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A Practice Sensibility: An Invitation To The Theory Of Practice Architectures
 9813295384,  9789813295384

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 5
Contents......Page 8
List of Figures......Page 11
1.1 Glimpses from a Moving Train......Page 12
References......Page 17
2.1 Finding Space for New Practices: Baby Miles Finding His Place in the World......Page 18
2.1.1 Opening up Activity Time-spaces: The Formation of Practices......Page 19
2.1.2 Practice Landscapes and Ecologies of Practices......Page 20
2.1.4 Praxis......Page 21
2.2 The Theory of Practice Architectures I: Practice Architectures of Bedtime Reading for Baby Miles, and for Stella and Luci......Page 24
2.3 The Theory of Practice Architectures II: Dear TPA Workshop Participants......Page 31
2.4 You’re My World: The Song, and the Practice Architectures of Loving,......Page 34
2.5 Practices, Practice Architectures and Marx’s Third Thesis on Feuerbach......Page 36
References......Page 40
3.1 Passages Through Time: Living Our Lives in Practices......Page 41
3.2 Intersubjectivity I: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity......Page 44
3.3 In the Beginning Was the Word: Finding Each Other in Language......Page 48
3.4 Intersubjectivity II: Entanglement in Semantic Space......Page 51
3.5 Intertextuality: Anthony Capella and His Sources (in Semantic Space)......Page 54
3.6 Here: In Time, in Space (A Poem)......Page 58
3.7 Intersubjectivity III: Entanglement in Physical Space-Time Materiality......Page 61
3.8 Sociomateriality: Writing in the Real World......Page 64
3.9 Harking the Herald Angels in Awe and Wonder at ErinEarth (a Poem)......Page 70
3.10 Intersubjectivity IV: Entanglement in Social Space......Page 71
3.11 Power I: Power Is Enacted in Practices......Page 74
3.12 Power II: A Conversation About Lecturing (and an Example of Transcript Analysis Using the Theory of Practice Architectures)......Page 79
3.13 Power III: In Whose Interests? (Using the Theory Critically)......Page 92
3.14 Intersubjectivity V: Happening, Lifespace (World War I, Organisations, and the Community of Life on Earth)......Page 95
References......Page 100
4.1 Praxis, the Good for the Person, the Good for Humankind and the Good for the Community of Life on Earth......Page 103
4.2 Choices (A Poem)......Page 109
4.3 Contestation I: Australia Day and ‘Change the Date’......Page 111
4.4 Contestation II: Academic Practices and University Management......Page 119
4.5 Practices and Learning I: In the Menswear Store......Page 124
4.6 Practices and Learning II: Coming to Know How to Go on (Inhabiting Practices)......Page 129
References......Page 135
5.1 Practices at a Small Scale: Morning Coffee (Practices Unfolding in Intersubjective Space)......Page 137
5.2 Practices at Larger Scales I: Meetings as Sites for Reproduction and Transformation......Page 143
5.3 Practices at Larger Scales II: Local Actions Constituting a National and International Research Network......Page 148
5.4 Practices and Cycles: Recruitment, Entanglement, Spirals......Page 152
5.5 Vast Ecologies of Practices: The Melbourne Cup......Page 154
References......Page 157
6.1 Wheels Within Wheels: A Daily Harvest of Oranges; Following the Seasons......Page 159
6.2 Communing with Nature: An Unexpected Connection Between Grey Shrike-Thrushes, Australian Magpies and Steers......Page 163
6.3 In the End Is the Word? Is Humankind Evolving Towards Absolute Knowledge?......Page 165
6.4 Bees and Being (a Poem)......Page 175
References......Page 176
Author Index......Page 178
Subject Index......Page 181

Citation preview

Stephen Kemmis

A Practice Sensibility An Invitation to the Theory of Practice Architectures

A Practice Sensibility

Stephen Kemmis

A Practice Sensibility An Invitation to the Theory of Practice Architectures

123

Stephen Kemmis Charles Sturt University Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-981-32-9538-4 ISBN 978-981-32-9539-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9539-1

(eBook)

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

This book is the product of a certain kind of life. Mine has been a life of reading, reflecting, researching, teaching and mentoring in my work an academic. It has also been a life as an engaged interlocutor, thinking and rethinking ideas and issues in the light of perspectives and arguments offered by friends, colleagues and many co-authors and authors, who have changed my ways of seeing the world. Then there has been my life as a member of my complicated family. And there is my current life as a partly retired person who continues, as a volunteer, to teach and research and mentor with a wide network of co-researchers in the fields of practice theory and action research. I am especially grateful to my friends and colleagues in the Pedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP) international research network, with whom I continue to research, reflect and write, and to the many people who engage with our work in conferences, publications and conversations around the world. In the pages that follow, you will find examples reflecting some of these facets of my life, as I draw on examples from my everyday life to try to convey a ‘practice sensibility’—a way of seeing the world through practices. The book also reflects my work as a volunteer with ErinEarth, an organisation committed to educating children, young people and adults in our community in Wagga Wagga and the surrounding Riverina region of New South Wales about sustainable urban living. ErinEarth has a serene garden next to the railway line in central Wagga Wagga, with a solar-passive house now used as offices, but formerly the home of its first leaders, (Catholic) Presentation Sisters Carmel Wallace and Kaye Bryan. ErinEarth hosts many volunteers from the community who work in the garden, help with its educational mission and sustain the organisation in various other ways. And it has open days and other events which inhale the community into its garden and meeting rooms, learning from the community as well as helping the community learn about the dangers of global warming and climate change. ErinEarth has twin missions of sustainability, represented in its efforts to demonstrate sustainable urban living, and spirituality, expressed in its efforts to help people understand how humankind is part of the whole community of life on Earth, and, in turn, part of the expanding Cosmos. I am an atheist, but ErinEarth has

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nevertheless helped me better to understand my own secular spirituality, and my place in the community of life on Earth (and not as someone with some kind of right to exploit the planet as a resource), and thus, also, in the variety of human communities that have sustained me through my life. Many people close to me are named in this book. Most are friends and family identified just by their first names. I thank them for allowing me to acknowledge our connection in this way. Academic sources are cited in the usual way, both in the text and in references at the end of each section. I am grateful for what I have learned from them. After my time as a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I met the then-Dean, Mike Atkin, who visited me in Norwich, where I was working at the University of East Anglia. “I will never be able to repay the teachers at Illinois who taught me so much”, I said to Mike. “You need not repay them,” Mike replied sternly, “They were doing their job. Your job now is to teach others.” So: I hope this book does reach and engage others, and encourages them to think about working in and with practice theory. Some intrepid friends agreed to read drafts of the book, or sections of it, to advise me on whether it had a chance of achieving its purpose of conveying a practice sensibility to people coming to practice theory. I am grateful to Christine Edwards-Groves, Susanne Francisco, Hannu Heikkinen, Mervi Kaukko and Kathleen Mahon for their insights, comments and suggestions about how the text could be improved. I would like, especially, to thank the three reviewers that Springer Contracting Editor Nick Melchior invited to review the manuscript: Nick Hopwood, Ted Schatzki and Elizabeth Shove. They encouraged Springer to publish the book, and made many insightful and readerly suggestions that have helped me to revise and improve the text and to tell this story, this way. For the text as it appears here, of course, I take sole responsibility. I am, especially, indebted to Hannu Heikkinen and Rauno Huttunen for pointing out that a formulation I have used for some years to describe one view of praxis as ‘post-Hegelian, post-Marxian’ does not recognise the influence of August Cieszkowski (1814–1894), who critiqued Hegel and influenced Marx, particularly in Cieszkowski’s description of praxis as ‘action oriented towards changing society’ (in his Prolegomena to Historiosophy, published in 1838); in the light of this, in this book, I describe this tradition of understanding praxis as ‘Hegelian-Marxian’. In 2002, recently widowed after the death of my beloved wife Sheila, I came to work at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga as a Professor of Education, and then as a member of CSU’s Research Institute for Professional Practice, Learning and Education (RIPPLE). Sadly, RIPPLE no longer exists. In Wagga Wagga, I found a new career of research and teaching and, most unexpectedly, a new love: Roslin Brennan Kemmis (Rozzie), my partner and wife, who died in July 2015. Her absence is a continuing presence in this house, where I am writing. She is in my thoughts as I write. Her infectious enthusiasm, her commitment to inclusion (“when in doubt, include”), her courageous advocacy for social justice and her extraordinary intelligence have encouraged me to write a book unlike others I have written,

Acknowledgements

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in the hope that it will reach and engage people who might join the community of practice theorising, not just to understand the world, but to help save it. Humankind, though many centuries, has made much of the world we live in today. As has now become starkly obvious, however, the ways we now live are unsustainable. We are testing the very limits of the atmosphere, the oceans, the ice and land masses and biodiversity on the planet. We are at the edge of catastrophic change to the community of life on Planet Earth. These changes are the consequences of the ways we live: our practices. We need to understand and appreciate that we live our lives in practices, and that it is though our practices that we engage with the Planet and the community of life on Earth. For the community of life on Earth to be sustainable, we humans must change our practices, and we must do it very soon. To change our practices, however, we need to change more than just our thinking: we also have to change the ways we do things, and the ways we relate to each other and the world. Some of the required changes will be dramatic. The problem—for policy, for social science, and for life on Earth—is that our practices are not properties of our selves, as individuals, as autonomous agents. They are held in place by conditions that extend into the space in which we encounter each other: intersubjective space. Our practices are held in place by the languages we use to understand ourselves and the world, the material arrangements that enable and constrain what we do, and the social and political arrangements that enable and constrain how we relate to one another. These are not individual but ‘extra-individual’ conditions that affect us all, shaping what practices are possible. These conditions, described in this book as ‘practice architectures’, can be changed a little by each of us individually, but, to change them sufficiently to create sustainable conditions for life on Earth, will require a global social and political movement to change the architectures that currently maintain our lives and our practices in their currently unsustainable course. So, dear reader, this book is an invitation to you to join this movement. In the meantime, please accept my thanks for joining me in the critical conversation that will be conducted in your mind as you read the pages ahead. Wagga Wagga, Australia June 2019

Stephen Kemmis

Contents

1 About This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Glimpses from a Moving Train . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 6

2 Introducing the Theory of Practice Architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Finding Space for New Practices: Baby Miles Finding His Place in the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.1 Opening up Activity Time-spaces: The Formation of Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.2 Practice Landscapes and Ecologies of Practices . . . . . . 2.1.3 A Widening Sociality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.4 Praxis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 The Theory of Practice Architectures I: Practice Architectures of Bedtime Reading for Baby Miles, and for Stella and Luci . 2.3 The Theory of Practice Architectures II: Dear TPA Workshop Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 You’re My World: The Song, and the Practice Architectures of Loving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Practices, Practice Architectures and Marx’s Third Thesis on Feuerbach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

..

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..

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3 Practices Happen in Intersubjective Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Passages Through Time: Living Our Lives in Practices . 3.2 Intersubjectivity I: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity . . . 3.3 In the Beginning Was the Word: Finding Each Other in Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Intersubjectivity II: Entanglement in Semantic Space . . 3.5 Intertextuality: Anthony Capella and His Sources (in Semantic Space) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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8 9 10 10

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25 29

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31 31 34

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Contents

3.6 3.7

Here: In Time, in Space (A Poem) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intersubjectivity III: Entanglement in Physical Space-Time Materiality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8 Sociomateriality: Writing in the Real World . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.9 Harking the Herald Angels in Awe and Wonder at ErinEarth (a Poem) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.10 Intersubjectivity IV: Entanglement in Social Space . . . . . . . . 3.11 Power I: Power Is Enacted in Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.12 Power II: A Conversation About Lecturing (and an Example of Transcript Analysis Using the Theory of Practice Architectures) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.13 Power III: In Whose Interests? (Using the Theory Critically) . 3.14 Intersubjectivity V: Happening, Lifespace (World War I, Organisations, and the Community of Life on Earth) . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

4 Praxis, Agency, Contestation, Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Praxis, the Good for the Person, the Good for Humankind and the Good for the Community of Life on Earth . . . . . . 4.2 Choices (A Poem) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Contestation I: Australia Day and ‘Change the Date’ . . . . 4.4 Contestation II: Academic Practices and University Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Practices and Learning I: In the Menswear Store . . . . . . . 4.6 Practices and Learning II: Coming to Know How to Go on (Inhabiting Practices) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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..... 93 ..... 99 . . . . . 101 . . . . . 109 . . . . . 114 . . . . . 119 . . . . . 125

5 Practices at Different Scales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Practices at a Small Scale: Morning Coffee (Practices Unfolding in Intersubjective Space) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Practices at Larger Scales I: Meetings as Sites for Reproduction and Transformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Practices at Larger Scales II: Local Actions Constituting a National and International Research Network . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Practices and Cycles: Recruitment, Entanglement, Spirals . . . . 5.5 Vast Ecologies of Practices: The Melbourne Cup . . . . . . . . . . 5.5.1 Postscript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . 127 . . 127 . . 133 . . . . .

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138 142 144 147 147

6 Living in Practices: Being in Earth’s Community of Life . . . . . . . . . 149 6.1 Wheels Within Wheels: A Daily Harvest of Oranges; Following the Seasons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 6.2 Communing with Nature: An Unexpected Connection Between Grey Shrike-Thrushes, Australian Magpies and Steers . . . . . . . . . 153

Contents

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6.3

In the End Is the Word? Is Humankind Evolving Towards Absolute Knowledge? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 6.4 Bees and Being (a Poem) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166

Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Subject Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

2.3 2.4 2.5 4.1

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4

The theory of practice architectures (see Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 38) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arrangements and other practices (and individual practitioner factors) prefiguring initial teacher education face-to-face pedagogy (Mahon, 2014, p. 305) (printed with permission) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . One of Stella’s first stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Möbius strip (Photo supplied: S. Kemmis) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A lemniscate, depicting Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach . . . . Relationships between knowledge, learning, practising and the world . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Orange blossoms on the tree in my back garden (Photo supplied S. Kemmis) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fallen oranges in Spring (Photo supplied S. Kemmis) . . . . . . . Grey Shrike-Thrush (Colluricincla harmonica) (Photo by Patrick Kavanagh, https://flic.kr/p/UgoRVG, CC BY 2.0). . . . . . . . . . . Australian Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen) (Photo by Peter Kerrawn, https://flic.kr/p/SWFByp, CC BY 2.0) . . . . . . . . . . . .

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16 18 26 27

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. . 120 . . 150 . . 151 . . 153 . . 154

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Chapter 1

About This Book

Abstract This chapter introduces the book. It introduces the central theme of the book, namely, that we live our lives in practices. It describes the structure of the book, which is composed of 35 short sections (some just a page or two long; some are poems) which are distributed across 6 chapters. These sections offer different glimpses into practices, in a way that aims to foster a practice sensibility—a way of seeing life and the human social world not in terms of the apparently solid objects we ordinarily perceive in the world, but in the flow and the happening of lives lived and conducted in practices.

1.1 Glimpses from a Moving Train I have been studying practice and practices for more than 40 years, but with a renewed curiosity in the last 15. In recent years, I seem to have turned into a practice theorist. For most of the time, I’ve been studying practices, I have been thinking about how educational practices have come into being, how they have been sustained (sometimes for hundreds of years), how they die out and how they can be changed or transformed. My interest is not solely in educational practices; they are just one species of professional practices, and, even more important, just one species of human social practices. As you will see in the coming pages, I am very interested in the fabric of practices that constitute everyday life. Many of the articles, chapters and books I have written about practices, have been written in conversation with many wonderful interlocutors, co-researchers and co-authors. In this book, I want to do something a little different: I want to communicate a particular kind of practice sensibility, not in a scientific argument from evidence to conclusions, but by sharing some scraps of writing and thinking in which I peer through different windows to try to see practices from different perspectives, as they reveal themselves through different kinds of topics. My central theme is that we live our lives in practices, and the collage of topics and fragments of text I present here has been put together in order to awaken or refresh a sensibility to that fact: a sensibility to how we live our lives in practices, and what that means in terms of our relationships with each other and the world—as well as © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 S. Kemmis, A Practice Sensibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9539-1_1

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1 About This Book

our relationships within the community of life on Planet Earth and with the Cosmos. I will suggest that these relationships are formed and conducted in practices. I suggested that in this book, I peer through windows into practices. This image may suggest seeing into the three-dimensionality of a house and its rooms, but that is not what I mean. I am not even sure that there is a ‘right’ order in which to read the scraps assembled here. It occurred to me that the window we are looking through might be more like the window of a moving train. We rumble or race along, looking out into the passing landscape—a city, a town, fields, a forest. The railway linearity of our travel is not matched by the tumble of images we see outside, sometimes abruptly changing demography, geography, geology, biology, archaeology, architecture, iconography, anthropology, sociology. We pass through a cutting and emerge to a bucolic idyll; we plunge through a tunnel and back out into the light to see a river dancing alongside us; we ease along the backs of leafy suburban gardens and crawl behind cramped, grimy tenements to arrive in the bustle of a railway station that spills us out into a city centre and the maelstrom of people bustling about in their many and varied practices of business and life. You will also find that later sections of the book return to topics discussed earlier. So perhaps, this train journey is not just one way but, rather, criss-crosses the territory, approaching previous topics from a different direction, or from a different perspective. The sensibility that this book aims to communicate might be something like the sensibility developed in the train traveller: a sense that the kaleidoscope of images is not just a jumble of juxtapositions. Rather, I hope it will lead to some kind of resolution and coherence as a broader landscape we have passed through, and come to know. In this book, I am trying to communicate one kind of sensibility about seeing the human social world, and the wider community of life of which we humans are part, as accomplished dynamically, through living. And I hope to show that living is accomplished through practices. Keep this little prose poem in mind as you read: Now is gone. Here comes another one.

Language sometimes seems to flatten time; it stills, and maybe even kills, the dynamism of life, the dynamism of the journey (Stories don’t: they carry us through the arc of a narrative.). We live life—from beginning to end—in motion, not at rest. It is a trick of language that causes us to think that ‘now’ exists. Like matter hurled into the expanding Cosmos at the Big Bang a mere 13.8 billion years ago, we, too, are always on the move, and always on the move in relation to everything else with which we share our own brief moment in the Cosmos. Much social science treats human beings and societies as if they could be studied at rest, as pinned at a moment in space and time. By contrast, practice theorists try to catch humans and societies on the move, to catch people and societies and events

1.1 Glimpses from a Moving Train

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as they happen (Schatzki, 2006). As things unfold. And as they unfold in particular places, being shaped in their unfolding by the moment (the time) and the site (the place and space) and the unfurling circumstances (history) that accompany their unfolding. I am grateful to my friend Hannu Heikkinen for drawing my attention to Bruner’s (1986, pp. 11–13) distinction between one kind of science and storytelling: Let me begin by setting out my argument as baldly as possible, better to examine its basis and its consequences. It is this. There are two modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality. The two (though complementary) are irreducible to one another. Efforts to reduce one mode to the other or to ignore one at the expense of the other inevitably fail to capture the rich diversity of thought. Each of the ways of knowing, moreover, has operating principles of its own and its own criteria of well-formedness. They differ radically in their procedures for verification. A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. Both can be used as means for convincing another. Yet what they convince of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. The one verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The other establishes not truth but verisimilitude. It has been claimed that the one is a refinement of or an abstraction from the other. But this must be either false or true only in the most unenlightening way…. …. Let me quickly and lightly characterize the two modes so that I may get on more precisely with the matter. One mode, the paradigmatic or logico-scientific one, attempts to fulfil the ideal of a formal, mathematical system of description and explanation. It employs categorization or conceptualization and the operations by which categories are established, instantiated, idealized, and related one to the other to form a system… At gross level, the logico-scientific mode (I shall call it paradigmatic hereafter) deals in general causes, and in their establishment, and makes use of procedures to assure verifiable reference and to test for empirical truth. Its language is regulated by requirements of consistency and noncontradiction. Its domain is defined not only by observables to which its basic statements relate, but also by the set of possible worlds that can be logically generated and tested against observables — that is, it is driven by principled hypotheses…. The imaginative application of the narrative mode leads instead to good stories, gripping drama, believable (though not necessarily “true”) historical accounts. It deals in human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course. It strives to put its timeless miracles into the particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and place. Joyce thought of the particularities of the story as epiphanies of the ordinary. The paradigmatic mode, by contrast, seeks to transcend the particular by higher and higher reaching for abstraction, and in the end disclaims in principle any explanatory value at all where the particular is concerned.

This book aims to convey a sense of verisimilitude about practices, and the practice architectures that make them possible. So: the fragments in this book have been created, at different times, to explore one idea or another that seems to me to be related to a practice sensibility. If I were a master of language, they would be like Jorge Luis Borges’s (2007) Labyrinths or (1956/1962) Ficciones, collections of short pieces written to confound and perplex and surprise their readers into seeing the world anew.

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Responding to Borges—in fact, to Borges’s (1942/1952/1999) piece entitled ‘John Wilkins’ Analytical Language’—Michel Foucault began the Preface to his (1970) The Order of Things thus: This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought – our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild existence of existing things, and continuing long after to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and Other. The passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that (p. xv; emphases in the original).

