Ordinariness

Building on a recent expansion of critical attention to the ordinary across humanistic and social sciences disciplines, contributors to this special issue introduce the orthogonal term ordinariness. If the ordinary connotes something monolithic and self-evident, the authors argue, ordinariness suggests something plural and diffuse. For example, ordinariness is the language of riddling and enigma, rumor and gossip; the affective experience of desirelessness, exhaustion, failure, and inconvenience; and the phenomenological terrain of the addicted, gustatory, and breathing body. Ordinariness, the authors conclude, infuses yet unsettles the ordinary.

Contributors: Nicholas Baer, Annabel Barry, Hannah Cox, Eesha Kumar, Sandra Laugier, Adrian de Leon, Daryl Maude, Sean Michael Muller, Ianna Hawkins Owen, Thomas Sutherland, Amber Sweat