Cover; Table of Contents; About the Author; Preface and Acknowledgements, or Music, Mucus and 'California Sociology'; Introduction: Reality in everyday life; Philosophically Informed Sociology; Introducing Slow Sociology; Conventional and Unconventional Realities: The Case of Sexual Difference; Cultural Sociology; Culturally Figured Reality; Once More, With Feeling: Beyond Performance; Variations in Space and Time; Reflexivity: Enacting Cultural Categories Along With Their Instances; Multiple Realities and Their Maintenance; Artful Practices and Making Sense.

What is reality and how do we make sense of it in everyday life? Why do some realities seem more real than others, and what of seemingly contradictory and multiple realities? This book considers reality as we represent, perceive and experience it. It suggests that the realities we take as ‘real’ are the result of real-time, situated practices that draw on and draw together many things - technologies and objects, people, gestures, meanings and media. Examining these practices illuminates reality (or rather our sense of it) as always ‘virtually real’, that is simplified and artfully produced. This examination also shows us how the sense of reality that we make is nonetheless real in its consequences.