Sadly, this book will not be like Borges’s Otras Inquisiciones, or Foucault’s Order of Things. “More’s the pity,” I hear you say. This book aims not to demonstrate the “impossibility of thinking that” but the possibility of thinking about the world in motion, a world in motion that carries us along like a swiftly flowing river, except that we are also part of the flow. I am struggling to disrupt the profound illusion that we are solid entities carried in the flow, and to show that we are in the flow, and, more, that we ourselves are part of the flowing—as well as part of the carrying. I am trying to disrupt the illusion of solidity produced by “the familiar landmarks of our thought” … “the thought that bears the stamp of our age and geography”. Rather than seeing us as carried like a surfer on the wave of life, I imagine us as the foam on the breaking edge of a wave, born of the wave, borne on the wave, blossoming when the wave breaks, spreading like a web across the water’s surface as the wave caresses the beach, then sucked back, to disappear once more into the body of the sea. We are part of the flow, not just carried by it. Before concluding this Introduction, I will say just a few words about the organisation of this book. As I have said, the fragments could be read in various orders, but here is the way I have arranged them: • Chapter 2 (Sects. 2.1–2.6) introduces the theory of practice architectures, although more cryptically than the more extended ways in which it is introduced in other publications (for example, Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008, pp. 37–62; Kemmis, Wilkinson, Edwards-Groves, Hardy, Grootenboer, & Bristol, 2014, pp. 25–40; Mahon, Kemmis, Francisco, & Lloyd, 2017, pp. 1–30). • Chapter 3(Sects. 3.1–3.14) introduces notions to do with the happening-ness of practices in intersubjective space. After Sect. 3.1, which suggests that practices are like passages through time, Sect. 3.2 contrasts the notion of intersubjectivity with the notion of subjectivity. Sections 3.3–3.5 then focus on the culturaldiscursive dimension of intersubjectivity: semantic space. Sections 3.6–3.9 focus on the material dimension of intersubjectivity: physical or material space-time.

1.1 Glimpses from a Moving Train

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Sections 3.10–3.13 focus on the social-political dimension of intersubjectivity: social space. This set of sections comes to a close with Sect. 3.14, about happening and intersubjectivity: the way happening in intersubjective space unfolds, everywhere and all at once, through time (recalling Sect. 3.1 on practices as passages though time). • Chapter 4 (Sects. 4.1–4.6) looks at particular topics of concerns in the theory of practice architectures. Section 4.1 explores praxis, the good for the person, and the good for humankind. It is followed by Sect. 4.2, a poem, ‘Choices,’ that concerns a person’s agency in addressing the life situations they encounter. Sections 4.3 and 4.4 discuss contestation, reminding us that practices do not unfold in entirely smooth, untroubled, harmonious ways: their paths are frequently shaped by contests: misunderstandings, disagreements, collisions and conflict. Sections 4.5 and 4.6 focus on learning as an element of practices, and perhaps as a process that always shadows practices as they unfold. • Chapter 5 (Sects. 5.1–5.5) addresses the way practices unfold at various scales, sometimes in vast webs, constellations or ecologies of interconnected practices. These sections intend to convey the notion that, while practices may appear to unfold in entirely local sites, they nevertheless connect with other practices to form larger and larger webs that have ramifications for history and nature. • Chapter 6 (Sects. 6.1–6.4) aims to suggest some of the ways in which our practices are located in ‘Big History’: in the happening of the Cosmos, and the community of life on Earth. Sections 6.1 and 6.2 are intended to suggest something of how we are connected to the seasons and the community of life on planet Earth through our practices: we live our lives in practices, and practices are the means by which we enhance or erode the community of life on the planet. Section 6.3 brings us back to concerns from earlier in the book, inviting us to consider whether humankind has by now accumulated sufficient knowledge for us, collectively, to understand our place in Nature and in History, what the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel thought was Absolute Knowledge. It recalls Sect. 3.3, ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ which introduced the semantic dimension of intersubjective space. Section 6.4, the poem ‘Bees and Being,’ implies that we have come into Being in space and time, and that, at the end of our own lives, we return in another form to the continuing happening of space and time, the great happening of the Cosmos. I do not pretend to originality in the pages that follow. There are many others who express more powerfully and profoundly insights that reveal this way of seeing the world. Among so many that I might acknowledge for seeing the world in motion, here I will express my gratitude only to Ted Schatzki (for example, 1996, 2002, 2010) whose writings in practice theory and philosophy, drawing on Wittgenstein and Heidegger (among many others), shattered the way I thought about practices in the early 2000s. He disrupted my thinking about the world of people and societies at rest, opening my eyes to such things as the sheer happenstance of happening, the bundling of practices with arrangements of things to be found in the sites where they happen, and the unfolding of practices in “the time-space of human activity” (to use the title of his 2010 book). Ted’s work, and the burgeoning work of a new generation

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of practice theorists, has been immensely generative, changing the ways I think about social the social world, and about practices themselves. So, dear Reader: ahead of you lies a tangle of tales, some grounded in observation, some in rumination and some in speculation. I hope you find yourself entangled in it. Mostly, I hope you enjoy the journey, and that the journey awakens or refreshes in you a new sensibility about practices: a practice sensibility.

References Borges, J. L. (1942/1952/1999). ‘John Wilkins’ Analytical Language’. In E. Weinberger (Ed.), Selected nonfictions (E. Weinberger, Trans.). London: Penguin. The essay was originally published as ‘El idioma analítico de John Wilkins’, La Nación, Argentina, 8 February 1942, and republished in Borges’s (1952) Otras inquisiciones. Borges, J. L. (1956/1962). Ficciones (Ed. and Intro. A. Kerrigan). New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Borges, J. L. (2007). Labyrinths: Selected stories and other writings (Ed. D.A. Yates and J. E. Irby; Intro. A. Feinstein; Foreword A. Maurois; Illustrated N. Packer). London: The Folio Society. Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. London: Tavistock. Kemmis, S., & Grootenboer, P. (2008). Situating praxis in practice: Practice architectures and the cultural, social and material conditions for practice (Chapter 3) In S. Kemmis & T. J. Smith (Eds.), Enabling praxis: Challenges for education (pp. 37–62). Rotterdam: Sense. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). (Chapter 2). In Changing practices, changing education (pp. 25–40). Singapore: Springer. Mahon, K., Kemmis, S., Francisco, A., & Lloyd, A. (2017). Introduction: Practice theory and the theory of practice architectures (Chapter 1). In K. Mahon, S. Francisco & S. Kemmis (Eds.), Exploring education and professional practice: Through the lens of practice architectures (pp. 1–30). Singapore: Springer. Schatzki, T. R. (1996). Social practices: A Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schatzki, T. R. (2002). The site of the social: A philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Schatzki, T. R. (2006). On organisations as they happen. Organisation Studies, 27(12), 1863–1873. Schatzki, T. R. (2010). The timespace of human activity: On performance, society, and history as indeterminate teleological events. Lanham, MD: Lexington.

Chapter 2

Introducing the Theory of Practice Architectures

Abstract This chapter (Sects. 2.1–2.5) introduces the theory of practice architectures, although rather more cryptically than the more extended ways in which it is introduced in other publications. We encounter Baby Miles coming home after his birth in a hospital, and bringing a range of new practices into the household. We find a description of the theory of practice architectures illustrated by Baby Miles participating in the practice of bedtime reading with his parents. We see the song ‘You’re my world’ interpreted through the lens of the theory of practice architectures. We read a letter written by Stephen Kemmis to participants in a forthcoming workshop on the theory. And we find out how Marx’s Third Thesis on Feuerbach inaugurated a view of praxis and practice that lives on in the theory.

2.1 Finding Space for New Practices: Baby Miles Finding His Place in the World1 At nearly 3 weeks old, baby Miles is settling into life in the Big World. Breastfeeding is now going more routinely, and he is learning to manage transitions more calmly: like being changed before being settled for sleep. He appears to be learning that the end of one activity is not a catastrophe, but a shift, bumpy or smooth, to another activity. Miles seems to me to be building up some sense that life is composed of activities or routines, which are not always precisely the same, but roughly the same, and that one routine follows another.

1 First

written on Friday, 14 October 2016, during a visit to Miami, Florida, to welcome a new grandchild into the world. Picked up by Alice’s friend Julia at Miami International Airport, I was rushed to the hospital just in time for a quick hug before Alice disappeared into the birthing suite. A few hours later, showered and changed, I was back at the hospital to see Miles, Alice and Shannon beginning a new life together. With Shannon’s mum Vinette staying in their apartment, I stayed in a hotel a block away for 4 weeks to help the family settle into its new routines. What a joy and privilege! And what a chance to watch new practices emerge and consolidate and grow and diversify in the—not so tranquil—hothouse of new parenthood.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 S. Kemmis, A Practice Sensibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9539-1_2

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2.1.1 Opening up Activity Time-spaces: The Formation of Practices As a practice theorist, it’s hard not to be excited by watching this. For example, it is exciting to watch how the practice of breastfeeding becomes established as an activity time-space2 (Schatzki, 2010) in which activities are distributed between mother Alice (who is my stepdaughter) and baby Miles, but also involving others like father Shannon and even me. And these activity time-spaces entangle activity with objects like Alice’s breast, the Boppy Breastfeeding Pillow Miles rests on while feeding, and, most importantly, embodied Alice entangling lovingly with embodied Miles. It is interesting to see how these practices unfold, and how one activity timespace gets chained to another, like changing the baby after breastfeeding, and settling for sleep after changing (or returning to feeding). The particular activity time-space of ‘awake time’ for baby Miles was initially perplexing for Alice and Shannon: if ‘awake time’ is neither sleeping nor feeding nor settling nor changing nor bathing, is it a legitimate activity, or should baby Miles really be going into one of the other activities? As if to resolve this perplexity, a couple of days ago, Alice described Miles’s awake time as ‘mapping the world time’. This seems to me to be a very good way to think about it, rightly giving this activity its own legitimacy and authenticity, so we can all think about it as a time in which Miles develops his perceptual constancies (how to understand edges of objects, and arrangements of foregrounds and backgrounds, how sizes change when nearer or further way, etc.), and learns the faces and embraces of those who care for him, among many other things. ‘Mapping the world time’ has become established, and maybe transitioning into something else, like ‘free play’ or ‘play time’. In the last couple of days, Miles has spent some of this time in what Alice and Shannon call his ‘gym’: a soft cloth mat, printed with jungle and animals, that unrolls on the floor, with a flexible frame that crosses above him, supporting several hanging objects that Miles can look at. He lies on his back for 40 min or so, apparently happy and occasionally vocalising quietly, looking around him at whatever he can see, and sometimes twisting himself to look in the direction of a human voice, especially if it is Shannon’s or Alice’s. By naming ‘mapping the world time’, Alice has isolated it as a distinct activity time-space (Schatzki, 2010, p. 38). She has given baby Miles’s practice a teleology, a purpose that this practice is aimed towards (‘mapping the world’); and she has also given it a space as an activity that Miles can legitimately be engaged in when he is fed and changed but not wanting to sleep—when he is motivated ‘to map the world’ 2 Activity time-spaces are nexuses of time and space in which particular activities unfold, enmeshed

with people and other objects. Like the universe itself, expanding in time and space, but outside which there is no time and no space, an activity time-space unfolds in time and space, enmeshing activity with objects it ‘absorbs’ as ‘elements’ of this kind of activity. Somewhat gnomically (meaning aphoristically, rather than gnome-like), Schatzki says: “The timespace of human activity consists in acting towards ends departing from what motivates at arrays of places and paths anchored at entities” (2010, pp. 38, 40).

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or ‘to play’ (something he “departs from”). And ‘mapping the world time’ has its own distinct “places and paths anchored at entities,” like being put into his ‘gym’, looking around while he is in it, and being taken out of it to go on to the next activity.

2.1.2 Practice Landscapes and Ecologies of Practices The routines of the family have changed over these first 18 days at home, since leaving the hospital: new activities and practices are being established, and some old activities and practices have been pushed out of the way to admit the new practices of caring for the baby. In Miles’s first days home, many of Alice and Shannon’s everyday activities like shopping, showering, cooking and exercising were suddenly threatened in the everyday ecologies of practices3 of the household, and in the household as a practice landscape.4 To allow the new parents to attend to the new demands of baby wrangling, and to allow new practices of caring for the baby to become established, grandparents and friends took over some tasks (practices) like cooking, washing dishes, shopping and doing the laundry. Similarly, the new parents had to learn to catch sleep and take showers in the short windows between one breastfeed and the next, when baby Miles has sometimes been sleeping for as little as 50 min or an hour before waking to be fed (although sometimes, mercifully, for three hours). Alice and Shannon also had to learn that they have to find time for all the additional maintenance activities the baby demands: changing diapers (‘nappies’ to me), so Miles is not uncomfortable or getting diaper rash (‘nappy rash’ here in Australia); bathing, to ensure he is dry and clean; washing Miles’s clothes and ensuring clean clothes are always available… As days have passed, however, there has also been a transition to Shannon and Alice reclaiming some tasks (like cooking and cleaning) when grandmother Vinette returned to her home town, and, each evening, when I left for the nearby hotel for the night. In the absence of these support people, those everyday practices are gradually being reabsorbed into Alice and Shannon’s daily lives, anticipating the days to come when they, and Miles, become the sole permanent members of the household.

3 Ecologies

of practices (Kemmis, Wilkinson, Edwards-Groves, Hardy, Grootenboer, & Bristol 2014) are relationships in which one practice is interdependent with another, so that (for example) the outcomes of one practice are inputs into another. For example, the practice of feeding leads to the activity of pooping, and pooping leads to practices of changing the baby’s diaper/nappy. 4 A practice landscape (Kemmis et al., 2014; Schatzki, 2010) is a site in which different practices coexist, not necessarily in ecological relationships with one another. In this household, mail has been arriving, and bills have been paid, but these are not in obvious relationships of interdependence with practices of breastfeeding or of changing baby Miles, although in a larger scheme, perhaps such interdependencies can be observed or inferred. For example, we might infer that there is an interdependent relationship between paying rent for, and breastfeeding in, this apartment.

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2.1.3 A Widening Sociality In recent days, we have also been fitting in visits from close friends who come to see baby Miles and congratulate Alice and Shannon, restoring bonds of friendship attenuated while the family has been preoccupied with this new person who now calls the shots in the household. A place is being found for new baby Miles in these friendship bonds and networks: as these friends of the family goo and gaa and bless Miles, they are admitting him into their lives as well, and opening the possibility that they may be surrogates for Miles’s parents, able to offer love and nurture and care, and resources of various kinds, at different moments in Miles’s life and the lives of his parents. And, of course, they come bearing gifts of welcome, objects like baby blankets that will, one way and another, become entangled with Miles’s body and in his life. It is amazing to think how irreversible all these transitions are in the practice landscapes of home life, and how life has just become much, much busier—and will be for years ahead. In the coming weeks and months, first, Shannon, and, later, Alice, will return to work, and more dramatic transformations and reconfigurations will occur for all the inhabitants of the household. As a practice theorist, it is intriguing to watch this household reconfigure itself as an ecology of interconnected practices, and as a practice landscape in which multiple, very different, practices simply coexist. It is to see not just the new baby and the new equipment that has come into the house, but how the life that is lived here is composed of activities and practices that have to be reconfigured to fit into, and find a place in, daily life: the activity time-spaces of family life in the household. Will Alice ever get time for a walk? When? With whom? What will need to be done by others when she goes for a walk? (As I wrote this, by the way, she was indeed taking a walk, with Miles in the pram sleeping, Shannon at home doing some necessary tasks, and me in my hotel over the road, writing this.).

2.1.4 Praxis5 It is wonderful to see the part that love plays in this constellation of changing practices. The imperative of parental (and others’) care for the baby seems almost as tangible as Miles’s physical being; we apprehend it in life here in Alice and Shannon’s apartment as an almost instinctual ‘force of nature’. Yet we also know that this imperative is intensely social, not just material or biological or physiological or psychological. It is not only the welcoming of a new human being into our lives, but the establishment of a new way of being which includes Miles and the people around him: those who care deeply for his wellbeing. We, and Miles, get caught up in, and recruited to, 5 Praxis, in the Aristotelian tradition, is morally informed and committed action, oriented by practice

traditions; in the Hegelian–Marxian tradition, it is ‘history-making action’. See Sect. 4.1, ‘Praxis, the good for the person, the good for humankind, and the good for the community of life on Earth’.

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new practices of caring, new ways of being in a world in which he is—at least for now—suddenly central. Our human brains may be wired to respond appropriately to babies’ cries and smiles, to the innocence of their sleep, and to do whatever will secure their comfort, but it seems to me that we are also wired to participate in caring, comforting, mothering and fathering as practices that ensure our mutual solidarity, and collective survival, in the family or the troop or the clan. That is to say, we are wired to practise caring, comforting, mothering and fathering, and most of us near to Miles have been readily recruited into these practices. We welcome the new baby to the family and the world, not just as a material, biological, physiological and psychological fact, but as a primordial expression of our indissoluble sociality as members of these groups. It seems to me to be a proto-conscious awareness that this tiny being—this one of ours—is being added to our family, our troop or clan, our society. We have become something more than we were, and this expanded sociality is expressed in new practices of caring and nurturing for this new object of caring and nurturing. And, in expressing and enacting this care, we recognise that, as persons, we are more than just ourselves, and that our being, as selves, depends on the presence and nurture of the others around us: the family, the troop, the clan, the society. It is through our practices of care, that we participate in the life of the family, the troop, the clan, the society. This recognition that caring and nurturing are practices through which we participate in the life—the living—of a collective seems to me to be a profound acknowledgement that we are not isolated, atomistic selves, but participants in living socialities and solidarities and language communities in which, and of which, we, too, are nodes or elements. We are not worlds unto ourselves: as Donne (1624/2001) said, “No man is an island”.6 We recognise that this New One is one more unique Other, equivalent to us in their being, fragile and vulnerable though they are at this stage in their lives. We recognise that they are part of the web that is Us: a web composed entirely of practices of the kind that also nurture and support us; a web that now extends to nurture and support this New One: baby Miles. The web that weaves us together as nodes or knots in its fabric—the web of which new baby Miles is currently the focal point—is not just relationships in the abstract, nor even the bonds of blood and kinship, but concrete and particular practices of caring, like the practices of breastfeeding, changing, bathing, comforting, cooking, shopping, earning a living, mothering, fathering and grandparenting. What makes a family is not the abstract arrangement of kinship relationships between members, but the web of living practices that gather and sustain its members—and also some non-human objects along with us humans—in different kinds of contributions that change and evolve with the life of the family and the development, ageing and loss of its individual members. Thus, also, a clan or a community or a society is realised— 6 In Donne’s original spelling: “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee” (p. 446; emphases in original).

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made real—through the practices that constitute it. As Schatzki said, in the title of his (2002) book, practices are The Site of the Social. Our awareness of this web is not just an awareness of boundaries in the flat terrain of us beyond which the territory of them begins; it is an acutely generational awareness, deeply rooted in generativity and movement in time: new generations, rising generations, older generations, passing generations. The generational awareness gives the family depth as well as breadth of membership, as it does for the clan, the village and the nation. Our practices develop and evolve and falter and fail in keeping with our generational obligations to be carers and cared for in different ways at different stages. Miles’s birth has generated other nativities: new parenting practices, new grandparenting practices—and, when they are not entirely new, then practices that have new loci: Miles, Alice and Shannon, Vinette, Stephen. We practise parenthood, grandparenthood, and babyhood; what might otherwise seem to be just abstract kinship relations come to life in real, concrete and particular practices that perform kinship relations and obligations. And the performance of these relations and obligations reaches out from the family to the clan and beyond, presaging ‘the good for humankind’ (and, perhaps, the good for the community of life on Earth, as I will suggest elsewhere in this book, including in Sect. 3.1, ‘Passages through time: Living our lives in practices’ and Sect. 4.1, ‘Praxis, the good for the person, the good for humankind, and the good for the community of life on Earth’). If praxis is acting for the good for humankind (the neo-Aristotelian view; ‘right’ action) or history-making action (the Hegelian–Marxian view; action with moral and political consequences), then our practices are praxis when we act with respect to Miles for his good and the good of the world, and when we lay down histories of practice (action and interaction) that we expect will shape for the better his and our future ways of being in the world. The webs of practices of which Miles and we are nodes or knots are parts of the life of our family, clan or society, parts of its ways of living, parts of its ways of being and becoming. Through the lens of practices, we see our family or society in motion, as it happens, as it is lived. To see the family or society in this way is to penetrate some of the illusions of trying to understand social life synchronically: as a snapshot at a particular moment in time. A still photograph reveals more about the presence and placement of actors than it does about the meaning, motion and momentousness (or not) of their actions; such things more clearly revealed by a practice perspective. Our world is bigger than it was now that baby Miles has arrived. We know, in a real sense, that he is a gift to the family, the community and our society: someone who will mature to continue the line, and, with love and education, sustain the viability not just of our family, but also the viability of humankind and the community of life on the planet. And he will achieve these things less through his personhood than through his practices—through participating in the world along with others, for the good of humankind, and for the good of the planet.

