The Nexus of Practices, Connections, constellations, practitioners

Editor(s):
Theodore Schatzki
Allison Hui
Elizabeth Shove
Book summary:

This book brings leading theorists of practice together to provide a set of theoretical impulses for the surge of practice-focused studies currently sweeping across the social disciplines.  The book addresses key issue 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.


Publication year:
2017
Publisher:
Routledge
Bio:
Photo:
Short bio:
Ted Schatzki is Professor of Geography and Philosophy. He is also former Senior Associate Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences, former Chair of the Department of Philosophy, and cofounder and former codirector of the University’s Committee on Social Theory, which oversees a multidisciplinary graduate-level teaching and research program in social thought. Schatzki earned a degree in applied mathematics from Harvard University (1977) and degrees in philosophy from Oxford University (1979) and UC Berkeley (1982, 1986). His research interests lie in theorizing social life, and he is widely associated with a stream of thought called practice theory that is active today in a range of social disciplines, including geography, sociology, organizational studies, education, anthropology, international relations, and history. Schatzki is the author of five books: Social Practices (1996), The Site of the Social (2002), Martin Heidegger: Theorist of Space (2007),The Timespace of Human Activity (2010), and Social Change in a Material World (forthcoming). He has also co-edited three volumes on practice theory: The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (2001), The Nexus of Practices (2017), and Questions of Practice in Philosophy and Social Theory (2018). In addition, he is author of numerous articles on such social topics as flat ontology, social space, learning, large social phenomena, art, social change, materiality, governance, and discourse, as well as many essays on human action and the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Schatzki has been a research fellow of the Fulbright Commission and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He has also been a visiting professor or researcher at the University of Exeter, The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Aalborg University Copenhagen, the Karl-Franzens University in Graz, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna, Lancaster University, the University of Zurich, The University of Bielefeld, The Free University in Berlin, The Charles Sturt University in Australia, the Catholic University Eichstaett-Ingolstadt in Germany, and the University of Bergen. In the spring of 2018 he received an honorary doctorate from Aalborg University in Denmark.
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