'Mystery in Everyday Life' James Hodgson
| Dates: | 20 March 2024 |
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| Times: | 12:30 - 12:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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This seminar organised by the School of Sociology and Social Policy (SSSP) at The University of Leeds is given by James Hodgson (The University of Manchester) on the topic of 'mystery work' and mystery as a social phenomenon. See the link to SSSP for more details.
Abstract:
Mystery is everywhere in social life. Whether the mundane mysteries of other people – strangers’ names, their lives and relationships – or the great unsolvable questions about life on other planets, life after death, the meaning of life itself. Nevertheless, few studies have considered mystery as a social phenomenon in its own right; this paper aims to sketch out some initial ideas on the subject.
I begin by drawing on a recent project of mine that explored wellbeing retreats. Running alongside the coordinated practices carried out on retreat to achieve self-mastery or self-knowledge (the ‘self work’), I found another set of practices that were directed at the accomplishment of a mysterious felt sense of connectedness. In an initial paper I characterised this second set of practices as a sort of ‘mystery work’.
In this paper, I build on these findings. I want to conceptualise two kinds of mystery work – one kind that accomplishes or creates mystery, and another kind that sets out to repair or solve the problem of mystery. That is, I want to distinguish ‘generative’ mystery work (the sort I found in wellbeing retreats) from a more ‘reparative’ type of mystery work (the sort you might find in a detective novel).
To close the paper I discuss examples of what people find mysterious in everyday life that have been collected from the Mass Observation Project (MOP), and suggest some future directions for the research.
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University of Leeds
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