2.2 The Theory of Practice Architectures I …

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2.2 The Theory of Practice Architectures I: Practice Architectures of Bedtime Reading for Baby Miles, and for Stella and Luci7 Kemmis, McTaggart and, Nixon (2014),8 describe how practices are held in place by practice architectures: combinations of cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that enable and constrain how a practice can unfold. Practice architectures prefigure social practices, channelling them in their course in the way that the flow of a river is channelled by its bed and banks. Changing a practice, these authors contend, generally also requires disrupting or changing the practice architectures that prefigure it: changing the cultural-discursive arrangements that shape how the practice unfolds in semantic space, the material-economic arrangements that shape how it unfolds in physical space-time and the social-political arrangements that shape how it unfolds in social space. Recently, Kemmis (2018) defined a practice as a form of human action in history, in which particular activities (doings) are comprehensible in terms of particular ideas and talk (sayings), and when the people involved are distributed in particular kinds of relationships (relatings), and when this combination of sayings, doings and relatings ‘hangs together’ in the project of the practice (the ends and purposes that motivate the practice). (pp. 2–3)

This definition of practice encompasses practices at a variety of scales, from large-scale phenomena, through medium-level cases of the conduct of practices, to the moment-by-moment talk and interaction that unfolds in practices as they are performed. Examples of large scales of practices are medicine, history, education or automobility. Below that scale are things like administering chemotherapy, consulting primary sources in an archive, teaching physics to high schoolers or driving from home to work. And at a still more granular level, there are performances like checking the dosage, making a photocopy of a document, answering a question in a high school physics class and applying the brake before approaching a corner. As already intimated, the sayings, doings and relatings that compose a practice, hanging together in the project of a practice, are made possible by practice architectures—conditions (arrangements) that make the practice possible. These conditions are not entirely subjective, at the disposal of the individuals who participate in a practice, but intersubjective. By this, Kemmis, McTaggart & Nixon mean that 1. the sayings that occur in a practice are made possible by cultural-discursive arrangements found in or brought to a site, in the shared medium of language, and in semantic space in which people encounter one another as interlocutors; 2. the doings of a practice are made possible by material-economic arrangements found in or brought to a site, in the shared medium of activity or work, and in 7 The

first part of this section is an adapted excerpt from Kemmis, McTaggart and Nixon (2019), pp. 186–188. 8 Following Kemmis and Grootenboer (2008) and Kemmis et al., (2014).

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physical space-time in which people encounter one another as embodied beings; and 3. the relatings of a practice are made possible by social-political arrangements found in or brought to a site, in the shared medium of solidarity and power, and in social space in which people encounter one another as social beings. These elements (and some others to be discussed in other sections of this book) appear in Fig. 2.1, which aims to give a schematic summary of the theory of practice architectures. For example, if we observe the practices that unfold after dinner and bath, as 20-month-old Miles prepares—and is prepared—for bed, we see him ask (sayings) for a bedtime story, approximating or using words (selected from the local culturaldiscursive arrangements in the medium of language) that his parents recognise as appropriate to the situation, in a shared communicative space (semantic space) in which Miles and his parents encounter one another as interlocutors. We see Miles going to the bookshelf and taking down four books (doings); the bookshelf, the books, the fleecy rug on the floor that Miles and his parents occupy, and the time taken for this activity (among the local material-economic arrangements in the medium of activity), help compose the space and time as a bedtime reading session (in physical space-time), in which Miles climbs onto mother Alice’s lap as father Shannon sits

Fig. 2.1 The theory of practice architectures (see Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 38)

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close alongside, and—if things go well—all are keenly aware of the warmth of their mutual encounter as embodied beings as all their eyes fall on the current page. Repeated with variations (sometimes successful, sometimes not) each evening, Miles and his parents now enter the special relationship (relatings) of the bedtime reading space, one which is especially charged by the reassurance of solidarity (which may be replaced, should things go awry, with an exercise of parental power) that is the precursor to Miles’s being put into bed and making the transition from the conviviality of family to feeling secure in a cosy bed while Mum and Dad return to the living room (a transition from one set of social-political arrangements and one social space to another)—a moment in which all participants are acutely aware that they exist not as atomistic individuals but as social beings and as creatures existentially bound together in this family. Practice architectures like those holding together the unfolding of Miles’s bedtime story prefigure (Schatzki, 2002) practices without determining them. As the practice of bedtime reading suggests, however, practices and the practice architectures that enable and constrain them may follow already-established patterns, but they also vary from occasion to occasion, so people adjust their practices to meet changed conditions, and as conditions themselves change. Practices are not held in place by just single, unitary practice architectures. As Kathleen Mahon showed in her pictures of practice architectures identified through her interviews with a several teacher educators about their teacher education practices, many different kinds of practice architectures shaped what these teachers did. This picture clusters different groups of things that these teacher educators explicitly mentioned as shaping their initial teacher education practices, which Kathleen depicted as a kind of ‘web’ of practice architectures. So: we can imagine that, were we to observe Baby Miles’s bedtime reading closely, and to interview Miles, Alice and Shannon about what shapes their practice, we might be able to compose a picture like Kathleen’s in Fig. 2.2, showing, for example, aspects of Alice’s practices and experiences that shape what happens, aspects of Shannon’s practices and experiences and aspects that are imposed by the arrangements to be found in Miles’s bedroom, including such things as the histories of the books and toys and furniture to be found there. Practices and practice architectures also change, both in relation to one another, and as practitioners and conditions change, just as rivers slowly erode and reshape their beds and banks, and as the course of the river may be changed by a fallen tree or boulder. Changing practices requires more than changing participants’ knowledge about practices, however; it also requires changing the conditions—the practice architectures—that make their practices possible. To have new practices, with new sayings, doings and relatings, we must also have new practice architectures to support them: new cultural-discursive arrangements, new material-economic arrangements and new social-political arrangements. Only when new practice architectures are in place can new practices survive. Miles and his parents carried the practice of bedtime reading from his home in Florida (US) to his new home in Sydney (Australia), from a bedroom shared with his parents, with bedtime reading in the living room, to his own bedroom with the

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Fig. 2.2 Arrangements and other practices (and individual practitioner factors) prefiguring initial teacher education face-to-face pedagogy (Mahon, 2014, p. 305) (printed with permission)

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shelves, the books and the cosy reading space we found them in a little while ago. And he has since moved to yet another house in Sydney, with another bedroom, but still with his shelves and books and reading space. The practice of bedtime reading, as enacted by Miles, Alice and Shannon, has adapted and varied to meet changing conditions, bundled with somewhat different practice architectures, but the continuity of the practice through these changes is one of the things that has made those larger transitions from country to country and house to house less disruptive for Miles than they might have been. For some years before Miles was born, his cousins Stella and Luci had a similar bedtime story pattern. When Stella was five and Luci three, for example, after a bath and dinner, as bedtime approached, each chose three storybooks from the shelves, and snuggled on the couch in the living room at each side of one of their parents, Julian and Fiona, who read the stories they had chosen. The rules for bedtime stories were clearly understood, as were the stories themselves (in the medium of language; cultural-discursive arrangements); the material objects (couch, cushions, books and sometimes blanket) formed the material space for reading (in the medium of physical space-time; material-economic arrangements); and the social relationships between the girls and their parents were revealed in the warmth and quiet (mostly, not always) of the pre-bed reading sessions (in the medium of solidarity and power; socialpolitical arrangements). And, for Stella and Luci, the project of the practice was about the same as it had been for Miles: to enjoy a story and a cuddle before bed. The project for their parents, Julian and Fiona (as for Miles’s parents Alice and Shannon), was more complex, however, in part, of course, it was to settle the girls for bed, but it was also about engendering a love for reading, and paving the way for literacy to come. As Stella grew older, I expected that she would swiftly learn to read. Her parents, and Rozzie and me (as grandparents), ran our fingers under the words we read during bedtime reading, fully expecting that Stella would deduce the code, begin to recognise words, and start reading for herself. Somehow, however, almost stubbornly, she did not, although we were sure that she understood—for example, from many their alphabet books with their pictures and words—that we were turning the marks that composed the words into speech. And she could recognise and name all the letters in her alphabet books. I guess Stella was bright enough, though, that she could remember a story by heart after a few readings, and ‘read’ (that is, pretend to read) whole children’s books to us, turning the pages at the appropriate moments, so, for what seemed a long while, she did not bother to learn to actually read. At that moment, she had mastered many, but not all, of the elements of the practice of reading. And then, at five and a half years old, Stella wanted to write her own stories. In a matter of a few weeks, she mastered writing, and began to write her own first stories— frequently without spaces between words, and without punctuation, of course. Here (Fig. 2.3) is one of her first stories, with lines9 : In case you find it a bit unclear, here is my translation:

9 Written April 19, 2015; published here with Stella’s permission, and the permission of her parents.

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Fig. 2.3 One of Stella’s first stories

Dog is running to the bush to pick blackberries. He finds a basket to carry his blackberries. So he fills his basket up, but – oh no – the basket is too heavy, so he gets his dad to help. So he and his dad has blackberry cake for dinner.

By now, a new practice—writing—had emerged. Stella was able to tell a story (sayings) using the discourse of letters and words. She had learned the physical skill (doings) of making the letters and words, and some conventions of writing like leaving spaces between the words and writing between the lines. And she knew her writing was an act of storytelling, of communication (relatings), that connects an author with a reader. But the practice architectures had also changed. Now, instead of hearing or reading a story composed by others, she was composing her own stories, in the medium of the English language she shares with her parents and grandparents, for example, (cultural-discursive arrangements). Instead of books, she wanted pencil and paper; instead of the couch, she wanted a writing surface and a chair (materialeconomic arrangements). Instead of being present with her sister and a parent or grandparent on the couch, she was learning the magic of composing a story, alone, for others to read, later, and perhaps even in her absence—the delayed gratification of a gift that would be opened not in her presence (social-political arrangements). She was delighted when her dad sent a photo of her story to Rozzie and me, and that we were able to read it far away in Wagga Wagga. The project of her practice had

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been attained: she had written her story, and it had been read by those she intended it for. She had become an author. Watching Stella at that time, we saw her practices of literacy begin to flower and diversify: oral reading to Stella had blossomed into her writing for others, and her writing had blossomed into her reading alone, including silent reading. Like millions of others before her, she was beginning to open the vast world of the written word which has now thoroughly entranced her. Now nine, Stella still reads before bedtime, now from ‘chapter books’. She borrows many from the library, and is usually reading more than one at any time. Luci, too, at seven, is beginning to make the shift to chapter books, but still enjoys three bedtime stories on the couch with a parent or grandparent. The practice of bedtime reading seems to me to be a precious time in family building, and a powerful force for family building. Yet, this extraordinarily generative practice eludes many children. Books are not found in many households, and a television often takes their place. In those households, the practice architectures to support bedtime reading are absent or unutilised. In even more extreme cases, teachers in my community tell me that, each year, a few children arrive at the primary school where they teach, aged between 5 and 6 years old, unable to speak any language. No one has spoken to them sufficiently for them to develop the power of speech. It is rare, and no doubt it is the result of a concatenation of tragedies that have befallen the parent or parents involved, and thus the children. But the school accepts those children, and the teachers help them develop language, and later help them to read and to write and to enter the wide world that literacy opens for those who have it. The school provides the practice architectures that can and do support and develop the practices of listening, speaking, reading and writing. And sometimes schools also provide the places of safety and nurture that not all homes can provide because of the challenging circumstances confronting some of the adults in our communities. Such teachers also do what they can to provide the attachment bonds necessary for those children to develop a secure sense of self-worth, helping them to grow into confident adults. The theory of practice architectures invites us to explore how practices are shaped by cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political conditions—conditions that are present, and, as we have seen, conditions that may be absent. It invites us to explore how we develop the practices we do by being interlocutors in particular settings, by being embodied persons moving among other people and objects in those places, and by being social beings responding to the different kinds of conditions of power and solidarity found there. It also invites us to consider how practices adapt and change and evolve in response to changing conditions, and how changes can be for better or for worse. I am profoundly grateful for the conditions that Miles, Stella and Luci have enjoyed in the practices of bedtime reading with their parents; I am grateful for the practice architectures that exist for them, in their homes and families. But I am also conscious that they are very fortunate, and that others are not so fortunate. As societies and polities, we must do better at creating conditions under which all of our members can thrive.

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2.3 The Theory of Practice Architectures II: Dear TPA Workshop Participants10 Dear TPA [Theory of Practice Architectures] workshop participants, It is Saturday morning. The sun is warming the garden as I sit on the front verandah, thinking of our workshop this coming Thursday. Thinking of you. The breeze stirs gently, bringing me eddies of fragrance from the jasmine flowering riotously on the fence. I am thinking of how to make my presentation of the theory of practice architectures fresh and compelling. I suppose some of you already feel very comfortable with it; some not. I want to find ways to disrupt some views of what practice is. I want you to think of it as Marx (1845) did long ago: as “sensuous human activity”. As living, not dead. I would like you to think of it ontologically, as it is and as it happens, not just epistemologically, in terms of the knowledge that impels it. Practices exist at many scales: for example, at a very general level, the practice of teaching, then the more particular practice of teaching physics, and then the practice of teaching Ohm’s Law, alongside a particular teacher’s practice of discovery pedagogy, and, at a very granular level, that teacher’s practice of asking or answering a question. Similarly, practices of conversation, in general, will include particular practices of turn-taking, and may involve my practice of asking you if you will have milk and sugar in your tea, and your practice of answering ‘No’ to both. Practices also exist in various kinds of relationships with other practices: for example, a practice of teaching someone to ride a bike may be related to the practice of learning to ride a bike—but people can learn to ride bikes without having someone to teach them, or any kind of professional teacher. A practice is an encounter: an encounter with the world and with people and things in it. Every practice is composed of sayings, doings and relatings, all rolled together, and hanging together in the project (the purpose or end) of the practice. In practices, we encounter one another • in our sayings, as interlocutors, in the medium of language, in semantic space, • in our doings, as embodied beings, in the medium of activities and work, in physical space-time, and • in our relatings, as social and political beings, in the medium of power and solidarity, in social space, all at the same time. Practices occur in the three-dimensional intersubjective space that lies between us, composed of interwoven semantic, material and social space. Other theories of practice take a more epistemological view of practice: they focus on the subject and subjectivity of the practitioner: her identity, her intentions, her knowledge, understandings, skills, and values: the things said to drive practitioners’ 10 Written

on Saturday, 14 October 2017, as an email message to participants in the forthcoming Thursday–Friday 19–20 October 2017, workshop (held at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst campus) on the theory of practice architectures for which I was a co-leader.

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practices. The theory of practice architectures finds a place for these, in the habitus, the dispositions, of the one who practices. But its focus is less on the one who practices than on what happens in the intersubjective space between people (and people and things) when they practise: their talk, interactions and interrelationships. The theory of practice architectures aims to see practices as they happen: their ‘happeningness’ as they unfold in semantic, material and social space. Because of this focus on the happening-ness of practices, we say that the theory of practice architectures emphasises an ontological view of practices. The theory of practice architectures sees the practitioner, the one who practices, but it is not blinded by the practitioner. It aims to see the practitioner in the practice, and to see the practitioner in relation to the site in which the practice happens. It sees the happening of the practice as something occurring in the intersubjective space between the practitioner and the site: something unfolding in the way a tree grows, reaching out on this side to find the sun, to avoid being shaded by the other trees around it, to find its own place among them. Practices unfold in relation to the particulars of the sites of their unfolding, and they unfold differently each time when those particulars change. Practices are malleable, flexible, responsive; they are not rigid. As well as being shaped by the sites in which they happen, practices are prefigured by their histories, but not predetermined by them. Even as they are reproduced from occasion to occasion, they are simultaneously transformed in response to changing circumstances. They are like mountain streams carving their bed and banks in the soil, bending around rocks, pooling behind barriers, running downhill to rivers and the sea. We see practices as shaped in their flow by practice architectures: the arrangements of ideas and things and relationships that are found in or are brought to a site, channelling what is said, what is done, and how people relate to one another in the site. The language we speak enables and constrains what we can say; the material objects and arrangements in a site enable and constrain what we can do; the relationships between people that already exist in the site enable and constrain how people can relate to one another in the site. Sometimes, practices also build and shape practice architectures, as when a builder’s practice of building constructs a house that enables and constrains how people can live in it—how they can practice. Practices and practice architectures are mutually constitutive: as the flowing stream cuts its way in the mountainside, where is the lip of the stream, and where is the lip of the bank that enables and constrains it? They are complementary. This relationship is not static; it is dynamic. Responsiveness is part of the nature of practices. Practices are enmeshed with the world; practices enmesh us with the world. In semantic space, practices enmesh us in language: our sayings are enmeshed in the cultural-discursive arrangements found in or brought to a site. We are enmeshed in the particularities and content of the talk, the conversations, the communication that occurs in the site. As I cook, I ask, “Would you like parsley in your scrambled eggs?” In physical space-time, practices enmesh us in activity and work: our doings are enmeshed with the material-economic arrangements found in or brought to a site.

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We are enmeshed in the particularities and content of what goes on, what is done, the activities of production that occur in the site. As I cook, my hands pass from eggs to bowl to cutting board to parsley to knife to board to bowl to knife to butter to frying pan… In social space, practices enmesh us in solidarity and power: our relatings are enmeshed with the social-political arrangements found in or brought to a site. We are enmeshed in the particularities and content of how people relate to one another, the forms of organisation and social relations that occur in the site. As I cook, I think of how moist you like your scrambled eggs to be: as always, the scrambled eggs are more than eggs: they are a gesture: a breakfast offering to you, prepared for you. Watch the Tango: it is not what the man does, nor what the woman does, that is so electrifying; it is what happens between them. The magic of the Tango lies in the drama of what happens, what unfolds—whether he woos or wins her, or she spurns or tames him. Learn to tell the difference between the Dancers and the Dance, the practitioner and the practice. So: as I said, it’s Saturday morning. I’m sitting on the front verandah. I’m thinking and writing, and rewriting, pecking with my index finger on the keyboard in the Notes app on my iPhone. I’m thinking of you, writing for you, trying, once again, to tell my story about the theory of practice architectures in a way that might reach you. I am saying, doing, and relating in the practice of preparing for next Thursday’s workshop, and thinking about the architectures I will encounter when we get together. My workshop practice has already begun, here among the practice architectures of my front verandah. It has begun to unfold in what Schatzki (2010) calls “the activity time-space” of a practice, making the time and space of its unique unfolding. This text could be a beginning for our workshop, perhaps, posted through time, from Saturday, posted through space, from my front verandah. Do you smell the jasmine? Cheers, Stephen. Stephen Kemmis Sent from my iPhone

2.4 You’re My World: The Song, and the Practice Architectures of Loving

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2.4 You’re My World: The Song, and the Practice Architectures of Loving11,12 The song, ‘You’re My World’, was originally recorded in Italian in 1963 as ‘Il Mio Mundo’. It was co-written by Umberto Bindi and Gino Paoli. The lyrics were translated into English by Carl Sigman, and the English recording was released in May 1964, performed by Cilla Black. It stayed at No.1 on the charts for 4 weeks, and was number one in various countries, including Australia in 1964. The song evokes the practice architectures that enmesh the lover, converging in the figure of the beloved and the project of attaining the love of the beloved. The song itself is a sung performance, about a practice of loving at a certain stage; it evokes a shift from love as a noun (a feeling) to loving as a verb (something we do). It encompasses a soliloquy of saying that is bundled together with bodily doings and a yearning for the beloved, relating, that bespeaks the power of love—both the enveloping sense of solidarity and the more dangerous sense of the beloved’s powerover the lover, named explicitly in the song’s final words. The song is about love of a certain kind and at a certain stage, in which the lover’s obsession is marked by “a power so divine” but an uncertainty about the security of the relationship remains, threatening “the end of my world for me”. 11 Lyrics available at: http://www.elyrics.net/read/c/cilla-black-lyrics/you_re-my-world-lyrics. html, downloaded May 20, 2015. For more information, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/you% 27re_my_world, downloaded May 20, 2015. 12 This little piece of analysis was first written early in the morning on Thursday, May 21, 2015. It was an important day. Twenty of us had authored or co-authored draft chapters for the book Exploring Education and Professional Practice (Mahon, Francisco, & Kemmis, 2017), and that day we were gathering to begin the sensitive task of giving feedback on each other’s drafts. All of us had reviewed two or three other chapters, and we were meeting in small groups with our fellow authors to share our responses. Some were unable to come in person, but they sent written notes; one beamed in by Skype. I had woken that morning around 4 a.m. Unable to return to sleep, I got up, with––astonishingly, perplexingly––the song ‘You’re My World’ ringing in my brain. It was an earworm that refused to be obliterated. (Susanne’s daughter Anna told her that singing the Beatles’ ‘Obladi-Oblada’ kills most earworms. I have since found it to be true.) I had awoken, I think, powered by Prednisone, the first corticosteroid I had ever been prescribed, to assist with my chemotherapy for Small Lymphocytic Lymphoma, a relatively common, gradually progressing, non-Hodgkin lymphoma that affects the Blymphocytes of the immune system. It is not curable but it is treatable. That morning, my brain was racing. More or less involuntarily, as the day began teetering across the fulcrum between ‘You’re My World’ and the seminar ahead, which would be sharply focussed on the theory of practice architectures, I began making a practice architectures analysis of the song. By 6.30 a.m., the analysis was complete. I printed copies to take to the seminar. Following a PEP (Pedagogy, Education and Praxis International Research Network) tradition that is extremely strong in the Nordic countries, I decided that we could begin the seminar with community singing. My handout included the words alongside the analysis. Singing the song, with its mighty crescendo, was a great beginning to the day, precipitating much laughter and warmth. but there was no catharsis for me. My brain buzzed on through the 2 days of the seminar, racing despite my gathering exhaustion. Some readers will be more familiar with that state than I am.

