From ‘practice theory methodologies’ to ‘methodologies-in/as-practices’

How could those working with practice theories engage with efforts to decolonise methodologies? How could those decolonising methodologies benefit from understanding methodologies-in/as-practices?  

This pair of questions informs my recent paper in the Sociological Review entitled ‘Situating decolonial strategies within methodologies-in/as-practices: a critical appraisal’. The paper provides an argument responding to both questions that you can, and I hope will, read. But in this post, I want to draw out additional reflections around the history of ‘practice theory methodologies’, and implications of my discussion for the community engaging with practice theories.  

Interview with Bhavna Middha

There are rich examples of practice theory-informed research that addresses bundles of professional/organisational practices, leisure practices, or everyday practices related to, for example, pressing concerns such as sustainability. Yet considerations of the nexus of practices invite researchers to continue creatively investigating links that may cross over different sub-disciplinary literatures or methodological discussions. In this interview, Allison Hui talks with Bhavna Middha about how her research, on topics such as eating and community engagement, has engaged with varied everyday and governance practices through a grounding in Schatzki’s site ontology. Our discussion highlights how digital and online methods can be integrated as forms of co-production.

Call for Applications “Practicing Place: Sociocultural Practices and Epistemic Configurations”

The newly approved DFG-funded research training group “Practicing Place: Sociocultural Practices and Epistemic Configurations“ at the University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany, invites applications for

• 10 part-time positions (75%) as research associate (doctoral candidate)
• and a full-time position (100%) as research associate (postdoc)

to be filled by April 1, 2021, initially for a period of 3 years.

Please see the attached files for further information. The deadline is December 10, 2020.

Practicing Place_docHerunterladen

Practicing Place_postdocHerunterladen

Johannes Coughlan – Some newcomer’s observations on the relation of ethnomethodology to practice theory

Ethnomethodology (EM) and practice theory (PT) should pay more attention to each other. This might sound like a strange, even preposterous claim. After all, both strands of scholarship currently have a respectable academic following and are in no need to expand their territory, so to speak. Moreover, a newcomer to either of these traditions might struggle to see any fundamental differences between them. Garfinkel, after all, contemplated the name “neo-praxeology” before eventually landing on the mouthful that is ethnomethodology. There are also many publications within the PT literature that discuss and praise the relevance of EM (e.g. Nicolini 2013). Experiences at recent conferences have, however, left me wondering about the relationship between EM and PT.

Deborah Giustini – A praxeological and methodological quest: Capturing invisible expertise

 

As a practice theorist, I engage with Heideggerian and Wittgensteinian arguments that practice is the source of meaning and human action (cf. Schatzki, 1996), broadly sustained by practical understanding and intelligibility, normativity, and teleo-affectivity.  I am particularly fascinated by expertise as a form of social, normative, and relational mastery, as “skill, know-how and technique” (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson, 2012: 14) inscribed in bodies and minds, that practitioners must possess to competently engage in a certain practice.

In my research, I look at expertise in labour practices, to understandhow the internal organisation of different types of work shapes conditions of expert conduct, and how this conversely affects practitioners’ relations and engenders conflicts and inequality. I consider here the case of ‘conference interpreting’. This is an exceptionally complex professional practice, based on multilingual communication services performed in high-stake settings (e.g. supra-national organisations, business…), and positioned in labour markets as part of the language industry. (If you cannot visualise it, think about that film with Nicole Kidman doing headphones-and-microphones simultaneous ‘live’ translations for the UN…).

Nicola Spurling – Lancaster Lines

In response to the aims of a workshop on Connecting Practices in Lancaster during April 2019, this short experimental piece explores lines in Lancaster and their multiple relationships with and forms of connection to practice. It therefore addresses the theme of ‘processes of connection’ and explores line-making as such a process. The piece of thought has two starting points. The first is Ingold’s ‘comparative anthropology of the line’ (2016:1) in which he argues that the production and significance of lines should be a topic for anthropological study, and in which he provides some conceptual starting points for such a project. His focus on different forms and classes of line across practices including walking, weaving, storytelling, drawing and writing drew my attention to painted lines in the first place, and raised a question ‘how do painted lines do work in the world?’. In this paper I am interested in how practice theory might offer conceptual starting points for answering this question.

