Questions of Practice in Philosophy and Social Theory

Editor(s):
Theordore Schatzki
Anders Buch
Book summary:

Humanistic theory for more than the past 100 years has been marked by extensive attention to practice and practices.  Two prominent streams of thought sharing this focus are pragmatism and theories of practice.  This volume brings together internationally prominent theorists to explore key dimensions of practice and practices on the background of parallels and points of contact between these two traditions.  The contributors all are steeped in one or both of these streams and well-known for their work on practice. The collected essays explore three important themes: what practice and practices are, normativity, and transformation. The volume deepens understanding of these three practice themes while strengthening appreciation of the parallels between and complementariness of pragmatism and practice theory.

Publication year:
2018
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.
A&S department affiliation:

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.
A&S department affiliation:

Understanding Spatial Media

Editor(s):
Matthew W. Wilson
Rob Kitchin
Tracey Lauriault
Book summary:

Over the past decade, a new set of interactive, open, participatory and networked spatial media have become widespread.  These include mapping platforms, virtual globes, user-generated spatial databases, geodesign and architectural and planning tools, urban dashboards and citizen reporting geo-systems, augmented reality media, and locative media.  Collectively these produce and mediate spatial big data and are re-shaping spatial knowledge, spatial behaviour, and spatial politics.

Publication year:
2017
Publisher:
SAGE
Bio:
Photo:
Short bio:
Matthew W. Wilson, PhD, is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky and Visiting Scholar at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. He co-founded and co-directs the New Mappings Collaboratory which studies and facilitates new engagements with geographic representation. He is co-editor of Understanding Spatial Media (SAGE), and his most recent book is New Lines: Critical GIS and the Trouble of the Map (University of Minnesota Press). He has previously taught at Ball State University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and his current research examines mid-20th century, digital mapping practices. He earned his PhD and MA from the University of Washington and his BS from Northwest Missouri State University. His childhood was spent in Pumpkin Center, Missouri, a small farming community in Nodaway County, where his family has farmed for over 150 years.
A&S department affiliation:

New Lines: Critical GIS and the Trouble of the Map

Author(s):
Matthew W. Wilson
Book summary:

New Lines considers a society increasingly drawn to the power of the digital map, examining the conceptual and technical developments of the field of geographic information science as this work is refracted through a pervasive digital culture. This book draws together archival research on the birth of the digital map with a reconsideration of the critical turn in mapping and cartographic thought.

Publication year:
2017
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press
Bio:
Photo:
Short bio:
Matthew W. Wilson, PhD, is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky and Visiting Scholar at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. He co-founded and co-directs the New Mappings Collaboratory which studies and facilitates new engagements with geographic representation. He is co-editor of Understanding Spatial Media (SAGE), and his most recent book is New Lines: Critical GIS and the Trouble of the Map (University of Minnesota Press). He has previously taught at Ball State University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and his current research examines mid-20th century, digital mapping practices. He earned his PhD and MA from the University of Washington and his BS from Northwest Missouri State University. His childhood was spent in Pumpkin Center, Missouri, a small farming community in Nodaway County, where his family has farmed for over 150 years.
A&S department affiliation:

Geography Colloquium "Should GIS Sing? The Promise and Peril of Mapping Music History"

Maps have long punctuated musicological texts, but only recently have music historians begun to leverage maps as tools for analysing, organizing, and presenting research. In part inspired by the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities at large, historical musicologists are now paying greater attention to the geographical contexts in which past performances took place. And the increasing accessibility of web-based GIS platforms makes it possible to visualize and analyze music historical trends across time and place with greater ease than ever before.

Yet such work - at the intersection of spatial history and the digital humanities - still faces significant challenges. The most widely accessible GIS tools fail to reconcile tensions between the spatial and temporal. They struggle to visualize premodern, non-Cartesian conceptions of space, or smoothly incorporate qualitative as well as quantitative data - especially sound and visual media.

 

Date:
Location:
CB 334

Other geographies: Thinking space, from somewhere

Dominant histories of geographic thought confine the ‘cultural turn’ -which brought geographers into conversation with alternative epistemologies like critical race, postcolonial, Indigenous, feminist, and queer theories- to the 1990s/early 2000s. These theories may indeed have reached peak saturation in Geography then. But while significant parts of the discipline see the cultural turn as a thing of the past, it is ongoing. And there is thus now a wealth of scholarship that shows us how social difference works in and through space and place. Yet this work is still on the margins in Geography. For, despite widespread good intentions, there is considerable resistance to the epistemological and embodied challenges that come along with these alternative theorizations. Dismissals, erasures, and devaluings are enacted through acts of micro- and micro-aggressions, non-/tokenistic citation, canonical gatekeeping and more - all to the detriment of individuals on the margins and of efforts to advance a collective critical project in these deeply troubling times. In this talk, I argue for a new turn/revolution, one focused on building relationships with each ‘other’. I argue that though we have considerable evidence that we, as ‘others’ & allies, are not heard, we can build new centres, ones that extend what we know to be true because we live it in our bodies and on our skin; that is, that differential embodiment is the most consequential element in determining life chances in our world, and that this fact ought not be treated as a sideshow but as a main event

Date:
Location:
Patterson Office Tower 18th floor, West End Room
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