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The lover’s song (sayings)

Inferences about the lover’s project and practice architectures

You’re my world, you’re every breath I take

The beloved feels like the lover’s whole world—an encompassing practice architecture. The lover embodies the project of the lover’s practices of loving and even living. This feeling is physically experienced in the lover’s every breath (doings) …

You’re my world, you’re every move I make

As the encompassing project of the lover’s life, the beloved gives force and significance to “every move I make”, suggesting not only the lover’s doings, but these as bundled in the lover’s every strategy, doings bundled together with sayings and relatings

Other eyes see the stars up in the skies

The lover is well aware that arrangements in the material world includes others, who see beauty in the stars in the sky (relatings) …

But for me they shine within your eyes

… for the lover, however, such beauty is only to be found embodied in the eyes of the beloved (physical arrangements), and experienced in the gaze, the attention, of the beloved (relatings)

As the trees reach for the sun above

In the material, living world, photosynthesis is a force of Nature driving plant growth; the tree depends on the sun

So my arms reach out to you for love

The lover’s actions feel similarly caused by a force (power) of Nature; the lover feels dependent on the beloved as an end or object; attaining the beloved’s love is the overwhelming primary project of the lover’s life

With your hand resting in mine

The lover receives the hand of the lover (doing and relating vis-à-vis the beloved’s hand as both a physical and a social arrangement), suggesting protectiveness and connoting sexual entwinement (relatings)

I feel a power so divine

To the lover, the power of love (relating) is not merely a force of brute Nature, but sanctioned by the Divine, that is, it is named and justified, in the medium of language, in the special discourse of love

You’re my world, you are my night and day

“You are my night and day” invokes love enacted in the apparently vast, endless, cyclical duration of activity time-space

You’re my world, you’re every prayer I pray

Attaining the beloved is the lover’s project; the lover’s every thought and desire (sayings) is enmeshed in a language and universe of cultural-discursive arrangements concerning love and the beloved (continued)

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(continued) The lover’s song (sayings)

Inferences about the lover’s project and practice architectures

If our love ceases to be

The lover is aware that this love (this relating) is uncertain, as things are in the material world, the world of relationships, and the world of propositions (sayings) that can seem true but turn out false

Then it’s the end of my world for me

And if this love ends, the lover’s world ends: a world in the form of a practice architecture that has given meaning, direction and value to the lover’s life, embodied in the lover’s practices of living and loving. Even in the solidarity of love, the lover cannot ignore that dependence on the beloved gives the beloved power-over the lover: the power to destroy the project that guides what seems to be the whole of the lover’s living

[So there it is. You be the judge of how crazy I was that morning.]

2.5 Practices, Practice Architectures and Marx’s Third Thesis on Feuerbach The enactments of practices have a cyclic character. They have beginnings, middles and ends. After one enactment of a practice is completed, it has to start anew. It might be more accurate to say that practices trace spirals as they unfold in time and space. They do not return to their past beginning, but to a new beginning, somewhere else, somewhere in the present or future. Perhaps, practices are also not quite like spirals. I am tempted to think that they are more like a Möbius strip. Figure 2.4 is a picture of the Möbius strip I made: it is a strip of paper joined with a half-twist, so the top of one end of the paper is joined to the bottom of the other end. The fun fact about a Möbius strip is that if you trace your finger along its surface, you find that it has just one side. Because of the half-twist, what was the white side runs into what was the striped side, so your finger traces along to the point on the surface where you began. It arrives at the same place, but (crucially) it gets there at a different time (I said at the beginning of this book: Now/is past./Here comes another one.). This is a bit like practices: how they are reproduced from occasion to occasion, beginning at one moment and coming to an end at another, later moment. Of course, practices are also always reproduced with variations that respond to the changed and more or less different circumstances of each new unfolding, with the result that the practice is always a little different, always a little improvised. They do not follow exactly the same path as before. When Schatzki (2002) says that practices

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Fig. 2.4 A Möbius strip (Photo supplied: S. Kemmis)

are prefigured, rather than determined in their course, he acknowledges this: that practices do not always follow exactly the same path, but vary to respond to changing local circumstances each time they are enacted. It is also true to say that practices evolve over time. My practice of writing, for example, has evolved over time. But the practice of writing itself has evolved through the history of writing, and it has evolved differently in different parts of the globe, depending on such things as the orthographic system used (whether an alphabet, or pictographs or ideographs, for example), the number of literate people in the population, and, in recent decades, the rapid diffusion of computers and other digital devices. One might thus think of practices as existing in generations so later generations of practices sometimes supplant earlier generations. Thus, for example, schooling in early colonial Australia was conducted using the practices of the ‘monitorial school’ (a teacher overseeing senior students as ‘monitors’ in turn overseeing the work of other students), and, especially after the rise of mass compulsory education in the mid-nineteenth century, this system was later supplanted by a new generation of teaching practices in the multi-classroom, multi-teacher school in which there was one teacher for each class. Similarly, a new generation of practices of teaching is emerging as teachers integrate the use of digital devices into their classroom teaching. Other examples in education include the supplanting of older practices of direct instruction by a new generation of practices of discovery learning, or the supplanting of older practices of monologic pedagogy (a teacher doing most of the speaking in the classroom) by a new generation of practices of dialogic pedagogy (in which teachers create opportunities for all, or almost all, students to engage in dialogue with other students and the teacher in the course of a lesson; Edwards-Groves & Davidson, 2017). It is difficult to capture this notion that practices evolve through generations, either in the practices of individual practitioners or in the practices of a wider group, like the teaching profession. Nevertheless, in an attempt to point towards this notion, our diagram of the theory of practice architectures (see Sect. 2.2: ‘The theory of

2.5 Practices, Practice Architectures and Marx’s Third Thesis on Feuerbach

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Fig. 2.5 A lemniscate, depicting Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach

practice architectures I’, Fig. 2.1), includes a lemniscate (see Fig. 2.5), which is rather like the infinity symbol, and a bit like a Möbius strip. We include it in the diagram in an attempt to convey the dynamism of the dialectical relationship of mutual constitution that can exist between the combined sayings, doings and relatings of a practice, on the left-hand side of the figure, and, on the right-hand side, the combined cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that together form the practice architectures that enable and constrain the practice. Through time, and perhaps through generations of practice, this dynamic dialectical interrelationship between practices and arrangements can change both practices and practice architectures, both practitioners and the conditions that enable and constrain practices. The lemniscate is a bit ‘flatter’ than a Möbius strip, but perhaps it serves its purpose well enough. Inside the left-hand loop of the lemniscate in this figure, I have included the words ‘The individual’; in the loop on the right, the words ‘Society: circumstances and upbringing’. If you trace your finger around the lemniscate, you loop around the domain of the individual and then around the domain of the social—society. Individuals make societies, and societies make individuals. This dialectic of individual-social was articulated in the third of Karl Marx’s (b.1818–d.1883) eleven Theses on Feuerbach13 (1845), according to which: The materialist doctrine that [people] are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed [people] are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is [people] who change circumstances and that the educator must [him- or herself] be educated.

The ‘materialist doctrine’ Marx is referring to is the philosophical materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach (b.1804-d.1872), a fellow member, with Marx, of the ‘Young 13 The

philosopher Richard J. Bernstein devotes Part One of his important (1971) book Praxis and Action: Contemporary philosophies of human activity to ‘Marx and the Hegelian background’. He gives a lucid account of the notion of praxis (in the German)—what we might today in English refer to as practice. Marx’s notion of praxis as “sensuous activity” (p. 11) was important for the whole of his philosophy and his political philosophy. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre remarks (1998, p. 224) that the Theses on Feuerbach was the last of Marx’s explicitly philosophical writings.

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Hegelians’, who were critical of G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophical idealism, which suggested that human history is a history of the progress of ideas. Against this, the Young Hegelians wanted to bring Hegel ‘back to earth’, one might say: to explore how it is not just ideas, but historical, cultural, material, economic, social and political circumstances in the world that shape events. Marx nevertheless felt that Feuerbach’s materialism remained incomplete: it omitted the role of people in making history. In the third Thesis, Marx thus draws attention not only to the notion that people are shaped by circumstances and upbringing (and that, therefore, changed people would be the products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing), but also to the role of people in this history: it is people who change circumstances, and people who educate educators (‘upbringers’). Later, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852, no page), Marx also says: [People] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

The Theses on Feuerbach were important for Marx’s philosophy because it is here that he also emphasises the role of praxis or “sensuous human activity” in history. He sees history as the product of human action. In a similar way, I understand practice to be human action in history (Kemmis, 2018, pp. 2–3). As we practice, we make and remake the world; we produce, reproduce and transform circumstances. We human beings are interwoven with the world through our practising. We ask the innocent lemniscate in the diagram of the theory of practice architectures to do some pretty heavy lifting when we ask it to represent these ideas. It is intended to remind us that the combined sayings, doings and relatings of a practice are made possible (respectively) by the combined cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that make up the practice architectures that enable and constrain the practice. At the same time, the lemniscate can remind us that people’s practices—the practice of a teacher, for example—enable and constrain other people’s practices—the practices of a student, for example—and people’s practices can thus be among the practice architectures that shape others’ practices. The teachers’ sayings, doings, and relatings are experienced as among the cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements the students experience when they interact. Thus, through their talk-in-interaction in classrooms, teachers and students co-produce each other’s practices (for close analysis of how, see, for example, Edwards-Groves & Davidson, 2017). People’s practices are among the practice architectures that shape the practices of others, but they are not the whole of those practice architectures; other kinds of circumstances (for example, the language we use, the material arrangements of a place, the relationships between people who inhabit the place; songs, the weather, and the climate of an organisation) are also among the conditions that shape people’s practices.

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References Bernstein, R. J. (1971). Praxis and action: Contemporary philosophies of human activity. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Donne, J. (1624) “No man is an island” from Meditation XVII, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, p. 446 in C. M. Coffin (Ed.) (2001) The complete poetry and selected prose of John Donne. (D. Donoghue, Intro). New York: Random House. Edwards-Groves, C., & Davidson, C. (2017). Becoming a meaning maker: Talk and interaction in the dialogic classroom. Marrickville Metro, NSW: Primary English Teaching Association Australia. Kemmis, S. (2018). Educational research and the good for humankind: Changing education to secure a sustainable world. Keynote address at the Seminar ‘Education, Fatherland and Humanity’ held on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Finnish Institute for Educational Research, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, June 7. https://ktl.jyu.fi/en/current/news/180524-edresearch-and-the-good_23.pdf Kemmis, S., & Grootenboer, P. (2008) Situating praxis in practice: Practice architectures and the cultural, social and material conditions for practice (Ch. 3). In S. Kemmis & T.J. Smith (Eds.) Enabling Praxis: Challenges for education (pp. 37–62). Rotterdam: Sense. Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R., & Nixon, R. (2014a). The action research planner: Doing critical participatory action research. Singapore: Springer. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014b). Changing practices, changing education. Singapore: Springer. Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R., & Nixon, R. (2019). Critical participatory action research (Ch. 12) In: O. Zuber-Skerritt & L. Wood (Eds.), Action learning and action research: Genres and approaches (pp. 179–192). Bingley, West Yorkshire: Emerald. MacIntyre, A. (1998). The theses on Feuerbach: A road not taken. In K. Knight (Ed.), The MacIntyre Reader (pp. 223–234). Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Mahon, K. (2014). Critical Pedagogical Praxis in higher education. PhD thesis, Charles Sturt University. Mahon, K., Francisco, S., & Kemmis, S. (Eds.). (2017). Exploring education and professional practices: Through the lens of practice architectures. Singapore: Springer. Marx, K. (1845). Theses on Feuerbach (C. Smith, Trans., 2002). https://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1845/theses/index.htm Marx, K. (1852). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (S. K. Padover, Trans.). https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm Schatzki, T. R. (2002). The site of the social: A philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Schatzki, T. R. (2010). The timespace of human activity: On performance, society, and history as indeterminate teleological events. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington.

Chapter 3

Practices Happen in Intersubjective Space

Abstract This chapter (Sects. 3.1–3.14) introduces notions to do with the happening-ness of practices in intersubjective space. After Sect. 3.1, which suggests that practices are like passages through time, Sect. 3.2 contrasts the notion of intersubjectivity with the notion of subjectivity. Sections 3.2–3.5 then focus on the cultural-discursive dimension of intersubjectivity: semantic space. Sections 3.6–3.9 focus on the material dimension of intersubjectivity: physical or material space-time. Sections 3.10–3.13 focus on the social-political dimension of intersubjectivity: social space. This set of sections comes to a close with Sect. 3.14, about happening and intersubjectivity: the way happening in intersubjective space unfolds, everywhere and all at once, through time.

3.1 Passages Through Time: Living Our Lives in Practices1 Some people think we live our lives in a stream of consciousness. US philosopher of practice Schatzki (2013, p. 32) disagrees. He says we live our lives in an unbroken sequence of activities, some overlapping or in parallel. And most of our activities occur in our practices: buying food, preparing meals, eating, cleaning, commuting, working, reading, feeding the birds, sleeping… We live our lives in practices. We have a powerful image of ourselves as biological entities. To ourselves, we seem more or less solid, autonomous, distinct. Some of us think of ourselves as having an identity. Some of us think we are or have one self. (Others think we have many ‘selves’, each different so we can be our appropriate self in relation to every 1 An

early version of this idea was a text entitled ‘Passages’, written in 2008, as I worked with colleagues at Charles Sturt University to develop the first forms of the theory of practice architectures. A metaphor like ‘passages’ through time or ‘passages of play’ seemed apt for describing the way practices unfolded as they are enacted. Once committed to the idea of ‘architectures’, however, I began to harbour a mild regret for the built-design feel of the ‘architectures’ metaphor. ‘Passages’ began to feel like corridors. By the time I chose a photograph for the cover of Enabling Praxis, the (2008) book I edited with Tracey J Smith, which introduces the theory of practice architectures, I had already chosen a more organic image: A photograph of the Longleat Safari Park hedge maze in Wiltshire, England, including two children. Its ‘passages’ are made of growing yew hedge, rather than bricks and mortar.

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other kind of person we meet, and especially in relation to kin who are in different relationships with us.) In any case, our biological self appears to have an external boundary—although not precisely, our skin. Everything else in the world, everything that is ‘not-me’, is beyond this boundary. It turns out that we are not so solid. Our bodies are constantly being remade. Small amounts of the ‘not-me’ enter my mouth, are chewed and digested and become part of me. Other parts pass through my gut and are excreted. The food I eat is transformed into energy and the resources my body needs to replenish itself, to replace the many millions of cells that will die in the course of my life. And what about the microbiota in my gut, composed of millions of microorganisms, all doing their jobs, mostly in some kind of mutual relationship with me—or are they also part of me? My biological identity at this moment is composed of different cells than yesterday, or a month ago, or 10 years ago, and it is decaying before my eyes: I see the evidence in the mirror. As much as I depend on the community of life on the planet for food, I also depend on the air for oxygen, and on the planet and the Cosmos for the atoms and molecules that, through long chains of biochemical interactions, come to compose my body. Things that were not part of me become part of me; things that were part of me are excreted, eroded, erased. My very existence depends on the endless stream of interactions that connect me to the many things that appear to be ‘not-me’ until they become part of me, and then perhaps disappear from me. So I am like a vortex in a stream, formed as the current passes a rock, spinning down the stream for a time, then disappearing into the surrounding air and water. I come into existence in the fertilisation of an egg, develop as an embryo, am born and nurtured, grow up to maturity, go on (perhaps) to reproduce, (perhaps) nurture my own children and maybe my grandchildren, and, sooner or later, I die, to disappear into the surrounding air and earth and water. To put it another way, although I appear to myself as a more or less solid, enduring entity that passes through time and space (changing here and there, at the margins), in reality I am not so solid, and not so enduring. My body and my lived being are permeable, and constantly under reconstruction, reproducing and transforming me from moment to moment, year to year. On this view, I come to see my body and being as a confluence in webs, spirals, tides of repair and renewal that are made possible by my interactions with the world—interactions that are necessary to sustain both my body and my lived being. And of course, they also maintain the illusion that I am a solid, enduring entity. And this is the point: My life is lived in practices. Without practices, I do not interact with the world in ways that sustain me as a being—a sentient being, a biological being, a social being. Like all other living beings, I am part of the community of life on the planet. I participate in this community of life through my practices; without my practices (and the practices of others), my life cannot be sustained. Without interacting with a range of other minds, my life and my consciousness as a sentient being cannot be sustained. Without interacting with many other people and other living and nonliving things, my life as a biological being cannot be sustained. Without interacting with other people, in a diverse array of relationships, my life as a social being cannot be

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sustained. I am a confluence of practices that secure (and challenge) my mind in interaction with other minds, that secure (and risk) my body in interaction with the material world, and that secure my social being in interaction with the communities that sustain (and threaten) me in webs of relationships of power and solidarity. As happens in other ways with other species of biological beings, my practices have evolved through my life. As a human being, my practices have evolved from primitive reflexes like the sucking and grasping and sleeping of my infancy to the whole array of more and less specialised practices that maintain the adult me in my interactions with the world. By now, I have developed a wide repertoire of practices: a wide repertoire of ways to sustain myself in the world around me. And I am more or less well adapted to the specific place I live in—my ‘here’, where I live, more or less successfully, in my way. The Cosmos began with the Big Bang, about 13.8 billion years ago. Before it, there was no time and no space. Perhaps, in some billions of years, it will end in a Big Crunch, or eventually peter out in a long diffusion into a structurelessness of time and space. My life is like the Cosmos. Before it, there was no me; after it, there will be no me. In the meantime, all the life I have is made by my living it. Some of us thrive; some just survive. And some come too soon to the end that eventually meets us all. But what we do in life is living. Living is active, not passive. It is dynamic. In the case of us humans, living happens by our being engaged with the world—with other minds, with other living and nonliving things, with other people in various kinds of communities and conflicts. Without this engagement, we wither and fade. Through our living, we ‘make our way in the world’, and we do it our way: our way will be different from the way others make their way in the world. They live their lives in other ways. So ‘my way’ of living—my own life—is a life lived ‘my way’. And yours is a life lived your way. Our lives start and finish at our own unique moments, and between those two momentous instants when the apparent solidity of our own Being and the emptiness of non-Being collide, our lives follow their own unique trajectories, even though our trajectories are much influenced by other lives and other things around us. My life, then, is my own unique ‘passage through time’—the path my life has taken, and will take, before its end. And your life is your unique passage. So, when we think of all the organisms and all of the species that have ever lived on planet Earth, since life began, we recognise that each organism has its own lifespan, its own unique passage. Some of these passages are connected to others in lines of succession, as one gives birth to another individual or species. And some passages disappear into others, as when a prey is consumed by a predator, thus helping to sustain the predator’s life. And some just disappear into death, or the extinction of whole species. The history of life on the planet is a vast, dense mesh of these passages, each unique, with its own beginning, its own pathway and its own end, yet entangled with others in life and death. At this moment in the history of the planet, many living things, and many species are under existential threat. In my lifetime, many species have become extinct, with unknown consequences for the ecologies of which they are part. We humans have a lot to answer for, and we have much changing to do if we are to preserve ecologies

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and communities of life on the planet which will enable human beings to survive into the future. We need to learn much about how to change the practices which are currently threatening the community of life on Earth, and to adopt new and different practices that will help us to sustain the community of life. We need a mass of knowledge if we are to find out what makes just one human life take the trajectory it does, let alone the knowledge we will need for Homo sapiens to survive extinction, and for many other species around us to survive so they and we can thrive. Each person’s life trajectory depends on when and where and how it begins, and every when and where and how that follows until, for that person, there are no more whens or wheres or hows. I am trying to discover some of that kind of knowledge, about what makes a life take the trajectory it does. The work I do is one version of practice theorising. Practice theory is a way that some people try to find out how lives unfold in the ways they do, in practices, and how those practices enmesh us with the world around us, and our human communities and societies, and the community of life on the planet. Practice theory explores what practices are composed of, and what cultural, material, and social–political conditions are necessary to make those practices possible. I am trying to discover how we traverse time and space in our own unique passages, in a life lived in practices that carry us from one moment to the next and the next and the next, until, for us at least, there are no more nexts. As we grow older, we come to accept that, despite fear of death, or denial, we are mortal. And, as some of us grow older, we see that other lives grow up in our shadow, and thrive, and take their turn in the sun. Our generations today, however, are having both to learn and to teach a new lesson: while we are mortal, and die, we must also leave our planet fit for human occupation, and fit to support the community of life on Earth. Our generations threaten the greatest intergenerational injustice of all time: the threat of destroying the planet for future generations of our species, and thousands of other species as well. In these circumstances, practice theory may be among what Williams (1983, p. 243) called a “resources for a journey of hope”. Indeed, I think, and I hope this book will help in a small way to show, that practice theory may help us to see how we are currently entangled (Hodder 2012) with the world through our existing practices, and how we can remake the cultural, material and social-political conditions that currently fix our practices in paths that, left unchecked, will lead us to destruction. As practice theorists like Shove and Spurling (2013) show, practice theory can help us to identify and to construct other conditions that will support practices for sustainable lives for people, and for the community of life on Earth.

3.2 Intersubjectivity I: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity Here I am, an agentic human subject capable of speech, action and relationships. I am ‘me’; obstinately existing; myself. It is tempting to believe that I am the centre of things, but I am not. I am just at the centre of my own life, at the centre of how things appear to me, from my standpoint.

