Social Practice

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in an administration office in Berlin (Germany). The analytic focus lies on how the staff mis/uses a software for the management of appointments to create a specific order among the so called clients. While their practices enable them to sustain order in the office they also adjust neo-liberalisms order/logic of an active, self-disciplinating subject.

The ways in which people view and use time have very real material consequences that both shape and reflect the relationship between human society and the physical environment, thereby affecting sustainability transitions. More or less resource-intensive time cultures, that is, shared repertoires of time-related meanings and solutions to everyday problems, coexist both within and between countries. Moreover, they often cut across other socio-economic and cultural fault lines such as class, gender and rural-urban divisions. Having remained largely under-researched in the past, the recent ‘temporal turn’ in the social sciences has highlighted these time-cultural differences and their social and ecological impacts.

The article focuses on the scientist’s body with the aim of analyzing how knowledge
is produced by the body in scientific practice. This process is mediated by links and interactions
with the sociomaterial dimension of working practices and may be defined as a learning process.
The paper investigates how mastery of the body is produced, perceived, defined and narrated by
researchers engaged in laboratory practice. The paper shows how the scientist’s corporeal
learning is gradual, the fruit of daily disciplining, and it is only through a process of embodiment
that the body develops sensitive ability and expert competency. The article includes three
episodes of knowledge embodiment in the form of immersion in practice and ex-post reflection on
the practice itself.

A panel discussion as part of the Smart Museum of Art's symposium Of Hospitality on May 5, 2012 with Hannah B. Higgins, University of Illinois at Chicago; Erika Dudley, The University of Chicago; and Amy M. Mooney, Columbia College, Chicago sharing reflections on hospitality, criticality, and the meal as they intersect with the idea of the domestic with a response by University of Chicago MFA student Anais Daly.

In this short essay it is argued the importance of facing an epistemological development of micro-places, in order to move towards a society whose communication is based on the opportunities that the most simple inter-subjective contact, which emerges in the own habitat, can improve the mutual understanding.

In this brief guide to the interpretation of collective action for anthropologists in training, I propose a logical-consequentialist framework for identifying clusters of experience and indirect responsibility in the impact of behaviour that reflects internalized structures performed implicitly, but rigidly by social actors. I propose a definition of ordinary ritual action by borrowing insights from Rappaport, Turner, Bourdieu, Sperber, Boyer, & Liénard, and expand on ways to interpret 1) the fuzziness of meaning, and 2) the material consequence of collective action.

See http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/performance-network

"The Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network (CIPN) brings together people from a wide variety of disciplines in Cambridge and beyond who are engaging with performance as a concept, from music and literary studies to anthropology, architecture and medicine. It asks how these varied interests might relate, intersect and interact.

Interest in performance reflects a movement away from thinking in terms of immutable objects and singular subjects. It focuses attention on collective contexts. It also models a different way to mean: so performances, theatricality, theatre, and the arts in practice are relevant, too. But the group’s main focus is on the potential of the idea of performance as an umbrella approach to culture: a 'kind of thinking in its own right' (Cull/Minors 2012).


What does it mean to frame, stage, display or enact? In what sense might all forms of self-consciously public statements – art, politics, academic discourse – be seen as performance?

How is our post-print digital era, with its forces of equivalence and convergence, prompting reconsideration of traditional categories and boundaries – ie of the disciplinary itself?

How do we understand objects (fixed, a record) when they cannot exist separate from their experience on the part of somebody or other (time-bound, embodied)?

How do we understand the subject when it depends on imagined and actual collectivities to position itself?

Each session will be organized around two short but very different presentations, followed by a discussion. We hope that these discursive encounters might suggest some of the potential benefits of greater dialogue between disciplines, and between the academy and creative practice more generally."

