The Culture of Cities Project is pleased to announce its call for papers for its panel “Everyday stuff: narrating the social lives of material objects”, to take place during the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association (CSAA) at York University, Toronto.

As silent protagonists of our everyday lives, mundane objects simultaneously escape and fascinate the scholar, who seeks to turn their apparent irrelevance, inertness and muteness into phenomena worthy of detailed consideration. We are particularly interested in contributions in the form of case studies from both graduate students and established scholars who aim at discovering mundane things and their (contested) use as occasions for research into the interpretive complexity of the structure of everyday life. A list of topics includes, but is not restricted to:

˛ Tools and technologies
˛ Architecture and infrastructure
˛ Landscapes and monuments
˛ Amenities
˛ Clothing, food and other consumer goods
˛ Domestic and public furniture
Paper proposals should include the title of the paper, name, institutional affiliation and e-mail address of the author(s), as well as an abstract of no more than 500 words. The deadline for proposals is December 31st, 2005. Authors will be notified of their participation by January 31st, 2006.

Please, direct submissions to:
Diego Llovet (dllovet@yorku.ca)
Department of Sociology, York University
Toronto, Canada