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In reality, I am one small thing among a great many in the Cosmos, and one thing, just one living being, among a very great many here in the community of life on Planet Earth. (It disturbs me deeply to discover that since I was 24, in 1970, there are now 60% less animals on Earth [World Wildlife Fund 2018].) I came from what already existed before me. All the atoms and molecules of which I am made are ancient beyond reckoning. What and who I am now is fashioned from things that long predated me. 1. The language I speak, and the semantic spaces it makes possible, existed before me. I came to use it as an interlocutor with others, and sometimes say something new in it, but I emerged into a semantic space that existed before me. While I speak the language, the language also speaks me into life. 2. The kinds of human activities and work I do, along with the whole panoply of places in physical space-time that I can inhabit, existed before me. As an embodied being, I was formed from the materials of the world, and, biologically speaking, from a mother and father, and I emerged into a material world that was already alive with activity and work, and, over time, I learned how to participate in it. 3. All kinds of human relationships existed before I came into the world, and into my family and community, along with the whole of social space shaped by people over history—patterns of solidarity and inclusion and exclusion, and relationships of power of various kinds. When I emerged, as a new born, and later, as I came into other situations as a newcomer, I came into social spaces already shaped to enable and constrain how I could coexist with others in them.2 In these three ways, all of us come into the ‘always-already-ness’ of a world whose history precedes us, and which we become part of, shaping a new always-already-ness for others, including the others who follow us. I am only interpretable to myself and to others against the backdrop of this threedimensional always-already-ness. Importantly, I learn who I am and what I am like in the language, in the material world, and in the social spaces that have preceded me and that I now inhabit. My subjectivity (and yours) presupposes a fabric of intersubjectivity that binds us all together as human beings, and as participants in the community of life on Planet Earth. On these grounds, I conclude that our subjectivity is grounded and anchored in intersubjectivity.3 2 My

much-missed wife Roslin Brennan Kemmis (Rozzie), who died in 2015, once had a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “How come they made up all the rules before I got here?”. 3 I am grateful to Ted Schatzki and Nick Hopwood who, in reviewing the manuscript for this book, shared their hesitations about the concept of ‘intersubjectivity’ as a key notion in the theory of practice architectures. Schatzki believes that the history of twentieth-century philosophy cautions against making the concept of ‘intersubjectivity’ central to a theory of practice or of social life, on the grounds that it yields misleading formulations about what seems literally implied by the term, namely, that it implies ‘between subject(ivitie)s’. He would prefer that I called the space in which people act, interact and carry on practices a ‘common world’ or ‘Common Space’ or ‘Public Space’, rather than ‘intersubjective space’, on the grounds that these would be better terms to use to describe

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We do not make ourselves, as we please, through our own autonomous agency; we become ourselves by stepping into and participating in histories: family histories, communal histories, local histories, global history, the evolution of life on Earth, the history of the Cosmos. Through our practices, our action in history is our part in history, and part of the larger histories that unfold around us. Our agency develops as part of the dialectical process of our self-formation, as we are shaped by our particular life-histories. Each of us actively shapes ourselves in relation to the cultural, discursive, material, economic, social, political conditions we encounter, and, as we do, those conditions leave their imprint upon us. While some may see this as evidence of our capacity to shape ourselves, we should note that we also do so under particular conditions not of our own choosing. Thus, I conclude that our agency is not an untrammelled force of will; it unfolds and develops over time in interaction with, and enabled and constrained by, the particular conditions and circumstances it encounters. We also become ourselves by learning: as we shall see, our learning means coming to know how to go on in practices (Sect. 4.6: ‘Practices and Learning II’). Through our learning, we develop particular kinds of dispositions about how to speak and act and relate to other people and things and the world in different kinds of sites, settings and circumstances. We develop particular kinds of agency that impel our speaking, acting and relating in different circumstances: a sense of our capability in this or that situation; our sense that we can make things happen in particular ways. Neither our particular dispositions nor our particular awareness of our agency in different circumstances develop according to some entirely internal, endogenous developmental process of their own, however; they develop through interaction, as we relate to others and other things in the situations, sites, settings and circumstances in which we find ourselves at different times. While we may carry the dispositions and the sense of agency that we formed in one setting into other settings, we nevertheless test them out in each new setting to see how they fare. I mostly learned how to chair meetings in university settings; when I became chair of the Residents’ Association in the village where I lived in Victoria, however, I had to learn new and different dispositions, and new forms of agency, to respond to the particular kinds of dispositions and senses of agency that my neighbours brought to the meetings. It is through our practices that our dispositions and our sense of agency form and develop, as we interact amid the practice architectures of the different settings we inhabit.4 this space. He also thinks it would be more compatible with a Wittgensteinian view of practices. He suggests instead a notion of ‘lives interrelatedly unfolding in a common world’. Schatzki recognises, however, that the term ‘intersubjective space’ has been central in my writings with colleagues over more than 10 years, and concedes that it might be acceptable if my colleagues and I intend that the term be understood in a looser, more encompassing way, to refer to the overlapping realms of semantic space, physical space-time and social space. This is indeed the way I understand and use the term. 4 Thus, for example, a disposition like the authoritarian personality produces a person’s tyranny over subordinates (practices of tyranny) at the same time as it produces that person’s obsequious compliance to superordinates (practices of compliance). The authoritarian personality is one who

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So: we come into the world in the dialectic of chicken and egg. As eggs, we come from chickens; as chickens, we come from eggs. But we did not just come from eggs. We came from the always-already-ness of a history—of action-in-history—that was already underway when we entered the world, or the family, or the workplace. And we absorbed and became part of this action-in-history by learning (see Sects. 4.5 and 4.6—Practices and Learning I and II): by coming to know how to go on (Wittgenstein, 1958) in that action-in-history, in our way, for ourselves and for others. And we learned not only by watching from the sidelines as more experienced people enact a practice, by “legitimate peripheral participation” (Lave & Wenger, 1991), but also by just plunging in to the activity and blundering through, learning by doing as we go, which is another form of the “situated learning” that Lave & Wenger identify. Mentors and guides and teachers can help initiate us into new practices, but in the end we learn new practices principally by doing them: by learning how to participate in (how to go on in) the sayings, doings and relatings of this practice in this place, usually drawing on what we have learned elsewhere, and finding how that must be varied to be useful here; and, later, we take the practices we learned here when we start again there, in some new place—as I did when I took the meeting-chairing practices I had learned in the university setting to the meetings of the Progress Association in the village I lived in beside Westernport Bay, west of Melbourne, in Victoria. Thus, I learn my subjectivity, and find my identity, in the stream of intersubjectivity that surrounds me, and carries me along in the unfolding, the happening-ness, of action-in-history. And I learn to steer myself in that stream—that happening. And I learn through steering in that stream that the unfolding of action-in-history is not always within my control. I steer alongside all the others with whom I share this place, and this planet. If I am lucky, I learn who I am (subjectivity, identity) in the places and spaces I inhabit, and something about my capacity and agency by steering myself in history. And in the process, I also learn humility: I learn both that my powers are limited, and that I am fortunate to have them; I learn that there are limits on my capacity to steer what happens in the flow of history, and limits to people’s collective capacities, for example, in social movements. But although we can concede such limits, we should not forget that we also have some agency, and that some changes are possible. We can become more alert and attuned to the world, and stronger and wiser, through reflection on action, and through the kind of meditation that opens us up to experience the world around us more sensitively. These reflective practices have an important place in our development. To have something to reflect on, however, we must first act—that is, we must first interact with others and the world, through our own action-in-history. Thus, I conclude that most of our becoming is done in our own interactions with others and the world; that is, most of our developing is done in practices. has over-learned the power-over relations of hierarchy, often because, in the past, they have been bullied by a superordinate. Such a person all too readily manifests this super-sensitivity to hierarchy in steering through everyday life, usually (1) by bullying others (practices of bullying), and (2) by trying to avoid being bullied by bosses, often by trying hard to please them, and to anticipate and fulfil their wishes, even before the bosses have expressed them (practices of compliance).

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And this conclusion allows me to go a step further. If our development is principally through our practices, then it occurs principally in the intersubjective space (simultaneously in the three dimensions of semantic space plus physical space-time plus social space) in which practices are enacted. And if this is so, then it follows that our subjectivity is principally formed (grounded, anchored) in intersubjectivity.

3.3 In the Beginning Was the Word: Finding Each Other in Language Here are the first four (of the eighteen) verses of the Prologue to The Gospel of St John (John 1:1-1:4) 5 : 1 In

the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

I am an atheist, but it seems to me that the Prologue to John must surely be one of the most crucial of all biblical texts about Jesus. In it, the author asserts that Jesus, here called the Word, existed from the beginning as “with God” and as a part of God, the God who created all things, and yet was distinct from the essence of God in being incarnated (like all things that were and are incarnated in God’s act/s of creation). The text aims to convey the unity of God and Jesus, distinct only as essence and presence are distinct, and, metaphorically, as Father and Son. The Greek word Logos is at the fulcrum of this doubleness. Translated here as ‘Word’, it is used to refer to Jesus, as yet unnamed in the text. The author of the Gospel of John has drawn the word Logos from two regional cultural and linguistic traditions of the times (the hundred or so years after the life of Christ) to convey something about the unity-in-doubleness of the essence and the presence of God (leaving aside, here, the Holy Spirit as the third element of the Christian Trinity). Apparently, the author of John’s Gospel was deliberately using a word that had distinct, specific meaning and force within those two contemporary traditions: the Jewish Wisdom tradition, which sees Wisdom as at the core of all religions, and the Hellenistic philosophical tradition, in which Logos stands for knowledge. The author of the Gospel thus deliberately attaches a double meaning to the ‘Logos’ personified in Jesus. Depicting Jesus thus presents him as both the bearer of deep wisdom (drawing on the Jewish wisdom tradition) and of the knowledge grounded in the philosophical tradition, and thus as encompassing these two traditions but also, the author of John may want us to believe, transcending those former traditions in a new, emergent tradition (Christianity). The fourth verse (as well as others that follow in the Prologue) asserts that what came into being with Jesus was “life, and the life was the light of all people”. What he 5 From

New Revised Standard Version Bible (1989). National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. http://bible.oremus.org/?passage=John+1:1–1:18&version=nrsv.

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brought into being, the author asserts, is enlightenment about God that came through the teachings of Jesus, and, with it, an enlightenment about life and how people could live in order to “become children of God” (verse 12). The thing that continues to reverberate with me whenever I read or hear this passage, however, especially the first verse, is that it puts Logos at the very centre of things. To me, it evokes the power of language, the power to speak and mean. ‘Logos’ has many meanings, including ‘word’, and ‘thought’, and ‘logic’, and ‘knowledge’ but in an encompassing sense it means what language allows us to think, what is capable of being said and known, and it includes the possibility that what it is possible to think and know evolves and grows over time, through the speech and action of thinking–saying–acting–feeling people. To me, then, the first verse of The Gospel of John points to the enormous power of language—‘the Word’. “In the beginning was the Word…” And Logos, the word, also connotes all knowledge. According to this Prologue, the Word is part of God’s essence, and yet it is also incarnated in Jesus, the presence of Jesus, the Son of God. For me, as an atheist, questions about such matters as the Trinitarian nature of God are of great cultural and historical significance, but, on the face of it, they don’t much help me to understand my place in the universe. They do seem to me to reveal, however, a profound intuition, from the emerging Christian, and the existing Judaic and Hellenic traditions of two millennia ago, that the Cosmos from its beginning included not only the possibility of the emergence of life, but also the emergence of language, and the possibility that, through language, we products of the Cosmos could also be enlightened about our place in it. One might reasonably say that this enlightenment comes in a double sense: both, first, in the sense of an ‘objective’ understanding of ourselves as entities that occupy a time and place in the Cosmos, and, second, in the sense of a ‘subjective’ understanding of ourselves as selves and yet also as creatures of the Cosmos. Moreover, this doubleness allows us to understand that these two sides of our being in the Cosmos are dialectically intertwined in our conception and birth, our becoming, and our death and disappearance back into the stuff of which the Cosmos is made—that is, in our ‘incarnation’ as beings in the whole Being of the Cosmos. On this view, incarnation refers not only to the coming and presence of the man Jesus, coming to Earth from God the Father as the Son of God and, after his death, returning to life with God; on this view, we are also part of the incarnation of all things that exist and have ever existed, along with all living things. Indeed, the third verse of the Prologue says: “3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being”. What the first verse of the Gospel of John most provokes in me, then, is a sense of awe—and yet of serenity—that it is language, the Logos, that allows us to know ourselves in the Cosmos in this double-sided way, as both a consciousness that we are among the things (objects) in the world and the Cosmos, and also that we have (subjective) self-consciousness of our being not just in but of the Cosmos. To see this from the perspective of practice, and from a perspective on the place of language in practice, is to see language as an intersubjective accomplishment of humankind, or, rather, to see all languages as the intersubjective accomplishments of

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their own communities of speakers, each of which renders the world comprehensible in its own way. To a very great extent, but not entirely,6 we know the world and ourselves through language, by being immersed in languages we share with others. Some years ago (Kemmis, 2010, pp. 11–12), I reached toward this intuition in the following way: Our actions and practices are part of a wider, deeper ‘happening-ness’ that is constituted by the world and history even as it constitutes the changing world and unfolding history. As Marx (1852) noted, our actions and practices become part of an ‘external’ material, historical reality that exists for each of us equally, no matter how differently (or unequally) we may perceive it, how different (and unequal) our access to aspects of it may be, or how different (and unequal) our self-interests may be. Written into the world and to history, our actions and practices escape our control in the same way that language does—as Habermas observes in his (2003) The Future of Human Nature on the linguistic grounding of intersubjectivity: “As historical and social beings, we find ourselves always already in a linguistically structured lifeworld. In the forms of communication through which we reach an understanding with one another about something in the world and about ourselves, we encounter a transcending power. Language is not a kind of private property. No one possesses exclusive rights over the common medium of the communicative practices we must intersubjectively share. No single participant can control the structure, or even the course, of processes of reaching understanding and self-understanding … The logos of language escapes our control, and yet we are the ones, the subjects capable of speech and action, who reach an understanding with one another in this medium. It remains ‘our’ language” (pp. 10–11; emphasis in the original).

Action and practice likewise ‘escape our control’ in a shared world and history. As they are ‘loosed upon the world’ (Yeats, 1921, p. 19), spiralling ‘out’ from us in space and ‘down’ through time, action and practice become things less and more and different than we intended, desired, anticipated, expected or hoped. Their effects are irreversible and may be amended only by apologies, compensation or promises to do differently in future (Dunne, 1993, pp. 97–100; Kemmis & Smith, 2008, pp. 19–21). As Aristotle (2003, p. 120), quoting the Athenian poet Agathon (448–402 BC), observes: For one thing is denied even to God: To make what has been done undone again.

This is the feature of action and practice that prompts people to learn from experience, from history, and from literature, and to seek knowledge through science. This is the feature of action and practice that prompts us toward research on practice and praxis. When I first read that paragraph in Habermas’s The Future of Human Nature, the words took my breath away. Yes, when we use language, “we encounter a transcending power”. And: 6 We also know the world through our six senses in an embodied way—through the pain and pleasure,

of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch and proprioception (the sense of awareness of the position and movement of the body). We also know the world in a social sense, in terms of the pleasure and pain of positive and negative emotions and feelings like those of belonging (inclusion), caring, exclusion, power-over and power-with.

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The logos of language escapes our control, and yet we are the ones, the subjects capable of speech and action, who reach an understanding with one another in this medium. It remains ‘our’ language.

Language is shared; it is a shared accomplishment, the accomplishment of a linguistic community over many generations. Yet, at the same time, our language is sustained by our use of it for our everyday communicative purposes, as well as for many specialist purposes—like writing about practice theory. Moreover, we cannot say anything about the world entirely ‘innocently’. As Habermas says, “As historical and social beings we find ourselves always already in a linguistically structured lifeworld”. We are never just passing through the world pushed by the power of wind in our sails, we are always steering somewhere, oriented by the logos of language, floating on a sea of language. Much of the world was already named long before we came to know the things named, and new names and things spring up around us all the time. And we are profoundly shaped by the language we use, and the regions of language we inhabit; we become inhabitants of particular niches in language, and strangers to other niches, as we speak ourselves into being in the ebb and flow of conversation. Our language opens up a world for us, but it is our world. Each of us has our own perspective on the world we share, shaped to a greater or lesser extent by the language in which we comprehend it. And yet we meet one another as interlocutors in worlds we can come to share in language, through language, just as we meet as embodied beings in particular places and times, and as social beings in the webs of relationships that connect us to family and friends and communities and workplaces and the social and political world we share. As interlocutors, we find one another in language, in words. So: “In the beginning was the Word”. And through the power of words, we accomplish not only consciousness of the world, but also the consciousness of ourselves, of one another, and of ourselves-in-the-world as a community.

3.4 Intersubjectivity II: Entanglement in Semantic Space7 Knowledge In my view, knowledge arises from the practices of a community; it comes from what people do, and how they live. Knowledge about building, for example, arises from the observation and experience of people involved with buildings: builders, architects, engineers, interior designers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters and many more. The knowledge of these people is represented in some form in their own neural pathways, but it is also represented in a more public form in words, languages, specialist discourses, diagrams, mathematical formulae, and other forms of texts about different facets of building. Once represented, in minds or in texts, this knowledge 7 This

section is adapted from Kemmis and Edwards-Groves (2018), pp. 116–120. I am indebted to Hodder (2012) for the concept of entanglement.

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recalls not only particular moments of individual people’s experience, but also histories of buildings, of building types, building materials, building techniques, and the specialised work of a variety of tradespeople and professionals. And, finally, this knowledge anticipates and returns to its use in the practice of building—whether repairing an existing building, making a new building, or designing an entirely innovative building never before imagined. A long tradition in philosophy and education has regarded knowledge—truth—as something carried in our heads—our minds. It is what we learn. But knowledge has always managed to slip beyond the confines of individual minds. The English philosopher Ryle (1946) distinguished knowing that from knowing how. ‘Knowing that’ is propositional knowledge, like the knowledge that 2 + 2 = 4, or that J. K. Rowling was born on 31 July1965. ‘Knowing how’ is knowing how to do something, like riding a bike. This ‘know-how’ is something learned from experience; it is not easily put into words (that is, turned into propositional knowledge)—just as describing how to ride a bike is not easily put into words. (It is easier to have a go at doing the riding.) In a different way, Polanyi (1958) contrasted propositional knowledge with tacit knowledge, which is the ‘subsidiary awareness of particulars’ that makes it possible for us to recognise patterns like human faces, or the scattered marks in an X-ray image that betray the presence of a disease. To put it another way: we know more than we can say—or, more precisely, we know more than we know propositionally (in propositions; knowing that). From the views of Ryle and Polanyi, then, we can say that our knowledge extends beyond the limit of what we can put into words. Looking at what knowledge is from another perspective, for many centuries there has been a distinction between knowledge ‘in our heads’ as compared with the knowledge ‘in books’. Knowledge escapes from human minds into texts, and travels, somewhat unpredictably, and sometimes with surprising results, from writer to reader, and reader to reader, and readers to writers. In this way, knowledge also travels from text to text: intertextually (although this travel is mediated: it travels via the reading of an author who later writes in ways that have been shaped by what she or he has read). Knowledge does not just travel from person to person in texts, however. Much more obviously, it also travels through speech, through conversation. It is thus possible to think of knowledge not solely as the property of individual minds—individual cognitive subjects—but as something created and shared intersubjectively. German philosopher Habermas (1987) takes the view that knowledge is shared intersubjectively, rejecting a position that he describes as ‘the philosophy of the subject’. The philosophy of the subject holds that knowledge is something like an image on the retina, or a proposition in the mind. Habermas, by contrast, emphasises that knowledge is intersubjective, because it arises from and returns to conversation or communication between people (although holding this view does not imply that knowledge cannot also exist in the mind of an individual subject). Language and meaning In this, Habermas is building on insights from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958), who saw that knowledge did not simply ‘point’ to objects in the world, but

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that meaning existed in living language. Meaning came from knowing how to mean, by using words appropriately in language games necessarily played with others. To play a language game is to use language in thinking and speaking and hearing and writing and reading, speaking about things in ways that connect with other people’s uses of the language, until we find that our meaning is shared with others—which is to say, we find that our use of words as we communicate in language, orients us and our interlocutors to the world in the same way. To take this view is to say that the relationship between a word and the world is not the relationship between something—an idea or concept, say—‘in the head’, and some state of affairs in the world: a relationship between something ‘internal’, in our minds, and something ‘external’, in the world. It is to say that we can orient ourselves and our interlocutors to things in the world by using language to point, prompt and push one another to see things in the same or similar ways. From what has been said already, then, we can conclude that knowledge is not ‘all in the mind’. Wittgenstein’s insight was that words have their meanings by being used, and by being used in ways that are comprehensible to different speakers when they use the words in a given context. I think this harks back to the very beginnings of language in the primal prehistory of human beings and their forebears—when ancient people (or their forebears) shouted alarm calls, or called about finding food, or whispered and nodded silently to indicate the presence of an animal they were hunting. But this communal orienting function of language holds true today, of all talk and texts, whether simple and every day, or arcane, specialised and esoteric. Words and language are only of any use when they allow meanings to be shared— when they orient us to the world in the same way as our interlocutors, and other users of our language. Meaning is not so much ‘transmitted’ from one to another, from one mind and mouth to another’s ear and mind, as it is ‘shown’: we find agreement when we see what it is in the world that our interlocutor wants us to see, and when we can also use words to orient in the same way with our interlocutor towards something in the world. Wittgenstein’s further insight was that we learn to use language not just to see the world, passively, as it were, but to engage with it, to be in it, to live and do things in it. In Wittgenstein’s view, then, language had an indissoluble relationship with living in the world. In short, language has an indissoluble relationship with practice. In my terms (to reiterate), language (and thus, also, knowledge) arises from practice, represents and recalls practice, and it anticipates and returns to its use in practice. Language is thus not just the achievement of an individual mind that masters it; it is a social achievement, a communal achievement. Every language is the communal achievement of a linguistic community: every language grew, and grows, through the speech and understanding of its communities of users. Linguistic communities can be as different as the linguistic communities of English or Urdu or Finnish. There are many kinds of linguistic communities, however—the ones who speak the language of quantum theory, for example, or the ones who speak the language of practice theory, or the ones who speak the language of the world of Harry Potter, or the ones who speak the language of polo or Pokémon or painting. Language grows when people

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who share worlds want to orient themselves and one another in practices that take place in those worlds. Languages, practices, linguistic communities, and speakers all arise and grow together—and die out or become extinct together. Specific linguistic communities arise and grow because they are also, at the same time, what Lave and Wenger (1991, pp. 30, 94–99) call “communities of practice”. Just like us, as speakers of languages, all the words we use have histories. All words once emerged and came into use, and their meanings frequently grow and diversify over time, like different species evolving from common ancestors. And all the words we use have uses: they fit into sentences in mostly orderly ways, even when poetic or funny ways of speaking surprise us. They belong in their own worlds of use. Some words we find everywhere—like ‘the’ or ‘are’ in English—while others exist in mostly unfrequented regions of a language—like the imaginary ‘houyhnhnms’ (an intelligent race of horses) that exist in the pages of Swift’s (1726/2003) book Gulliver’s Travels. Thus understood, language and knowledge are an intersubjective achievement as well as a subjective one. Our subjective knowledge arises from our actions in the world, and especially from our intersubjective interactions with others. Knowledge arises, one might say, in practices that occur in a world we share with others. When we learn things, then, we do not just learn words or language or ideas or concepts, and we do not just learn them as ‘internal’ representations that correspond to, or attach to, ‘external’ things or states of affairs in the world. We learn to use them in relation to, as part of, some kind of practice. What we learn arises from, represents, recalls, anticipates, and returns to its use in practice.

