1st Edition
The Nexus of Practices Connections, constellations, practitioners
The Nexus of Practices: connections, constellations, practitioners brings leading theorists of practice together to provide a fresh set of theoretical impulses for the surge of practice-focused studies currently sweeping across the social disciplines. The book addresses key issues facing practice theory, expands practice theory’s conceptual repertoire, and explores new empirical terrain. With each intellectual move, it generates further opportunities for social research.
More specifically, the book’s chapters offer new approaches to analysing connections within the nexus of practices, to exploring the dynamics and implications of the constellations that practices form, and to understanding people as practitioners that carry on practices. Topics examined include social change, language, power, affect, reflection, large social phenomena, and connectivity over time and space. Contributors thereby counter claims that practice theory cannot handle large phenomena and that it ignores people. The contributions also develop practice theoretical ideas in dialogue with other forms of social theory and in ways illustrated and informed by empirical cases and examples.
The Nexus of Practices will quickly become an important point of reference for future practice-focused research in the social sciences.
Introduction, (Allison Hui, Theodore Schatzki and Elizabeth Shove)
1. Learning in and Across Practices: Enablement as Subjectivation, (Thomas Alkemeyer and Nikolaus Buschmann)
2. Qualities of Connective Tissue in Hospital Life: How Complexes of Practices Change, (Stanley Blue and Nicola Spurling)
3. Sociomateriality in Posthuman Practice Theory, (Silvia Gherardi)
4. Variation and the Intersection of Practices, (Allison Hui)
5. Epigenetics, Theories of Social Practice and Lifestyle Disease, (Cecily Maller)
6. Technologies Within and Beyond Practices, (Janine Morley)
7. Is Small the Only Beautiful? Making Sense of ‘Large Phenomena’ From a Practice-Based Perspective, (Davide Nicolini)
8. Practices and their Affects, (Andreas Reckwitz)
9. Sayings, Texts and Discursive Formations, (Theodore Schatzki)
10. Reflexive Knowledge in Practices, (Robert Schmidt)
11. Matters of Practice, (Elizabeth Shove)
12. Placing Power in Practice Theory, (Matt Watson)
13. How Should We Understand ‘General Understandings’?, (Daniel Welch and Alan Warde)
References
Biography
Hui, Allison ; Schatzki, Theodore; Shove, Elizabeth
"This dazzling volume demonstrates the power of rich diversity among practice theories and theorists. It has started a conversation that will engender a new generation of practice-based studies and reshape the field, as researchers respond to the book’s empirical and theoretical challenges. Essential reading." Professor Emeritus Stephen Kemmis, Charles Sturt University, Australia
