from your research assistant. We tried to mitigate some of it, utilising photo elicitation, those sorts of approaches, to try and get a fuller account. Getting people to draw spatial layouts of their workplace and to explore who is going where and then encouraging them to speak to the drawings as they are being interviewed. But I don’t think there is a whole lot that can really stand in for just being there, for getting that ethnographic depth.

It is interesting how much value you put on the non-discursive or the extra-discursive and the sensory in your research, am I reading that correctly?

Yes that is true and it does go quite a long way back and it goes back to the work I did with the Timorese refugees. My earlier work (see Wise, 2006) was about the connection between trauma, memory and political identities among this particular exiled community. I have this really strong memory, all these years later – during an interview with a young Timorese man I remember some sirens went past and he completely froze and went under the table and his whole universe basically crumbled because he had this sort of post-traumatic flashback. We had a few kind of situations like that. And then also in that community torture images were circulated as well as part of the independence campaign. So people who had come from traumatic circumstances having left East Timor, and even young Timorese who had grown up in Australia, were being exposed to this imagery as part of the campaign, so I got interested in this story of affect, emotion and embodied memory.

I thought I was leaving all that behind when I went off to do my nice study with elderly lawn bowlers in Ashfield. But it was really visceral the way that people talked about their encounters with this new difference and the Chinese community moving into the area and the way the shops changed and the busy trucks went past. And people were talking in quite visceral ways so that background research into the senses and traumatic memory and cultural identity also fed into the way that I was thinking about these sorts of questions. So I suppose that is the thread that endured, just that really embodied level of connection between memory, the senses, our emotions and encounters with newness.

Thinking about the projects that you have done Amanda, how have you set those up, how have you designed them, how have you tried to bring the everyday into a manageable form so as to be able to research it?

Look, I have a more intuitive approach I suppose. I mean I do have a method and when you get research funding you have to say I’m going to interview X number of people, or I’m going to go into this field, or I’m going to do that ethnographic work and these are my concepts. So I have that, I have always got a conceptual framework that I begin with and sets of sensitising concepts are really important but it is also very open ended as well, so my methodology also forms over time. There is nothing very profound or new about that, that is what most people do. You you start to wait to see what sort of floats up and then it starts to form categories and then you take those categories and explore them more deeply, so there is that side. But you know what I have to think more carefully about methodologically is this question of researching increasing diversity, and so for a long time I would start from the zone of encounter and see who comes into it and identify what categories are meaningful for them. And that is mostly how I still work.

But there are situations where ethnic and racial categories matter, and they already matter, so to bracket them out becomes quite problematic. The work I have been doing in Singapore is an example here, because everyday life there and institutional life is racialized in every way possible which means it is pointless to pretend that that doesn’t matter when it does. But you have to come at it critically and say, ‘Okay yes it does matter, so to what extent does it matter and where does it matter?’

And in terms of being in the everyday lives of people or engaging in empirical conversations in which participants are telling you about everyday lives or experiences – how do you persuade people to talk to you, how do you manage that sort of intimacy?

A lot of the field work I have done has been with my partner Raj [Selvaraj] and he is not at all shy to just go up and start asking a stranger questions. So it has been helpful for me to have him and since we have had kids, kids are a fabulous research tool, ice breaker, often. So then that starts to take you into the zones that you encounter as a parent, schools and playgrounds and those sorts of places – or it just opens a safe path to converse with a stranger. And sometimes you just have to hang out a lot until someone wants to know what you are doing there and they will strike up a conversation with you. It is quite challenging for me to just go up to perfect strangers … What I am good at though, I guess, is observing, being attuned to minutiae – at reading into the slight, into the mundane, and reading that in urban space.

In your work on the micro social life, on complex identities and complex ways of belonging, what do you listen for, what do you look for, as a researcher?

Yes, you know I might have been a bit misleading when I said I was completely open when I go to the field. So each project will have a frame right? The most recent project has been about looking at neoliberal work cultures and how they come to bear on the encounter, on affinity and disjuncture, racisms as well as cross-cultural connection. Then the frame becomes looking at some of the key features of neoliberal work cultures, such as work intensification, monitoring, more insecure forms of work certainly in the Australian context, like labour hire and, in the UK, zero hours contracts, all those sorts of phenomena; Singapore’s use of migrant labour, its stratified system of visas, migrant labour visas. The focus is on how these cultures start to sort people into categories, how they start to frame who encounters one another, under what sorts of conditions, how they perceive one another. Then we are able to say that when we did the work in a bus station, the lunch room at a bus depot, we start to see that actually the casuals work on a split shift and they are there at different hours and in a different corner of the lunch room than the permanent ones who are there during the standard shift because they are always there at the same hours and they have got the central table.

