Paper short abstract:

Boundaries are part of the everyday they expose the ordinary and extra-ordinary of daily life and lived experience. Traversing these boundaries involves embodied experience, expression and engagement with the world. I will look at the boundaries of the everyday as extra-ordinary experience.

Paper long abstract:

What makes something ordinary or extra-ordinary? Where do experiences become bounded or surpass boundaries? Boundaries "always have the potential to be transgressed, seen across, thought beyond or else acted upon in ways that transform or expand them" (Irving 2010). In this paper I explore the ordinary as a contradiction. What can be interpreted as a shared experience can take on new dimensions when looked at from another perspective. In my research with people with dyslexia the mundane is exposed as containing multiple dimensions of experience. Something regarded as an everyday activity such as walking through a doorway can trigger bodied responses. For my collaborators they described how walking into a room, which is a physical crossing through a threshold, releases a myriad of unknown possibilities and floods of new information which accompany its crossing. The mundane is therefore something complex, interwoven with embodied experience, histories and expectations. The ways in which objects and subjects are bounded can traverse the skin, surfaces and exteriors and in so doing communicate information with persons. The different perceptions of bounded interobjectivity and intersubjectivity can create clashes and even bring into question personhood, as it can for my collaborators. Boundaries are also associated with censure or approval and therefore affected by social expectations. As my collaborators explained traversing certain boundaries resulted in people describing them as strange. Boundaries therefore can sit between expected behaviours and embodied experience and in this session I discuss persons as traversing boarders.