3.5 Intertextuality: Anthony Capella and His Sources (in Semantic Space) Capella’s (2009) novel The Various Flavors of Coffee is about the life and loves of Robert Wallis, a rakish young poet in 1880s London who becomes a connoisseur of coffee. Among Robert’s achievements is developing the “Wallis-Pinker Guide” for testing the flavours present in different coffees—a case containing small jars of sample materials (like cherry and vanilla) to be used as standards against which to identify flavours in a tiny cup of coffee. Among his romantic encounters are a cautious affair with his employer’s daughter, a suffragette, in London, and an incautious affair in Africa with a bewitchingly beautiful slave owned by a business associate. In the Acknowledgements at the end of the book (pp. 547–8), Capella lists a number of other authors and books that helped to give authenticity to his story: The Wallis-Pinker Guide owes a great deal to several cupping manuals both old and new, and in particular to The Coffee Cupper’s Handbook by Ted. R. Lingle, published by the Specialty Coffee Association of America. It also owes a debt to Le Nez du Café, a set of bottled aromas created by Jean Lenoir, and the accompanying booklet of sensory definitions co-authored by Jean Lenoir and David Guermonprez, translated from the French by Sharon Sutcliffe.

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I have drawn on many books about coffee, including Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast, Black Gold by Antony Wild, The Devil’s Cup by Stewart Lee Allen and Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity by Heinrich Jacob. What little I know about Victorian coffee farming I learned from Coffee: Its Cultivation and Profit by Edwin Lester Arnold, published in 1886. I have moved around one or two dates in the history of the suffragette movement to suit my story, but the events themselves happened much as I describe. For primary sources I am particularly indebted to Votes for Women: The Virago Book of Suffragettes edited by Joyce Marlow, and Literature of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign in England by Carolyn Christensen Nelson. My descriptions of turn-of-the-century treatments for hysteria are based on The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction by Rachel P. Maines. What she relates sounds so strange to modern ears that I have taken the liberty of putting directly into the mouths of my fictional doctors some of the contemporary sources quoted by her. Some of my descriptions of fin-de-siècle London, as well as various menus, meals and observations, are also taken from contemporary accounts, including Scenes of London Life by Henry Mayhew and John Binney, and Dinners and Diners by Lt. Col. Newnham-Davis, both archived on the excellent www.victorianlondon.org. Robert Wallis’s letters as he travels to Africa are based on several late-Victorian travelers’ journals, such as those by Gustave Flaubert and Mary Kingsley—both far more enthusiastic explorers of that continent than Robert. I owe a special debt to Charles Nicholl’s Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880–91, and in particular to the section in which he recreates Rimbaud’s journey from Aden to Harar from the notes of Alfred Bardey, coffee merchant and adventurer. For a description of a Victorian-era slave sale, I drew on To the Heart of the Nile by Pat Shipman. This is the biography of Lady Florence Baker, who was spotted at one such sale by the explorer Samuel Baker and who subsequently became his wife.

Not everyone who read those 14 books, or others like them, produced the manuscript for The Various Flavors of Coffee, as Anthony Capella did. The story was not predetermined, neither by Capella’s initial plan for it, nor by the sources he drew on. We can imagine that, as his story took shape, he moved back and forth, between his initial ideas and those sources, gradually reaching out for yet other sources to enable him to credibly stage the scenes of the manuscript that eventually became the novel. The story emerged in the delicate dance—the practice—of writing that only ends when the story has reached a form, after passing through a publisher’s editorial process, in which the author and publisher are ready to present it to readers. It begins with some ideas and perhaps a rough plot, but it is a long process of discovery to decide how the characters will reveal themselves, through what occasions and in what scenes, in a narrative intricate enough to grab our attention and sustain it through to the last page. As Capella himself says of his relationship with the reader: “I never forget I’m inviting them to come with me on a journey, and that as their host and guide it’s my duty to enthrall them” (http://www.anthonycapella.com/?page_id=7). Many novelists report that they only feel that their characters are ‘real’ when they lose control of them, when the characters themselves seem to shape the ways the story unfolds.8 Perhaps it is the same with Anthony Capella. 8 Andre

Dubus III is one such writer, as he reveals to Fassler (2013).

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While the novel is undoubtedly Capella’s, his words also echo the words and ideas of the sources he lists, along with many other sources that have influenced him— for example, sources that he does not acknowledge on the operation of the (Stock) Exchange in late nineteenth-century London, futures trading, and the emergence of a variety of new financial instruments in the period. Indeed, this work of Capella’s imagination has been fed by his whole lifetime of reading, listening, reflecting and conversing—since his birth in Uganda in 1962, his travel with his parents returning to England when he was six weeks old, his time at St Peter’s College, Oxford, and his whole private and working life since that time. The novel has also been powerfully shaped by Capella’s desire to craft a story that will find and “enthrall” readers. It comes from a powerful desire to communicate, and to do so in a particular, very difficult way: in the form of a contemporary novel. Clearly, with a First-Class Honours degree in English Literature from Oxford, Capella is well aware of developments over recent decades in the novel as a form, including, for example, magical realism and various kinds of postmodern novels that challenged the realistic form of the nineteenth-century novel whose story was told by an invisible, all-knowing narrator. The Various Flavors of Coffee is not strikingly innovative in form, though, despite its being narrated by the central character as an older, perhaps wiser man looking back on his youth, who is telling the story to fulfil the wishes of a lover. Thus, Capella anticipates that the book will be read not only by general readers like me, but also by fellow novelists who will attend to much more than its story: as fellow practitioners of the craft of writing, they will also read its form, and decide whether and to what extent it is new and innovative in the evolution of the novel in the twenty-first century. Since the rights to some of his other works have been sold for movies or television series, we might also reasonably deduce that this novel was also written with an eye to its transformation into a movie. It certainly offers exciting locations and dramatic scenes, not to mention Robert Wallis’s romantic (and some not-so-romantic) relationships with various women, several strikingly beautiful, as the dandified young Wallis himself well maybe, with his curly hair bobbing at his shoulders. Perhaps, then, Capella is also writing for movie producers, directors, actors—story-tellers in a different medium. Perhaps it is for this reason that we accompany Wallis on a sea journey to Africa, and overland to distant outposts, crossing parched, blazing deserts to reach upland jungles with ecologically aware. Indigenous inhabitants ripe for nineteenth-century capitalist exploitation through the establishment of new coffee plantations. It turns out, however, that ‘Anthony Capella’ is also ‘JP Delaney’, writer of psychological suspense thrillers, and ‘Jonathon Holt’, author of the Carnivia trilogy. Indeed, Anthony Capella is a pseudonym (another fiction) that the author uses for writing the sensual, food-themed, historical novels of which The Various Flavors of Coffee is one. As ‘Anthony Capella’ explains on his website, he writes under different names for these different genres, purveying different genres of story to different markets, so readers can find the genre that appeals to them via the relevant pseudonym. According to https://www.unitedagents.co.uk/tony-strong, the person behind these

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pseudonyms (and who has also written other books under his own name), is in fact Tony Strong, formerly a highly successful advertising copywriter for the UK advertising firm Ogilvy and Mather, which also nurtured Fay Weldon and Salman Rushdie early in their writing careers, and later for the firm of Abbott Mead Vickers. Perhaps this helps to explain Robert Wallis’s (and our) introduction to the ‘science’ of late nineteenth-century advertising in The Various Flavors of Coffee, in order to sell packaged coffee, and to attract patrons to the chain of coffee-houses established by Robert Wallis’s employer, Samuel Pinker. Life and art bleed into one another in the novelist’s practice. The novel comes from somewhere (many somewheres, actually) and it goes somewhere: to readers—whole markets of them, populated not only by people who read, but also people who write, and by people who make movies and television series. One writer’s practice feeds another’s through the practice of reading which turns out to be even more crucial to the writer’s craft than the practice of writing itself. What is less obvious in this chamber of echoes is that not every text produces echoes in other texts, and each text echoes only some definite—though perhaps very large—number of other texts. In any one text, the echoes of some other texts may be so faint that their sources are indecipherable. Yet each particular text is also part of a particular conversation which draws on texts that have gone before it, and any particular text may or may not also contribute to a particular conversation that endures beyond it—not just in content, but also in symbolic and textual forms. Anthony Capella wanted to write a certain kind of novel—“sensual”, “food-themed” as he says on his website—and he thought coffee might be a candidate for the ‘food’ part, and the flavours of coffee and the sexual and romantic exploits of his central character might be candidates for the ‘sensual’ part. Thus, he had need of certain kinds of knowledge about coffee (and other things, including slave markets) in the late nineteenth century, and, as a very successful student of English literature, he had the skills to find sufficient texts to provide him with the education he needed to make a credible novel about a variety of people connected to the coffee trade in that period. Before Capella came along, it may have been some time since some of those texts had been consulted. Yet here I am, citing Capella (I might have chosen any one of a hundred other writers, including a dozen or more practice theorists), feeding him into my conversation with you, just because he wrote a few paragraphs in the Acknowledgements at the end of The Various Flavors of Coffee that served my purpose: the purpose of demonstrating the strange, evolving conversation made possible by intertextuality. Bulgarian-born French theorist Julia Kristeva, semiotician, psychoanalyst, poststructuralist, was the first to elaborate the notion of intertextuality in its contemporary form (Kristeva 1980). She sees the ideas of intersubjectivity and intertextuality as in opposition to one another, and regards intertextuality as primary, as the language of forms which mediate the ways readers and writers interpret the world. For me, the interrelationship of intertextuality and intersubjectivity seems more dialectical and complementary (a relationship between messages and media), rather than the subjugation of either to the other. What we see in Anthony Capella’s acknowledgements of his sources is how the web of his novel, itself a new story, although in an easily

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recognisable narrative form, is spun from a vast range of ideas and forms borrowed from elsewhere. This novel inhabits a world of novels, but it gives life to a new world (in imagination) spun from those particular ideas and forms—ideas about coffee, plantations, Victorian coffee-houses, Victorian dining, and the like. Some of the practice architectures of Anthony Capella’s writing emerged as his ideas began to take form—reference books that he could find and use to inform himself about—for example—life in Victorian London, and in parts of Africa. As objects, those books were among the material-economic arrangements that shaped Capella’s writing. As sources of ideas, they were among the cultural-discursive arrangements that shaped his writing. And they were also social–political arrangements, drawing from historical as well as imaginary sources to communicate a story to us, as readers, which we take into our discussions with others, and helping us to locate ourselves in real world history as well as in the fictional history his story creates. To focus just on semantic space for a moment, however, we see in Anthony Capella’s literary borrowings how some particular ideas about coffee, plantations, and coffee-houses (for example) travelled from the sources Capella acknowledges into to his text: relationships of intertextuality. Of course, this also happens in speech, not just in writing. Through the back-and-forth motion of intertextuality, we come to inhabit a variety of particular semantic spaces which overlap with others’ particular semantic spaces, in various kinds of linguistic communities we share in common. Thus, as we see in the case of Anthony Capella, texts breed and feed other texts in vast, flowering skeins, spirals and supernovae of intertextuality whose motors are the enduring, evolving, practices of reading and writing. Reading, as you are doing now, and writing, as I am doing.

3.6 Here: In Time, in Space (A Poem)9 We are always somewhere. Wherever we are, we are always not just at but in some particular ‘Here’ that is not ‘there’. We stand somewhere, sit somewhere.

9 The

first version of this poem was written in 2007 when I was on study leave at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with my former (1974–6) doctoral supervisor Robert E. (Bob) Stake. (Bob quoted that first version of the poem in prose form in his [2010] book Qualitative Research: Studying how things work, pp. 59–60; I revised it in January 2018.) As we often have, we were talking and thinking about case study, and I was thus trying to think how to convey the sense of the particularity and the singularity of each case. The poem emerged as a meditation on the singularity and particularity of some ‘here’ that a case study attempts to capture for some purpose. I think it makes a more general observation about place, however, and our being in it. Today, I think of it as an ontological sensibility, a large part of a practice sensibility.

3.6 Here: In Time, in Space (A Poem) In words, abstractions (thinking, saying), our minds may wander from this gentle but unforgiving reality, but we cannot escape being in some Here-ness, wherever we are. We breathe the air Here. This place enters us. We breathe in or do not breathe in the pollen that causes some of us hay fever in the spring. (And yes, we are always Here at some particular time.) Moment by moment, always, restlessly, we jolt, bump, jostle or caress the Here-ness of Here. We shed a shred of dead skin Here, leave a footprint, snap this twig, swallow water from this stream, touch moss. Living and dying, we participate in the great cycles of Being. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, some Here receives us back into itself. And Here nurtures or erodes us, even as we nurture or erode Here’s Here-ness. We eat Here. What we eat, from Here or there, was nurtured or torn from its locatedness somewhere – its being-there, its being in the Here-ness of there. Ego-centric, we may think that it was made for us, but it is made for us no more than we are made just for ourselves. We are made in Being, for Being. There is no exemption from being Here, wherever we are. Nor has Here, in its Here-ness, any exemption from our being Here.

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3 Practices Happen in Intersubjective Space Here does not express feelings about our being Here in words, in any human language. Here expresses its relationship to us in continued capacities to be or be transformed, mute of language but not of Being. It would be best if we could soon reconcile ourselves to the consequences of this brute fact. We leave a footprint in the soil Here. We savour and swallow Here the fruits of the earth brought to us from some Here, some other sacred place. We inhale and exhale Here, and clutter or clean the air that blows about the globe, taking traces of our Here-ness everywhere. The soil of Here travels slowly. Water rises or runs through Here’s catchment to enter oceans or evaporate into air. Here’s air circles the Earth, connecting our breath and fates to the breath and fates of every living thing and every other thing forever. Our doing – what is done – is done. We may want to but we cannot deny that we are Here, that we were there, that we left a footprint. And it is not just me Here, but you and me, and you, and you, and you… Like every other living thing, I was embodied by the acts of others, built from their genes. I jostle among others, endlessly nurturing, or bruising even where I mean to do what is best. We live and love in bodies

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smaller or bigger than others, more or less capable and caring than others, kinder or more dangerous to everything and everyone. We are not just thinking and saying. We are not just doing. We are always relating: always connected to the Earth and others. We are always, wherever we are, part of the flow of Being, and the Earth and what is in it are changed by the flows of our restless being – by our being Here. Though we may resist, resent or rejoice in it, we are part of a common humanity, a common history. Our lives leave marks on a shared Earth, shared fates, Here and in every Here.

3.7 Intersubjectivity III: Entanglement in Physical Space-Time Materiality In this section, I consider the second ‘dimension’ of the intersubjective space: physical space-time, or space-time materiality. It is a truism that all of our actions occur somewhere in the abstract matrix of time and space, but Schatzki (2010) distinguishes this abstract matrix from what he calls the time-space of human activity. Our actions are more than mere occurrences in abstract space and time; in Schatzki’s view, each of our actions opens up a distinct time-space of human activity (or activity time-space) that is their happening: “The timespace of human activity consists in acting towards ends departing from what motivates at arrays of places and paths anchored at entities” (2010, pp. 38, 40). And it happens in a way that is necessarily entangled with specific aspects of the material world in the place and time where it happens: “at arrays of places and paths anchored at entities” (2010, pp. 38, 40). Our being, as embodied persons, is a long process of development and renewal that begins with the fertilisation of an egg by a sperm, and continues through our lives. Our growth and development is not an entirely endogenous, autonomous unfolding, however; at every stage, it requires interaction with our physical environment. We

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need nutrients to grow, and develop, and be sustained. We need air, we need food and drink and environments that provide them. And we need care and companionship and shelter—and tools and technologies and whole infrastructures that meet our needs for food and water and air and care and companionship and shelter. And our interactions depend more and more on our capacities to move around in our environments, from rolling and crawling to walking and cycling and driving and being passengers in other vehicles. We actively pursue our survival, by interacting with the world and things in it to secure our capacity to go on. As embodied beings, we are not just in the world; we are of the world. We participate in the world—culturally, materially, socially—through the medium of our bodies. Our bodies are the site of our happening in the happening of the world. We are sensitive to our environments through sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, proprioception. And we are sensitive to how our environments change. We are attuned to the diurnal cycle of days and nights, and to the annual cycle of seasons. Most of us sleep at night, and go about our various kinds of business during the day. But our days also have rhythms—waking, showering, eating, helping the family get ready (for school and) for work, travelling to work, arriving at work, greeting fellow-workers, working, taking coffee and snack breaks, lunching, working, taking breaks, going home, greeting the family, doing pre-dinner tasks, preparing dinner, eating dinner, relaxing or working some more, getting family members ready for bed, doing other things, getting ready for bed, going to bed, sleeping… And our weeks have rhythms, with workdays and weekend days composed differently. And these rhythms change through the year, in some phases of our lives, with school holidays, holidays taken locally or on trips away from home, annual harvests, the football season… And our daily and weekly rhythms change with the seasons—Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… Our sensitivities to the seasons are revealed in our subtle, and our more obvious, responses to different proportions and averages of warmth and cold, the length of the days and nights, the brightness of the days and the darkness of the nights, and the position of the Sun as it moves from north to south in the sky, then back again. And we respond with a vast range of different technologies to these seasonal changes: we wear different kinds of clothes suited to different seasons, and to cope with different temperature extremes as we travel from the equator to the poles, and from the desert to the rainforest, and from sea level to the mountain-tops; we heat and cool our houses (with various forms of heaters, coolers and air conditioners); we design houses in response to local climates (open designs to allow the air through in warm climates, closed designs to keep warm in cold climates); we eat seasonal foods using equipment designed for the task (like ovens and barbeques, and different kinds of pans for different kinds of foods); and we shop in different kinds of markets and supermarkets for our food and clothing… And our responses to the seasonal rhythms change through the cycles of our own lives—from our infancy through our childhood and adolescence, to our early, middle and late adulthood—from the endless golden summers of childhood, to the cramped, dark winters of our old age. At different stages of our lives, we have different levels of energy: as the old saying has it, “the pup for the sprint, the old dog for the long track”.

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And at different stages in our lives, we exist in different dependencies on others to provide, materially, for us; to provide for ourselves; and to provide for others. And our responses to the world change depending upon where we live, and where we travel to. We adapt in different ways to local climates, local geography, local ecologies and local communities and industries and businesses and services. We are adapted in one way to the familiar climate of home, and conscious that we must adapt in new ways to the different climates and environments we encounter when we travel. And we travel in different ways in different places: walking, cycling, travelling by car or bus or train or plane or ship… And we need different kinds of resources to travel in each of these ways, and whole different systems of infrastructure to support them (roads, railways, airports, sea-ports; service stations, mines, gas or coal-fired or hydro- or wind or solar or solar–thermal power plants; bicycle factories, tyre factories, windshield factories, tool manufacturers, robot designers)… And all of the objects we encounter, from mountains to fountains, from fashion to foodstuffs, and plants and animals and rocks and air and water, naturally occurring or manufactured, have their own histories of formation and transformation, travelling by their own idiosyncratic kinds of routes from what and where they were, to what and where they are now, and to what they will become. So we encounter all of these things, living and nonliving, in their own particular moments in their own histories and in cosmic history (see also Sect. 3.14, ‘Intersubjectivity V: Happening, Lifespace’). Our encounters with these things are part of the dynamic of life on the planet, and part of the unfolding natural history and evolution of life on the planet, not just for us as members of the species Homo sapiens, or our race, or nationality, or gender, or abilities, or our family and friends and the others we encounter, but also for the whole community of life on the planet… The material world around us flows through us, changes us, challenges us. It renews us and it erodes us. We enjoy and endure it, we experience the pleasures and pain it brings us. And, one way or another, just as it nurtures and feeds us, in the end, it is the material world that damages and destroys us, whether by sickness or drowning or suffocation or starvation or violence. And then our bodies return to materiality, whether into smoke and ashes, or into decay and decomposition, as we cease to be ourselves and return to the elements that composed us. Our biological existence seems to give us an identity, a personhood. But we are not sovereign individuals; the individuality of our existence is illusory. We depend utterly on the intersubjective medium of materiality in order to come into existence as biological beings, on the collision of our parents’ bodies making love, on the sperm that finds the egg; we depend on materiality for our growth and development; and we depend on it to sustain us in life. And it is that same material world that in the end erodes and conquers us, and takes us back into itself, obliterating not only our biological being as embodied persons capable of action but also our existence as sentient beings capable of thought and speech, and as social beings capable of belonging, solidarity and power (as members of the solidarities and generations and hierarchies of families and friends and communities and societies, and as outsiders to other families and friends and communities and societies).