So you can start to see how they are sorted, we can start to see that there are different groups, it is a little bit racialized, it is also about newer migrants versus older migrants. Many new migrants are more in casual occupations and that starts to have sets of meanings attached … about competition and ‘taking our jobs and diminishing our conditions’.

Researching the everyday, focussing on the familiar, does it become hard to actually see what is significant in the slight? Is that something that you have encountered, difficulty in knowing when the small is significant?

Yes and I suppose what carries over is what is important in terms of transforming anything. I’m interested in the process of becoming cosmopolitan, you know, the difference between civility because people are stuck in a lunch room together at work as against having any more transformative and enduring effects, so that is really hard to capture. I am quite interested in capturing the micro moments of transformation and I suppose if you do this work over a long time you start to see connections and patterns across studies as well, so it gives you a sense of whether what you are seeing holds true for elsewhere.

Are there other ways to effectively capture the everyday apart from the ethnographic methods that are familiar to us as sociologists?

I think of some of Les Back’s work (for example 2007, 2013) is important, what he does and where he goes – popular culture, photography, biography, how we work as sociologists. And older methods like visual ethnography. During the Ashfield project I set a camera up and was just filming the street for days on end. I was completely overwhelmed by the amount of footage obviously but it was great; so detailed. I had just captured all this incredible visual stuff that you never, you know, even as a good ethnographer you wouldn’t capture. Just watching the expressions on people’s faces when they look in a particular shop window and you start to see minute movements of the face, that kind of thing. So I think there is a different place for visual stuff. I have been a bit conservative. I rely on, fall back on two or three very traditional ethnographic methods. I always think I am just privileged to be sitting with someone, spending time, eating food and listening to them for a while. I like that that works for me.

But in that sort of methods space, is there room for understanding and hearing about processes of racialization, processes of exclusion – are those experiences that particularly come through the everyday life approach?

Yes, I did some work (see Wise, 2009) after riots on a beach in Sydney, called Cronulla, about 10 years ago – it is 10 years this year – which was between Arabic-speaking young people and Anglo-Australians on the beach, and the Arabic-speaking young people were mostly identified as Muslims, but actually not all of them were. I did some work after that, interviewing some of those involved and the value of that kind of face-to-face work is that you get a sense of the visceral emotions that underpin some of these experiences. So if you are a young woman who has her hijab torn off on a weekly basis you get a sense of what that means for her in terms of her mobility around the city, in terms of her everyday sense of self and her sense of vulnerability, her sense of moral wounding, and you get that, which you can’t get from a survey.

That is quite important and I think it is important for a researcher to feel connected to the research subjects. But you also have to be careful with that. While working in Ashfield I got to know some white elderly people really, really well and I started to feel quite sympathetic towards their distress about some of the changes to the suburb and it was only a couple of years later when I had disconnected from those people and that field site that I began to get a bit more distance from it and write a little bit more, I suppose, evenly about some of it. I think that goes back to the question of the relationships that you form as well. With all the necessary empathy and connection comes the need to be a bit careful about where that takes you, not over identifying as well.

How do we manage that as researchers? Is it just through reflexivity?

I think it just means that you have to be reflexive about it, but it takes time, experience you know, to step away from it a bit. Remembering that it is a dance you have got to have. But it is important, just as it is important for me to know the emotional lives of those white elderly people. These changes are distressing for them and that accounts for some of the – kind of racist – stuff they were coming out with, and what was distressing for them was that their area had changed and all the rest of it. The challenge is to understand that this abstract racism comes, is drawn from, abstract discourses but comes from a place of experience as well and that they are trying to place those feelings somewhere. There are, then, different ways you can place those feelings, describe them, legitimate them. And so they found a place in a racist discourse that allowed them to express that and my argument at the time was that we need to give people another language to talk about the problems that come with place change when a process of diversification occurs.

Yes, neighbourhoods change and it is hard for people so let’s let them find a way to express that and find new ways for them to connect into the new communities that are there. The danger at the time was that if you said anything about having problems with the neighbourhood changing then you were put into the racist box, but that just becomes a kind of dead end then, and what do you do with that?

