Time

A Year with Svend Brinkmann’s Book ‘Qualitative Inquiry in Everyday Life’

By Davood Gozli | by Davood Gozli

The project of recording a series of videos based on Svend Brinkmann’s book, Qualitative Inquiry in Everyday Life: Working with Everyday Life Materials, continues. I just posted Part 9. Two more parts remain to be recorded and then the series will come to its conclusion. After updating the Patreon Videos page, I realized I had started working on this series last March–a little over a year ago. The book presents itself as a “survival guide”…

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book review Education Psychology in Everyday Life

Review of ‘The Art of Self-Improvement: Ten Timeless Truths’ by Anna K. Schaffner

By Davood Gozli | by Davood Gozli

Self-help is a tricky subject. Depending on the audience, it can provoke intense sympathy and intense skepticism. A dismissive attitude toward the current self-help culture can point to the lack of substance and depth in the popular material, the deceitful and self-serving “gurus,” the hyper-optimism of followers, the fixation with “positive thinking,” the unrealistic promises, the individualistic bias, and the social-political blindspots. But should the self-help culture–with all its associated ideas and aspirations–be completely dismissed?…

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Psychology in Everyday Life

Being with Others

By Davood Gozli | by Davood Gozli

Connecting to your past, to your history, to your language, to your family, should not be done only for its own sake, or–even worse–for the sake of acquiring the comfort for being with the in-group. Connecting to your history shapes your presence, sharpens it, makes it truthful. That is the justification for pursuing the connections, analogous to why we ought to read history–not for the sake of the past, but for the sake of the…

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Psychology in Everyday Life

Remembering & Being Remembered

By Davood Gozli | by Davood Gozli

What I wrote previously about my relationship with Toronto during 2010-2015, and the subsequent deepening of that relationship during the following six years while away from the city, and my eventual return last year, places the burden of agency exclusively on me. After I finished writing, a different way of looking at those years and the relationship occurred to me. A way of looking that recognizes an agency that is external to me. What if,…

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Psychology in Everyday Life

Remembering & Returning to a City

By Davood Gozli | by Davood Gozli

Living in Toronto during the five years of my graduate studies felt incomplete. I am not referring to the incompleteness of an unfinished story or an interrupted episode, but an incompleteness that would persist with any length of time. Because of that incompleteness, which is not in length, but in width or depth, leaving Toronto did not feel like losing something that belonged to me. It did not feel like a sudden distancing of something…

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