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The material world gives us life; it sustains us; and it takes our lives from us.

3.8 Sociomateriality: Writing in the Real World We are embodied beings, made and continuously being remade, of the stuff—the materiality—of the Cosmos. Our practices also occur and unfold in this material reality. We are materially embodied, and our doing is embodied. It encounters a world of objects, things, ‘set-ups’ (arrangements of objects in space and time; Schatzki, 2002). In Sect. 2.3, ‘The Theory of Practice Architectures II: Dear TPA Workshop Participants’, referring to a practice of making scrambled eggs, I wrote In physical space-time, practices enmesh us in activity and work: our doings are enmeshed with the material-economic arrangements found in or brought to a site. We are enmeshed in the particularities and content of what goes on, what is done, the activities of production that occur in the site. As I cook, my hands pass from eggs to bowl to cutting board to parsley to knife to board to bowl to knife to butter to frying pan…

In our practices, we weave through the stuff of the world. The material stuff of the world that is relevant to this or that practice passes through our hands, under our feet, in our sight, our touch, our kinaesthetic sense. In our practices, we sometimes play the world with the adroitness of concert pianists at their pianos, but at other times we move hesitantly, cautiously, picking our way through the thicket of things around us. Shortly, I will discuss writing as an example of how our practices entangle us with the material world. I will write about my practices of writing this. But I will set aside many other, extremely tactile aspects of writing, as in handwriting, for example. As an evaluator or researcher in the field, I took pages and pages of field notes, writing at great speed with a ballpoint pen, often, in recent years, in a Moleskine notebook. I still take notes of many meetings I am part of, often to try to reduce my tendency to talk too much, and not to listen enough. But last century, when we wrote letters to one another, I preferred to write with a fountain pen, or, at various times, a calligraphy pen. Especially if writing on a highly textured paper, this kind of writing slowed my hand, and made me conscious of how I was forming the letters, and even of the angle of the nib on the paper—angled wrongly, it might suddenly get stuck in the paper and then release to shower a spray of ink onto the page. But writing with a pen slowed my hand and thus my mind. I composed better sentences with a fountain pen, because I took more time to think. And sometimes the letters themselves were more stately because I had also taken care of how my handwriting looked on the page. The pen, the paper, the writing surface, the ink all shaped my practice of handwriting, and as it unfolded it also shaped the direction and content of my thought, my practices of composition, and the text that resulted from that writing and composing. In my practices as I write this text, now, my fingers race across the keyboard, pecking at the keys. I shift in my office chair, I rest my wrist on the desktop, my

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eyes flick across the screen and the keys… These are among the material-economic arrangements with which my writing practices are entangled. I stop frequently to take stock of where I’m going, pause to compose the next sentence. Sometimes I lean back, resting my back on the back of the chair, and tilt backward in the chair, eyes narrowed, thinking, composing (practices), as I consider the text on the screen. (The chair and the screen are also among those material arrangements.) Sometimes, I put my hands behind my head. And then I tilt forward again, and renew my attack on the keys, watching the sentences form on the screen, pushing the cursor forward, pressing the lines down the whiteness of the blank page, slowly filling virtual pages with text. At one level, the practice of writing is frequently understood to be, largely, a cerebral activity (going on in the head), but that is not quite right. Writing is very much embodied. Composing sentences in my head is embodied: the thoughts go on in my mind, in my brain. And they are integrally connected with the sentences that have already tumbled out through my pecking fingers to spread like a stain of letter- and word-shaped marks on the screen. Sometimes, beside me, in scrawls on paper, there is an explicit writing plan; other times, I sit at the screen and make a free dive into the virtual page. My writing practices unfold among these material arrangements. And then, later, comes the re-writing. Re-jigging, reconstructing, trying to make the sentences more writerly and more readable. For some, this work is tedious. For me, it is a joy. I tell my friends happily that “I am down with the spanners on the sentences”. Now my practices of re-writing are unfolding, and they are focused sharply on the marks that compose the sentences on the screen. The material arrangements of these marks, perceived by my eyes, provoke me to consider the logic and the rhetoric of the writing (how my sayings, these sentences, stand or fall as cultural-discursive arrangements that might later be encountered and understood by a reader with whom I aim to communicate—a relating, that helps to shape a social-political arrangement among this writer and those readers). Once upon a time, when I was 30, writing poured out of me. Now it trickles. Once, when I wrote, I felt I was the master of all I surveyed. Now I know it is a slow and steady job that will take its own time before the story can be allowed to set in the final draft. Sometimes, in my practice of re-writing, I insert a paragraph, disrupting the former flow of the writing, so new transitions need to be written. Sometimes, the text erupts into separate sections that need to be orchestrated into the flow of an argument or a line of thought in order to work together. Sometimes the argument crumbles into subsections that need interim conclusions to bind the ideas and the argument back together. Often I puzzle to find a better word. I hop onto the ‘Wordbook’ app on my phone, and search (first) the definitions of the meaning of words, and (less often) veer off into the thesaurus for other words, not synonyms but similar. I try to hone the meaning; I try to say more precisely what I mean. I do not shrink from metaphor, if I think it will guide the spear-point of my sentence to the bulls-eye in the mind of the reader.

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I have also enjoyed reading other writers on their writing. One of the best is John McPhee, the fabled New Yorker writer, who had a beautiful piece in the April 29, 2013 edition: ‘Draft No. 4: Replacing the words in boxes’. It is reprinted in an (2017) anthology of his writing on writing called Draft No. 4: On the writing process. McPhee is a delight: he knows how to write a story, and he also knows what a good story is; what it’s made of. Like his very funny shaggy dog story on collecting golf balls for young golfers as he cycles past a golf course in ‘The Orange Trapper: Compulsions are hard to explain’ in the 1 July 2013 edition. Some of his most famous writing, however, ranges across geology and geography. My practice of searching for a better word were encouraged and aided by the ‘Draft No. 4’ article. The subtitle, ‘Replacing the words in boxes’ refers to McPhee’s practice of putting a box around a word that he thinks might not be the best choice. Later, he goes back and thinks of alternatives, and searches dictionary definitions (he advises against the thesaurus). And he removes the box when he has a word—the word—he’s satisfied with. In a variation on his practice, sometimes, when I’m writing at the keyboard these days, I highlight a word that I suspect of laziness or imprecision: a reminder to come back and fix it later. I enjoy talking with fellow-writers about their writing. Most of the doctoral candidates I’ve worked with have heard the story of my great friend and co-author Wilfred Carr, who in the days of secretaries in academic departments, before we wrote directly into word processing software, used to start writing at 08.00 in the morning, filling every fourth line on a foolscap pad. Later, he would return to the text, deleting the sentences he had written and replacing them, on the second line, with others that more clearly conveyed his ideas and argument. Still later, he would replace those sentences with others that worked better, on the third line, and then he would start on a new page, writing on every line, to produce what in those days we called a ‘fair copy’ (improved further from the third pass) to give to a secretary for typing. He continues to be an excellent editor of his own writing. None of his sentences was ever safe from his own editorial scalpel. And I think none of the articles he submitted to a journal was ever returned to him for revising before being published. At the other extreme was the famous English educationist Brian Simon. I asked him once if a text he had written was a second draft: it had insertions typed above occasional crossed-out words or phrases. He replied that he had heard of drafting, but he didn’t do it himself. “I just think about what I want to say,” he said, “and when I’m ready, I just write it”. And when he wrote it, it was lucid, intelligent, engaging and compelling. He knew what he aimed to do in and through his writing. So: the practice of writing engages us with material reality, with words and their appearance on real or virtual pages, and the ways they do or do not hang together, and whether they make sequences that are easy or hard to read, and whether they trip up the reader requiring a second (or third…) reading to check on what was meant. The material reality with which my writing practice is entangled is also entangled with my acts of composition, entangled with a cultural-discursive realm, and with my attempts at communication with readers, entangled with a social-political realm.

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I sit here at my desk piled high with books and papers, reaching for a text to check a quote or remind myself of an argument. I find myself diverted to Google (as I did to find the exact references to John McPhee above). I put my references in the reference list at the bottom of the text as I go, just to be sure they are there. I don’t leave that until later in order to maintain the present flow of my thinking and composing, although I usually finish a sentence or sometimes a paragraph before stopping to put the reference in. I have learned that the flow of writing can also be dangerous. All too easily, it leads me onto the shoals of self-indulgence: thinking, just because I am writing it, that I must be saying something worth reading (as you may see from this book). I have learned that planning and revising are the only things that help me crawl towards readability. The less there is of planning, the more brutal will be the revising. I sit in a room with a high window; if I look out, all I can see is the featureless brick wall of the house next door. I come into the room and write for long stretches— often two or three hours. I work slowly. I get up for breaks, and in pleasant weather, I go outside to sit on the front verandah with a coffee, watching the world go by. Sometimes when I sit out there I think about the next ideas in my text, but not invariably. It is when I sit down at the computer again that I really re-engage, and it is with and through the text I’ve already written. What needs to be said next comes from the plan, or from the intention for the piece, but also from what the last sentences say, and how far they have advanced the action. When I start writing each day, I read what I have written so far, at least some pages or from the start of the section or chapter; all of it, if I am writing a journal article. Before I start new writing, I have often spent two hours re-writing, working my way back to the leading edge of my text. I try to have a picture of my reader in mind. In the case of this book, I am thinking of a PhD candidate who has been reading the theory of practice architectures, but doesn’t feel confident about her grasp of it. Or a researcher new to the theory who doesn’t really ‘get’ what’s different about practice theory. I am also thinking of some of my friends who know I write and think about practices, but don’t really have much of an idea of what that means. So I am conscious that my intended readers are embodied persons—real persons, who will also be interlocutors, trying out and testing my ideas, and social beings with social networks of their own, perhaps rethinking the way they understand their own social worlds as they see them through the prism of practices. And I do not shrink from addressing you in the text, dear reader, as I write, though I try not to do it too often. The reader I have in mind would find that irritatingly patronising. Another way to say this is to say that I know that we are in a relationship of writer and reader, and that this is a matter of some delicacy. If I am successful, neither of us will think the other needs instruction. I am not just writing things down. I am not just writing to fill pages. I am aware that the pages are windows with me on one side and you on the other. Hopefully, the pages are sufficiently transparent that you can see

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me through them, and that I can see you clearly enough—as clearly as an author can when the work is yet to find a reader. But the windows have something written on them; I am trying to tell you what I mean, and, through your lenses, you are reading to find out what I mean. In his (1989) ‘lexicon novel’, Dictionary of the Khazar, Milorad Pavic describes the relationship between the author and the reader: As for you, the writer, never forget the following: the reader is like a circus horse which has to be taught that it will be rewarded with a lump of sugar every time it acquits itself well. If that sugar is withheld, it will not perform (p. 15).

He also describes the relationship between the reader, the writer, and the text: Imagine two men holding a captured puma on a rope. If they want to approach each other, the puma will attack because the rope will slacken; only if they both pull simultaneously on the rope is the puma equidistant from the two of them. That is why it is hard for him who reads and him who writes to reach each other: between them lies a mutual thought captured on ropes that they pull in opposite directions. If we were now to ask that puma – in other words, that thought – how it perceived these two men, it might answer that at the ends of the rope those to be eaten are holding someone they cannot eat… (p. 14).

Perhaps Pavic’s speculations about the relationship between readers and writers are not the way you things, or quite the way I see them. But certainly, between us lies this text, which I see one way and you see another.10 Perhaps, if you read it to the end, you will know quite a lot about how I spend my days, what I do, how I think about things. I do not learn more about you as I write, but I learn more about the reader I want to reach. And, in a way, I want my reader to be charmed and reasoned into a way of seeing things in which the world is less solid and more flowing than perhaps we imagine it to be as we go about our business each day, shopping, cooking, picking oranges or writing. The words I am writing are like words in a conversation. And not just the conversation I am having with you. As I read what I have just written, I read them as if someone had said that to me. How might I go on in the light of that? My writing feeds my writing, just as my reading has. 10 I remember once visiting the city of Oviedo in Spain. I had settled into my hotel, and took a short walk in the streets nearby. Of course, I was in a hotel close to the University, and it was no surprise that there were bookshops. I paused before the window of one bookshop, and there, smack in the middle of the display, was a copy of Teoría Crítica de la Enseñanza: La investigación-acción en la formación del profesorado by Wilfred Carr y Stephen Kemmis. I am sure I glanced around me furtively to see if anyone recognised me looking so intently at the book I had written with Wilfred. But of course only a few individuals in Oviedo knew me. What struck me most on seeing the book there, however, was that I was the foreigner here. I was the illiterate one who could not read this Spanish text. I knew that the ideas and arguments we had written had become unmoored from our language, and now floated before me in another language. And I knew that we could not be sure what these ideas and arguments were, in translation, and that we could not know precisely how those translated ideas and arguments would be regarded or received by readers in that other language, culture, society, history.

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As with Anthony Capella, in Sect. 3.5, ‘Intertextuality’, my practice of writing is launched by all those authors I have read, and who have influenced me, for better or for worse. And, even when they are people I might not want to meet in person, I know that my writing is a response to their ideas and arguments. There have been many of them over the years, from a variety of fields and disciplines. As I write, I am aware that I open divergences from what they have written, becoming less orthodox in relation to their views, and sometimes downright heretical. I no longer expect some writers to engage with what I write at all. Mine is not a field they want to wander in. But I am aware that I am a small voice in the echoing rumble of conversation about social theory and practice, and educational theory and practice, that constitutes these fields, that constitutes intellectual traditions. In his (1988) Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Alasdair MacIntyre writes A tradition is an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict: those with critics and enemies external to the tradition who reject all or at least key parts of those fundamental agreements, and those internal, interpretative debates through which the meaning and rationale of the fundamental agreements come to be expressed and by whose progress a tradition is constituted. Such internal debates may on occasion destroy what had been the basis of common fundamental agreement, so that either a tradition divides into two or more warring components, whose adherents are transformed into external critics of each other’s positions, or else the tradition loses all coherence and fails to survive. It can also happen that two traditions, hitherto independent and even antagonistic, can come to recognise certain possibilities of fundamental agreement and reconstitute themselves as a single, more complex debate. To appeal to tradition is to insist that we cannot adequately identify either our own commitments or those of others in the argumentative conflicts of the present except by situating them in those histories which have made them what they have now become (pp. 12–13).

So I am aware, when I am writing, that I am also a participant in “arguments extended through time”, and that what I write may or may not contribute anything to these arguments. But I am aware that I am only one small voice in a vast crowd of interlocutors. My purpose here has been to try to show something of how the practice of writing is a sociomaterial practice, and especially that, like all other practices, the practice of writing engages the writer with many of kinds of material entities (material-economic arrangements): in the case of my writing practice, my embodied being is entangled with people, things, books, words, computer screens, pages, keys on a keyboard, desks, rooms… I have hoped to show, through this example, how our hands and eyes and ears and our imaginations always connect us with, and locate us in, the material world when we practise. Our practices always entangle us with an existing ontological reality, right here, right now.

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3.9 Harking the Herald Angels in Awe and Wonder at ErinEarth (a Poem)11 Pull on your awe-and-wonder pants And take a stroll among the plants. Open your eyes, your mind, your heart, To how each thing here plays its part: An intricate link in a natural verse, This place, this garden, this bio diverse. See how its beings are interconnected: This unity is in your mind reflected; Of its manifold parts, you count as one: A being in Being, powered by Sun. By now you must know – and in this you can trust That garden and you are from heavenly dust Flung from the crucible of the Big Bang As choirs of supernovae sang Heralding, here, a wondrous birth: Our best beloved Planet Earth. But wait! There is a second coming: Life in its plenitude; humans becoming. As ’round the Sun we keep revolving, The whole shebang12 just keeps evolving. Then Love comes along: our hearts are stirred; And Language appears, the sacred Word; Now Justice turns up, but in decay, In need of repair again, every day. Life, love and language wind us together, Justice gets us through stormy weather, And now, as it blooms, we acknowledge Community: Solace in suffering; imperfect immunity 11 I volunteer at ErinEarth, a house and garden next to the railway line in Wagga Wagga, set up to demonstrate sustainable urban living, and to disseminate the idea of Earth as a community of Life, rather than as a resource for human beings. ErinEarth was established in 1997 by the Catholic Presentation Sisters Wagga Wagga in 2017, the Sisters handed it over to the Wagga Wagga community as a not-for-profit company, ErinEarth Ltd. I wrote the poem in January 2018 to read as a reflection at the beginning of a Board meeting early in 2018. It was prompted by a conversation with the Manager and Assistant Manager of ErinEarth, not long before Christmas 2017, in which I suggested that they could think of their work as being in the awe-and-wonder business—at the heart of what I think ErinEarth is about. 12 Shebang: an entire system (used in the phrase ‘the whole shebang’).

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From pangs of pain, and isolation; Belonging, with others, in convocation. So what have we learned from this second birth? Earth is community – like ErinEarth.

3.10 Intersubjectivity IV: Entanglement in Social Space We now turn our attention to the third dimension of intersubjectivity: social space. Human beings are not atomistic individuals, separate from one another, who aggregate one by one by one to form a society. We are bound together by bonds of birth, language, culture and our shared occupation of space and time, contemporaneously and through history. We become who we are through living, participating and reciprocating in relationships with parents, siblings, relatives, friends, role-models, mentors, guides, bosses, colleagues… Our identities are formed in the mirrors of all of these relationships—mirrors that reflect us to ourselves, showing us who we are in relation to all these others, to every other. And we are not just Ego, or I, or Me, an entity entirely separate from Alter or Other. I am made Ego, I and Me in relationship with every Alter, every Other. Every Other is a part of Me, along some vector of alikeness or difference, that produces my unique location in relation to various kinds and groups of others. I am brother or sister; I am father or mother; I am colonist or colonised; I am richer or poorer; older or younger; learner or teacher; seller or buyer; more capable at this, less capable at that… And in being so, I am more or less of a resource to others in this or that way, or at this or that moment; more or less good to know. We are bound to our parents by the miracle of biological birth. But people are beginning to learn how, even in the womb, babies learn to recognise the moods and voice and even the language spoken by their mothers (for example, Moon, Lagercrantz, & Kuhl, 2013). Once born, we see them welcomed by parents and family and friends as new members of the family, the troop, the tribe, the community. We see the reciprocity of love and care, the crying or angry infant face that is soothed to contentment by the breast, or a parent’s face or embrace. As we saw, for example, in Sect. 2.1, ‘Finding Space for New Practices: Baby Miles Finding His Place in the World’, we are bound to many of those around us by the power of belonging, of solidarity, of a sense of identity in which we understand ourselves as members of the family, the clan, the troop, the village … or the faction. We understand more these days about the crucial importance of those bonds of attachment in infancy and early childhood: how profoundly an infant and a child need the powerful experience of parental love in order to form the seeds of self-worth that will later germinate into the self-esteem of the young adult, and the social confidence of maturity (see, for example, Bowlby, 1988; Tizard, 2009). When those bonds do not form in infancy and childhood, we see what damage has been done: young people torn from the social web, isolated and often opposed to others because they do not

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experience themselves as part of the shared social fabric of care that allows most of us to feel that we are worthwhile human beings, striving with others to make a world that finds a place for us. We learn the reciprocity and mutuality of friendship, and how it sometimes flowers and fruits in the intensity of love—for children, parents, lovers, partners, and even, for some with a heightened capacity for it, love for the whole heaving heap of humanity. We learn to belong in solidarity with friends, peers, colleagues, even nations. And alongside the pleasure of inclusion, we learn the sharp pain of not belonging, of exclusion, of rejection. If solidarity, belonging and attachment are a kind of ‘horizontal’ dimension of social space, then power is its ‘vertical’ dimension—the dimension in which it tends toward hierarchy. This ‘vertical’ dimension of power and hierarchy may or may not be at odds with the feeling and appearance of communality fostered by the dynamic of belonging. In some relationships between intimate partners, for example, feelings of love and belonging may be bound up with violence and one partner’s power over the other. We are creatures of power: ‘power-over’, ‘power-with’ and ‘power-to’. Through our living, we learn to endure power-over and we also learn to exercise it, just as we learn to resist, oppose and contest it. Willingly and unwillingly, we join conflicts. Sometimes destructively, sometimes constructively, we participate in conflicts, arguments, struggles, movements. Sometimes, we strive for harmony and social integration; sometimes for opposition and fragmentation. We learn that confusion and conflict frequently appear at moments of social change and transformation. We learn that social orders and hierarchies, which often appear so solid and established, often turn out to be fluid; that they change through history, just as waves and rain weather the proud cliffs over the sea, eroding and eventually erasing them. The excluded, the poor, and the weak endure their disadvantage, but their exclusion breeds frustration, dissatisfaction. Accumulating injustice brings increasingly insistent calls for justice, and reform or transformation. Revolutions are rare, but piecemeal social evolution is commonplace, even if it finds its way hesitantly, like the first runnels of droughtbreaking rain in a dry riverbed. At the same time, we also learn the power of cooperation: power-with. We learn to swell voices in support of a cause, to join a struggle, to build solidarity with others that brings communicative power and legitimacy to shared decisions. We learn that human beings are frequently described in terms of ‘the law of the jungle’, as competitors with each other, but we also learn that human beings are essentially cooperative— we live in families, clans, communities, societies, for the shared benefits of mutual support, protection and defence. And we also learn the satisfactions (and sometimes the dissatisfactions) of powerto: our individual and collective capacities to do things, to get things done: whether finishing a job, working with neighbours in a community organisation, or electing a government. We understand, too, about how, through our lives, we change our locations in the succession of generations: how, once dependent, later we become independent and interdependent; how once we were cared for, and become carers, and, still later,