Visual artist Amy Spiers has been making participatory and socially engaged art since 2006. Her article explores her own evolving understanding of community and social engagement through a critical reflection of a number of her artworks over the last few years. She describes how theorists Rosalyn Deutsche, Miwon Kwon and Claire Bishop, have looked to theories of radical and plural democracy, particularly Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau's concept of antagonism, to reveal the political shortcomings of much socially engaged art. She finishes the article by explaining how these theoretical underpinnings have impacted her art practice and advocates for a more destabilizing approach to socially engaged and participatory art practices.

The question can no longer just be whether “art and social practice” or creative forms of activism are part of larger neo liberal agenda nor if they are potentially radical in their conception, delivery or consumption. The question also becomes: what are the effects of social practice art and design for the artists, institutions, and the publics they elicit in public and private spaces; that is, how can we consider such artworks differently? I argue the dilution of social practices’ potentially radical interventions into cultural processes and their absorption into larger neo liberal agendas limits how, as Jacques Rancière might argue, they can intervene in the “distribution of the sensible.” I will use a case study example from The Center for Tactical Magic, an artist group from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Food consumption is the domestic consumption domain with the largest environmental impact. Fostering change towards more sustainable food purchases is thus key for reducing environmental pressures. In this paper, we adopt a social practice approach to investigate the interconnectedness of sustainable food shopping practices. Using quantitative survey data (n=1,217) and primary data obtained from 15 qualitative semi-structured interviews covering three European countries (Austria, Hungary and The Netherlands), we studied: 1) the frequency of purchasing regional, seasonal, processed, organic food and meat/fish, 2) the carriers of each practice, and 3) the meanings and competences associated with each practice. Studying how (food shopping and consumption) practices are interrelated is a promising approach to gain a deeper understanding why certain practices became locked-in and how this can be overcome. Moreover, by identifying positive spillover effects between practices this study shows how policy measures directed towards more sustainable food consumption patterns can be designed more effectively.
The analysis suggests that performances of sustainable food shopping practices are environmentally consistent when analysed at the aggregate level. At the individual level, however, inconsistent performances are the rule. On the basis of the qualitative interviews the reasons for (in)consistencies and the possibility of spillover effects between sustainable food shopping practices are investigated. Overall, we find only weak evidence for the existence of a 'general conservation stance' underlying food shopping practices. Wide-ranging environmental spillovers across all sustainable food shopping practices can thus not be expected.

Ethical consumption and sustainable consumption are often considered to be synonymous. I suggest they are better understood as distinct phenomena. The importance of this distinction is in challenging the assumption that sustainable consumption can be achieved by scaling up ethical consumption: if everyone was an ethical consumer, consumption would be sustainable. Firstly, the role of the consumer in both ethical consumption and sustainable consumption needs to be problematised. Secondly, we need to acknowledge that that ethical consumption tells us very little about the challenges of sustainable consumption. Lastly, we need a more appropriate way of understanding sustainable consumption – I suggest this is provided by a practice theoretical approach to consumption.

This report introduces a novel approach to sustainability policy — a practice perspective. We argue that social practices are a better target of intervention for sustainability policy than ‘behaviour’, ‘choice’ or technical innovation alone. Understanding the dynamics of practices offers us a window into transitions towards sustainability.

We consume resources as part of the practices that make up everyday
life—showering, doing the laundry, cooking or driving—what we might call inconspicuous or ordinary consumption. While we may have degrees of choice in how we perform these practices, access to resources (economic, social, cultural), norms of social interaction, as well as infrastructures and institutional organisation constrain our autonomy. Practices are social phenomena—their performance entails the reproduction of cultural meanings, socially learnt skills and common tools, technologies and products. This shift of perspective places practices, not individuals or infrastructures, at the centre stage of analysis. Taking practices as the unit of analysis moves policy beyond false alternatives—beyond individual or social, behaviour or infrastructure. A practice perspective re-frames the question from “How do we change individuals’ behaviours to be more sustainable?” to “How do we shift everyday practices to be more sustainable?” After all, ‘behaviours’ are largely individuals’ performances of social practices.