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Many homes in affluent Western societies have an ongoing battle against domestic mess, because of the steady inflow of new acquisitions. This essay looks at the ways in which mess has travelled through modern history and has ended up as both a powerful metaphor and a constant everyday worry in consumer life. In this process, mess has often been defined as a problematic condition, often reflecting the moral shortcoming of messy individuals. It has also created new market opportunities, services and solutions for de-cluttering. Mess illustrates some of the tensions in contemporary patterns of consumption and highlights the understudied aspects of how commodities are transformed during their domestic life cycle. The focus is on the ways in which materiality and affect are linked in these processes. The paper draws on an ongoing research project, “Managing Overflow.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores research routines which are so mundane that they are rarely noticed and may be hard to even verbalise. How does one acquire the bodily dexterity of rifling through a filing cabinet, skimming Google lists or judging a book by holding in it one’s hands? Drawing on interviews with and observations among scholars of both the analogue and digital generations, mainly in the social and cultural sciences, I look at how such routines are established, naturalised and transformed. They may be seen as methods slowly turning into inconspicuous habits. To what extent do such practices, which are often seen as intensely personal, actually mirror norms and cultural conventions of specific academic settings? With a focus on materialities and sensibilities, I discuss three arenas of everyday academic activities: writing, reading and handling information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnologists like to think of themselves as masters of the study of the everyday, but we still know surprising little how this mundane machinery works. Everyday life remains something of a black box, our understanding is still piecemeal and fragmented. This paper explores cohabitation and circulation of objects, affects and activities in the home--seen as a workshop where raw materials, raw feelings, previously untried movements and new routines are welded into everyday patterns. The concepts of throwntogetherness, assemblage and entanglement are used to explore such transformations and co-dependencies, often naturalised into invisibility. The home is also discussed a moral economy with strong ideas about good and bad, duties and rights as well as a space colonized by ideals and consumer dreams, which often can produce guilty feelings of "not good enough.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]