That’s interesting because I think one of the things we have been talking about, really relates to micro life being about routines, rhythms, the slight, the familiar and so on, but with your example of the Cronulla riots you are talking about the disorder of the everyday. Is there something about the dramatic in everyday lives, so the opposite of mundanity? A word that you have used quite a bit is visceral, which is quite an intense word, so I wonder what you think about everyday life, intensity and rupture?

The article (Wise, 2009) I wrote about Cronulla began with a story about the white people interviewed who had been on the beach leading up to the riots. They kept talking about two things: they said, ‘They kept kicking sand on our towels’ and the other one was ‘They played soccer on the beach’, and this would be said with such visceral outrage. So how does someone kicking sand or coming too close to your towel cause such outrage? What primes people to be tipped from everyday irritation to moral outrage?

So I was interested in that and how that ended up in a riot. And how two kids having fisticuffs on the beach with a life-saver can turn into a moment of national consciousness and division. How quickly that escalated within days, once it got to the media shock jocks and tabloid press ranting about it and the way that the categories start to – and particularly that is the Muslim question – these categories are so powerful, so you start to find all this everyday stuff sucked into these dangerous oppositional categories. ‘They are the sorts of people who kick sand, do you see’, they are the sorts of people therefore who are uncivilised. You know like kind of sexist comments on the beach, which anybody who has grown up on a beach will tell you there is no colour or religion attached to them, that is just masculine behaviour which is awful but it doesn’t belong to one culture or another particularly. But all of a sudden it gets sucked into, ‘You see they are Muslims, they are Arabs, that is what they do’. So quite quickly that situation spiralled, and that is when you have to come back to classics like the moral panic literature, spirals of signification, about crowd behaviour. But it was very interesting to me how it kind of began in the everyday, very much.

And I think the people who were interviewed couldn’t even quite understand themselves why it was so important to them. You know there was this real outrage in it. So there is something spectacular there, it lifts out of the local.

I suppose that is what we need to think through, that the everyday isn’t kind of packaged up as being about the familiar and the mundane but that the small is also a distillation, a manifestation of ‘the big’?

I mean there are several people studying everyday racism and that is an important field of scholarship in tracking the larger scale forces of power and how they play out in the everyday. You can talk about that in all sorts of different ways. It can sometimes be about racism but it can also be about the other forms of transformation going on that are interconnected with racism. There are also more positive transformations that occur and I think that it is legitimate to document them too. I don’t think documenting them is a denial of racism, you have got to be able to document all of that and when it goes on together and when it tips one way or the other.

Yes that tension is a really important one. And finally – we have got to our last question! Given the extent to which the realm of the everyday has preoccupied sociologists, where next for the everyday? You mentioned at the beginning Amanda, in a different context, about the process of taking stock, so where do you think we have got to as sociologists with the everyday and where might its future be?

At least for my work I think where I need to go next is to take better account of some of those paradoxes around the coexistence of conviviality and racism. That is really important for me and that is part of taking stock. Because we all have trajectories in our work and my earlier work was very much a response to filling in some of the silences at that time, which were that you could only talk about race and ethnicity through the lens of racism. That was nearly always done, here at least, through a more discursive approach to questions of race and ethnicity. I wanted to kind of bracket that and see what would come up ethnographically. So that was the project – and that has been bubbling along and now I feel like I need to come back to some of those older questions and set them back into conversation with what I have been doing. And I think the field has really expanded in a positive way in the last decade. So I suppose just taking a bit of stock of what is coming up. I think certainly for the Australian context we often import stuff from the European or the UK context, so for me, thinking about some of the specificities, comparative specificities, is important. Comparative work has become important for me, which is why I have been doing the work between Singapore and Sydney, exploring different forms of urban space. Australia is a very suburban society, we are not an urban society, and when we talk about urban encounter it is not in the close encounters of the city. So the question is, what happens when you import literature from London to here, so the zones of encounter are the Westfield Shopping Mall in Australia or the school or the front lawn of a suburban house? In other words we need to take stock of what happens when you import from context to context, which means you need to do comparative work and there is also a strange disconnect between the North American, particularly US, literature and the UK/European literature, so thinking about, well, which of the local specificities produce these traditions and what happens when you import across continents. That is probably another project, comparative and global everyday sociologies.

Thank you Amanda.