Quiet Standards: Diary Fragments on Everyday Hierarchies
Emily Payne
Emily Payne is a final-year Classical Civilisation student at the University of Warwick. Her academic interests, furthered by the Global Connections module, include cultural hierarchy, colonial afterlives and the politics of everyday life. She intends to continue exploring global and interdisciplinary questions through her postgraduate study.
About the Project
Quiet Standards: Diary Fragments on Everyday Hierarchies explores the lingering idea of cultural and national superiority through a sequence of diary-like fragments based on ordinary moments from my own experience between England and Brazil. The project focuses on comments, preferences and assumptions through which Europe or “the West” can appear as an embedded standard of value, shaping ideas of language, beauty, distance and belonging. Rather than solely approaching global hierarchy through large political structures or institutions, the project instead considers how it persists in everyday life: through jokes, admiration, aspiration, and subtle forms of comparison which often go unnamed. The diary form allows for the cumulative and often ambiguous nature of these moments to be captured, while the critical reflection situates them within wider discussions of colonial afterlives, symbolic power, language ideology and racialised standards of value. The project asks how global hierarchies continue to shape what feels desirable, prestigious or ‘normal’, even in apparently small and familiar interactions.