Mission Statement

"The unmarked generally remains unnamed and unaccented even in social research. ... Investigations of social life often begin with that which is already visible and named because of its 'exoticness' or its heavily articulated moral and political significance. Although there are many deviance journals to analyze socially unusual behavior there is no Journal of Mundane Behavior to explicitly analyze conformity." -- Wayne Brekhus, "A Sociology of the Unmarked: Redirecting our Focus" (Sociological Theory 16:1, p. 36) (Permission has been granted by Dr. Brekhus for the use of the title.)

The Journal of Mundane Behavior, hosted by the Department of Sociology and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at California State University, Fullerton, is a peer-reviewed journal that is devoted to the study of the "unmarked" -- those aspects of our everyday lives that typically go unnoticed by us, both as individuals and as academics. We approach these topics with both the sense of whimsy about the extraordinary efforts we put into maintaining such "mundane" aspects of our lives, and with the seriousness of intellectual integrity in our analysis of these matters.

All around us are ordinary phenomena that can astound us if only we attend to them with the seriousness they do not typically receive: letters and letter-writing, street scenes, routine family life, artistic and cinematic depictions of how we live our lives, everyday work and commercial situations, sociable occasions, nonprofessional sports activities, transportation contexts, venues of legal and political action, viewing televised entertainment, consuming information from various media, and so on. The study of the extreme, outlandish, and "profane" aspects of late 20th century existence has been well-developed and has given rise to many useful theoretical and research tools. Here, we want to turn these analytic tools to the level of everyday life, to examine in microscopic and graphic detail the more mundane, habitual, and quotidian aspects of our existence - including how we define what is "mundane". These unnoticed, unmarked aspects of our lives are often the most political and yet depoliticized, and it is one of the goals of this journal to expose these processes.

We see this new inter- and cross-disciplinary journal as dedicated to the development of research, theory and method regarding the very obvious features of our existence, both as aspects of our lives and as "the unmarked." We see a fruitful future for the excavation of the usual and the development of an intellectual agenda that allows for this form of discovery. We also want to encourage contributors and readers to explore the various ramifications of the "unmarked" and the conformity required by its various forms, including the social and political ramifications of conformity in a time when "deviance" and extremeness seem to have become the norm.

We view the online format of this journal as posing a significant opportunity for contributors to utilize this electronic medium to full benefit by providing supplemental visuals, video and/or audio, live hyperlinks and interactivity with their submissions, thereby giving their analytic work a real-world context that would otherwise be missing.

We also see the importance of wide-scale access to the work that this journal intends to disseminate, and we plan on soliciting and publishing materials accessible to the interested public as well as to specialists in the various fields touched on by JMB.

And finally, we see this forum as one characterized by a sense of wonder and humor. To discuss "the mundane" in a time when everything seems to be extreme would seem to require that we lighten the mood a bit, while at the same maintaining the intellectual integrity of the works published within. As such, authors and readers both are invited to "let down their hair".

Questions? Comments? E-mail Scott Schaffer, the managing editor.