Elizabeth Shove – Connecting practices: accumulation, circulation, interweaving and convergence

The charge that practice theories are only or perhaps especially good for studying small scale and typically bounded activities like showering, smoking, playing floorball or cooking dinner has been repeatedly and I would say effectively rebuffed.  Behind the scenes, and sometimes up front, those who claim that practice theories are incapable of engaging with large and important questions about politics, economy, climate change, power and inequality make one or more mistakes about what practice theories offer, and about the core ideas on which they are based (Schatzki 2016; Nicolini 2017).  Proponents of transitions theories (Geels et al. 2016; Schot et al. 2016)are, for instance unwilling to accept that practices exist on a single plane.  Others adhere to incompatible forms of conceptualization, analysis and interpretation, hankering after big explanations and abstracted laws of markets and political, economic processes. Although related, these critiques are not of a piece and neither are the responses to them.

“Sensing Collectives – Aesthetic and Political Practices Intertwined” (Call for contributions)

In collaboration with the ICI Berlin (Institute for Cultural Inquiry) the workshop “Sensing Collectives – Aesthetic and Political Practices Intertwined” will take place on November 14th–16th in Berlin. With keynotes by Antoine Hennion (Centre Sociologie d’innovation, Mines Tech) and Sophia Prinz (Berlin University of the Arts and the European University Viadrina Frankfurt/Oder). Call for contributions open until August 15th 2018.

The aim of this workshop is to reexamine the nexus between aesthetics and politics by turning away from their conception as institutionally or communicatively differentiated spheres and instead take a “practice turn” (Schatzki/Knorr Cetina/von Savigny 2001) to have a look at what is actually done, and how, and to what effect – both in art, design and aesthetics (e.g. Zembylas 2014) and in politics, policy-making and governance (e.g. Jonas/Littig 2016). Contributions by participants working in the field of practice theory are highly welcome.

The relation between aesthetics and politics has long been an issue of concern: often treated as opposites, sometimes connected perhaps, but essentially belonging to different spheres. Politics has been understood as the public questioning and shaping of collective orders, through power struggle or rational deliberation, mainly within the institutions of the nation state; while aesthetics has been considered either a private affair or a radical form of play contained in the eld of arts (Rebentisch 2012; Hoggett/Thompson 2012; Reckwitz/ Prinz/ Schäfer 2015a). Their mingling has been observed with skepticism (e.g. Horkheimer/Adorno 2006 [1944]; Downs 1957; Debord 1996 [1967]. Yet this line of separation is undoubtedly less clear than some have claimed. For aesthetics and politics this is re ective of what can also be seen as a broader questioning of accounts based on social theories of functional differentiation.

Susann Wagenknecht – Normative notions of practice: on rules, accountability and in-/formality

The relation between practices and rules – as well as norms – keeps bothering me. Practice theories commonly refute the explanatory power of rules and norms and instead declare normativity as something to be explained, ultimately, in terms of Wittgensteinian rule-following. It seems to me, however, that while this approach is sound and elegant (and while much of my conceptual thinking is deeply committed to it), more reflection on the status of normativity within practices is needed.

Illustrative of this need is my own ongoing ethnographic work on mobility practices and urban traffic infrastructure (comp. Tobias Röhl). Specifically, I study how municipal traffic engineers care for a city’s traffic lights. While these traffic engineers are engaged in particular professional practices – designing traffic lights, repairing and maintaining them, also handling citizen complaints – they also deal with practices as their object of work when they seek to ‘tame’ and regulate urban traffic flows. Yet, crucially, their work concerns rules: engineering conventions, industry standards, and, above all, traffic laws. Municipal traffic engineers are obliged to follow rules, re-inforce rules and impose rules upon traffic participants. In fact, we all take part in enforcing (or, undermining) traffic rules. “Bei Rot bleibst du steh’n, bei Grün kannst du geh’n” (red says stop, green says go) is what we, time and again, tell small children. It is a rule we urgently seek to impart to them even though many of us, adult pedestrians, don’t stick to it when no child is around.