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again cared for; how once we were newcomers, unsure of our responsibilities, and now become old-timers, able to help others ‘learn the ropes’. We recognise responsibilities: to care for others as they grow and develop to maturity, and for the old and frail; to take our turn in stewardship, caring for and contributing to the common good, pursuing the good for humankind. We learn to meet obligations, to honour traditions, even if we also seek to renew them. We learn to be part of the most universal of moral laws, the Golden Rule: to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. We understand ourselves as citizens, bound together by a constitution and by laws, as living in a social order that those who went before have bequeathed us, and that we now care for, so we can live together in a just and democratic society in which we citizens have collective powers of self-determination. We learn to exercise that collective self-determination to continue to transform our societies to create a social order that recognises and respects and enhances the rights and the well-being of all. And some of us come to recognise that we live in a double world, part system and part lifeworld (Habermas, 1987; Kemmis, 2000), in which we encounter one another in different ways. In systems, we encounter one another in roles, following rules, pursuing system goals, making things. In lifeworlds, we encounter one another as human beings alike in being unique, formed from our own histories and experiences, shaped in shared (and different) languages, in shared (and different) forms of work and activities and in shared (and different) relationships with one another of solidarity and power. And, in lifeworlds, we understand that we form ourselves, and our histories, as part of collective histories, shared fates, shared destinies. Our individual mobility, greater today than in former generations, may give us the sense that we are separate from the web of relationships that has produced us (and continues to produce us, wherever we go), but we are never outside the mutuality and solidarity of that social web. Tyrants, bullies, narcissists and sociopaths may tear the shared social web, and some torn shreds of the common web may prove impossible to mend, but, inescapably, our lives are always lived in relationship with others (and the relationships are not always good). Other people are indispensable to our thought and words (what we think and say), our work and our actions (what we do), and our sense of who we are in relation to others (how we relate). We know now that we are not just part of a family, a community, or a society; we are also part of the human community and the community of life on the planet. We are a part of the life of the planet, and it is part of our lives. We have obligations that stretch beyond us to the community of life, to the planet, to the Cosmos. Like the material world, the social world gives us life; and it sustains us. And when we depart this life, we leave a hole, an absence, in the web that we once inhabited along with those who were dearest to us, leaving them to grieve and endure our absence—just as we have grieved and endured the precipitous, obsidian absences of people important to us, when they were taken or torn from the webs of our most precious relationships. In the same way that we meet one another as interlocutors in semantic space in the practices of thinking and speaking, and as embodied persons in physical space-time in practices of doing, we meet one another as social and political beings in social

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space in practices of relating. Practice theorist Theodore Schatzki recognises that sociality is intrinsic to human coexistence in the title and the argument of his (2002) book The Site of the Social: A philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. He argues that it is through the thousands of practices that compose our lives that we connect with one another, and with the material world. As individuals, we find ourselves recruited into practices (Shove, Pantzar, & Watson, 2012) and thus into the sociality that practices provide—most of our actions take place in some kind of interaction, in practices that involve others (whether they are present or not). And so we return to the assertion at the beginning of this section: that the third dimension of intersubjectivity is social space. Our subjectivity, our identity, is grounded and anchored in social spaces found in the places and spaces (the sites) we inhabit as we go about our lives. To a greater or lesser extent, the social spaces we discover in these sites always already precede our arriving in them, but we also carry into them our own webs of relationships—webs that spread out like bonds attaching us to one another, connecting us to the wider social world. Sometimes, these bonds nurture us; sometimes they diminish or damage us. Relationships are not static; they are dynamic. As we shall see in Sect. 3.14, ‘Intersubjectivity V: Happening, Lifespace’, the dynamism of relatings is found in practices of relating, in the unfolding happening of relating in which we are part of the great social web of humankind and the community of life on the planet: a vast interconnected web of relationships of (for example) dependence, independence, interdependence and isolation that forms and transforms in the happening of life on Earth.

3.11 Power I: Power Is Enacted in Practices In the opening pages of Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1979, pp. 3–6) recounts the story of the March 2nd, 1757, hanging, drawing and quartering of Robert-François Damiens “the regicide”, a domestic servant who attempted to assassinate King Louis XV of France, in Paris. It is a gruesome account that does not shrink from detailing the failures of the executioner to effectively accomplish each excruciating stage of the grotesque spectacle, right through to the end, when it is presumed that Damiens is dead, though some witnesses said they saw his lips moving wordlessly as his dismembered body was hurled onto a fire to be consumed. The account is the more remarkable because witnesses present at the event reported that Damiens more than once said ‘Pardon, Lord’ during his torture, and was heard to forgive the executioner his failures. In short, it seemed that Damiens acquiesced to the punishment as right, appropriate and proportionate to his crime. In that era, crime was punished in public so the populace could see the dreadful consequences of crime, and learn from the example. All punishment was understood as a reckoning for an offence against the law, at a time in which the law was understood to be an explicit expression of the will of the Sovereign. Similarly, the judges and the executioner were held to be the agents and instruments of the Sovereign, exacting a vengeance deliberately calculated to outweigh the offence of the crime. In Foucault’s

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telling, Damiens accepts his guilt, and thus implicitly assents to the torture and death that follow his being found guilty by the King’s court. It is in this context that Foucault chains truth to power: on the one side, the truth expressed in Damiens’s experiential knowledge of his crime, and the legal and procedural knowledge of the judge, the executioner, the attending officials and the public gathered to witness the event. That multiple truth is linked, on the other side, to the overwhelming power of the Sovereign. The truth revealed by the investigation of the crime unleashes the retributive power of the Sovereign revealed in the torture and death of the offender. Foucault is not the first or the last to trace the workings of power. One of his most distinctive contributions, however, was to articulate the capillary operation of power—the way power operates not with the blunt force of a hammer, but rather through a distributed and nuanced network of subtle assertions and acquiescences that together produce and reproduce the reciprocal dominance of the powerful and compliance of the less powerful. At the end of the chapter in Discipline and Punish entitled ‘The means of correct training’, in which Foucault presents his insightful analyses of the double-sidedness of discipline (to discipline someone; to practise a discipline) and the indispensability of the examination, he makes a generative observation about the productiveness of power (1979, p. 194): It is often said that the model of a society that has individuals as its constituent elements is borrowed from the abstract juridical forms of contract and exchange. Mercantile society, according to this view, is represented as a contractual association of isolated juridical subjects. Perhaps. Indeed, the political theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often seems to follow this schema. But it should not be forgotten that there existed at the same period a technique for constituting individuals as correlative elements of power and knowledge. The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called ‘discipline’. We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of reality and objects of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.

The knowledge that you can gain about me is a product of the operation of a vast array of technologies of power that have been deployed to produce the various ‘realities’ that count as me: the Doctor, the Professor Emeritus, the supervisor of doctoral candidates, the one who gives invited addresses, the author, the interlocutor in a research meeting, the man who makes you coffee, the man whose house we meet in, the citizen, the divorced man, the often absent father, the peripatetic grandfather and the man past middle age who lives alone with a dog near the lagoon in central Wagga Wagga, a provincial town in rural Australia. Foucault draws our attention to the technologies of power by which we ‘individuals’ are produced. We may be tempted to understand ‘individuals’ as having more or less unitary ‘identities’ as the locus of the productions wrought by technologies like our school and university studies, the application and selection processes for positions to which we were appointed, the workings of the Family Court that granted my divorce, or my performance of ‘traditional’ (or non-traditional) roles in families or collegial groups. But these different operations do not produce a resulting unitary

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identity. Rather, we occupy various and sometimes contradictory locations in the great variety of power hierarchies to be found in the societies and communities in which we live: as more or less authoritative on the subject of professional practice or birds or model trains; as more or less capable in use of the apostrophe, building a shed, or caring for a dying relative; as a son to a father and mother, as a father to children and stepchildren, as a grandfather to grandchildren… With a little insight we come to the awareness that our ‘identities’ are not unitary and fixed, and, for example, that others see us in very different ways in the different situations in which we find ourselves in life—as workers, as whisky-drinkers, as patients, as parents, as caregivers, as consumers and so on. We also know that we occupy multiple locations in these various hierarchies, as well as in the various solidarities in which we belong as friends and, in principle at least, as co-equals. With a little self-awareness, we know that who we are, and our standing, in different settings is relational—and thus diverse and differentiated, rather than a simple unity. This relationality leads us back to the realm of the intersubjective, in which we ‘subjects’ relate in particular ways to a web of particular other ‘subjects’ who in turn relate differently their particular webs of others. From a relational perspective, we can see the capillary action of power (and solidarity) not just as an accretion of social scaffolding, in the structure(s) of a system of arteries, veins and capillaries, but, rather, in the dynamic operations of those technologies of power—in the flow that surges through those arteries, veins and capillaries, in the practices that produce and reproduce power and its consequences. As we have seen in earlier sections in this volume, we should think of these operations not in terms of clock-like mechanisms but in terms of organic practices. Another way to approach the capillary operation of power is to see it through the lens of ideology. As I studied the concept of ‘ideology’ in the 1980s, the writings of the French theorist Larrain (1979) persuaded me that ideology should not be understood as zeitgeist or worldview (as in Marx’s ‘German ideology’), nor as false consciousness (as, for example, in various Marxists’ views of the self-misunderstandings of workers that they lacked agency vis-à-vis their bosses), but instead as practices. Larrain demonstrated that through the practice of ideology people produce more or less securely established patterns in the ways people live in this or that society and community: patterns like patriarchy, colonial oppression, the enduring experience of dispossession that cascades through generations of Indigenous peoples, the marginalisation of LGBTQI people and the like. From the perspective of the theory of practice architectures, however, these patterns do not have the character of ‘structures’; (despite the ‘structural’ connotation of the notion of ‘architectures’) practice architectures are not hypostatised entities (abstractions treated as if they were concrete realities) that inhibit or facilitate the flow of human practices; practice architectures are in the flow as well as productions of the flow of happening at a site. Patriarchy, for example, is produced and reproduced not through the alleged effects of hypostatised ‘social structures’, but rather through innumerable male performances of assertion (whether effective or ineffective) in reciprocity with female performances of acquiescence (as well as women’s acts of opposition and resistance). As an ideology, patriarchy is

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thus co-produced and co-reproduced through the relevant practices, made possible by arrangements (practice architectures) including the kinds of language that classifies women as inferior, particular kinds of actions available to women in different settings, and social relationships in which women are regarded as in some way inferior or assigned subordinate roles. On this view, patriarchy will disappear when men and women no longer enact—when they jointly refuse to enact—the performances that currently co-produce patriarchy. Of course, it is no easy matter to reach the point when both men and women jointly refuse to enact those performances. Many, many obstacles stand in the way, including the self-interests of the powerful, and the considerable risks of refusal for the less powerful—risks that include violence and even death.13 In short, it takes particular kinds of cultural, material and social conditions, frequently secured through long historical processes, to secure the practice architectures of a social arrangement as pervasive and pernicious as patriarchy. Yet such a feature of our lives does feel as if it has the character of a something concrete and solid. It is not hard to see how and why people might speak of such a phenomenon as a social structure. But Foucault, Larrain and others show us that a social order of this kind is not secured by the expectations of individuals alone, nor by those expectations in combination with invisible ‘structures’ that order our lives. A social order like patriarchy is secured through innumerable actions and practices that (co-)reproduce the ways we have done things in the past. To transform those actions and practices requires more than just changing the practices, however; it also requires changing the conditions—the practice architectures—that make them possible. The site ontological approach of Schatzkian practice theory aims to challenge and amend the structuralist view of society by showing how it is not alleged ‘social structures’ but rather sociomaterial arrangements in or brought to sites, that canalise (channel; enable and constrain) the performance of practices like ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ and ‘lecturing’. For Schatzki—and for my colleagues and me—practices and the arrangements that canalise them form ‘practice-arrangement bundles’ (Schatzki, 2012, p. 14; Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 14). In our use of the theory of practice architectures to analyse practices and social life, my co-researchers and I focus on overlapping cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements. Such arrangements brought to sites also include (but are not are not limited to) the other people who inhabit those sites, who also act as practice architectures by enabling and constraining the practices of co-participants 13 In this context, it is impossible not to think about Australia’s domestic violence problem, which leads to the violent death of about one woman per week at the hands of a current or former intimate partner, and to an entirely understandable reluctance among abused women to report the violent behaviour of partners to the police, at the risk of attracting further violence. Practices of power have produced the men who do this violence; sometimes, practices of power have also produced the attraction of women to these men, and their practices of compliance that sometimes reproduce the tyrannical practices of the men who commit acts of violence against them. Of course, it remains true that, despite the attractions that lead women to these men, and the protective compliance they may display to avoid harm, they are not responsible for the violence done to them. The violence is entirely the responsibility of these men—although they may have endured violent role models whose practices in turn produced these men’s violent impulses and acts.

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with whom they share the site. In particular, participants bring to a site their particular ways of thinking and talking about things (sayings), their ways of doing things (doings), and their ways of relating to others (relatings) that are among the culturaldiscursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements those with whom they interact encounter in the situation. That is, people, as active agents, are among the practice architectures that give effect to, and produce, reproduce and sometimes transform the social effects that some structuralist theorists impute to ‘social structures’. Against this idea that it is alleged ‘social structures’ that produce these effects, theories of practice assert, by contrast, that it is people’s practices that produce these effects—not some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism upon which structuralist theories rely to produce the ordering that ‘social structures’ are alleged to do. As we have seen, Foucault’s helpful capillary view of power helps us to see how these effects are produced. In Discipline and Punish, at the end of the chapter on ‘The means of correct training’, in which he outlined the many detailed and “petty” procedures (like assessing students) through which discipline is achieved, Foucault asks (1979, p. 194) “Is it not somewhat excessive to derive such power from the petty mechanisms of discipline? How could they achieve effects of such scope?” I would agree that it is indeed through “petty” (or everyday) acts, but I would not describe them as ‘mechanisms’; I would describe them as practices. Larrain’s (1979) The Concept of Ideology is similarly helpful. It shows how ideology is secured through practices. Our theory of practice architectures (Kemmis, Wilkinson, Edwards-Groves, Hardy, Grootenboer, & Bristol, 2014), in my view, also helps us to see that what gives effect to power in Foucault’s ‘capillaries’ is human practices, which people (in particular places, sites), as the bearers of practices, learn from other people through interaction in which certain ways of saying, doing and relating (hence, practising) come to be ‘normalised’ or even hegemonic, while others become less frequent or less orthodox or marginalised or silenced. And thus practices travel from site to site, borne by people who act as and among the practice architectures that enable and constrain the practices of other people in those sites. In short: in the theory of practice architectures (like some other social theories, including theories like those of Giddens, 1979, 1984; Bourdieu, 1977, 1990), the effects that are in other theories imputed to ‘social structures’ turn out to be effects produced through practices, and through the agency of people who, encountering one another in practices, reproduce and transform particular ‘ways of doing things around here’. To say a little more about Larrain’s history of the concept of ideology: he shows how, in early social theorising, ideology was first understood as a kind of worldview (as in Marx and Engels’s [1845-6/1998] The German Ideology). Later, ideology came to be understood as false consciousness; this, however, seemed to imply that this sort of ‘wrong thinking’ to be understood as an individual, not a social phenomenon. Still later, for example, in the cultural Marxism (Althusser, 1971; Gramsci, 1971) of the mid-twentieth century, ideology came to be understood as practice. I would say that this understanding of ideology rescued it from the duality of the individual versus the social, placing it firmly in the domain of the intersubjective: that is, in the semantic space in which we encounter one another as interlocutors, in the physical space-time in which we encounter one another as embodied beings, and (especially) in the social space in which we encounter one another as social beings.

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To give an example of how these different understandings of ideology play out, we can think of patriarchy not as a kind of ‘social structure’ but as an ideology. One might view patriarchy as a worldview: ‘this is the natural way of things’. One might alternatively regard it as false consciousness: ‘men think they own the world—they’re wrong’. Or more intersubjectively, one might think of patriarchy as a practice: doing things in ways that we have come to regard as ‘masculinised’ or that assume the kinds of relationships we describe as characteristic of patriarchy. We need not look for ideology in allegedly shared worldviews or presuppositions: we live ideologies in our daily lives; we produce, reproduce, co-produce and renew them through our everyday practice. Nor need we look for power in the opaque operation of alleged ‘social structures’. We find power at work in the very fabric of our social existence, in the warp and weft of our everyday practices. Power flows through social life, surging here and provoking opposition and resistance there. Most particularly, we find power secreted within the relatings of our practices: in the assertions and acquiescences of power-over, in the solidarity of power-with, and in the agency and the capability of power-to. And these relatings take place among the social-political arrangements we find in a site, usually in already-established social orderings of roles and relationships. But power is also evident in the sayings of our practices, the ways a speaker addresses a hearer, or an author a reader, for example, in the semantic space interlocutors share, and also in the doings of our practices, the ways that actors, as embodied beings, coordinate their actions in relation to one another in physical space-time. The sayings and doings and relatings of practices ‘map onto’ each other in the conduct of a practice, but they do not always do so in coherent, non-contradictory ways. In relation to power, however, we should notice especially how sayings and doings are also and always already coordinated in social space—the realm of power and solidarity. In this way, every social practice, however innocent, involves the exercise of power, but it may also involve solidarity; power-over, power-with, power-to.

3.12 Power II: A Conversation About Lecturing (and an Example of Transcript Analysis Using the Theory of Practice Architectures) On Friday, 18 April 2008, at the home of one of the group members, six colleagues met to discuss how their working conditions enabled and constrained their teaching at the university. They were participating in an action research project to explore how they could more regularly achieve praxis, both in the neo-Aristotelian sense of ‘right action’ and in the Hegelian-Marxian sense of ‘history making action’ (Kemmis, 2012, p. 894). At the same time, they aimed to explore how the conditions of work at their university functioned as practice architectures that enabled and constrained what they could do as they pursued praxis in their teaching. We will shortly look at an excerpt from the transcript of that meeting. The group had met several times before, and the discussions had been audio-recorded, professionally transcribed and circulated to members a couple of weeks before the 18 April meeting. Everyone had

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been able to read and consider the transcript of the last discussion, and to think about themes and issues that might have emerged in and from the discussion, concerning, for example, opportunities for praxis and how working conditions in the workplace functioned as practice architectures—conditions of possibility—that enabled and constrained participants’ efforts to enact praxis in their teaching. There were six participants in the conversation: Tyler, Sam, Alex, Jamie, Lou and Riley (all pseudonyms chosen because the names work for both boys and girls, men and women). In this section, we encounter the participants (mostly Tyler and Alex) at the beginning of the meeting, when Tyler, who is facilitating the discussion, recalls that in the last discussion Alex had acknowledged that the practice of lecturing was enjoyable, and that it also involved the exercise of control, of power. Alongside the excerpt of the transcript of this discussion, which is presented in the middle column of the table below, I present a rough analysis of (sayings, doings and relatings concerning) the practice of lecturing, mostly as described by Alex, being questioned by Tyler, and of some of the practice architectures (cultural-discursive, material–economic and social-political arrangements) that seemed to be shaping participants’ lecturing practices. As readers of the transcript, we are ‘observing’ the practice and performance of a conversation: people conversing. In the analysis, we are not analysing the practice of conversing, however, but rather what the participants are conversing about: the practice/performance of lecturing. The notes in the practice and practice architectures columns of the table below are about the practice(s) of lecturing and what is said, or what we can infer about, the practice architectures that enable and constrain the practice of lecturing—what makes the practice of lecturing possible. Analysing what people say about lecturing in a discussion like this—among colleagues, audio-recorded—is to form a view of lecturing that may differ from what the participants might say under other circumstances. But the transcript is also limited in another sense: we might come to very different conclusions about lecturing if we were analysing a video of someone lecturing, or (as we have done in various research studies) analysing an audio recording of a pre-observation briefing interview, a video recording of the performance of lecturing, and a post-observation de-briefing interview with the lecturer, as well as a post-observation focus group interview with a sample of students, followed up with discussion some weeks later with the lecturer about the transcripts (after we get them back from the transcriber) and our initial analysis of them. I offer this caveat because this analysis gives only a narrow window onto the practice of lecturing. The discussion is interesting nonetheless, as participants explore the specific issue of power in the context of university lecturing. As the participants talk, they are doing some analysis for us. But I think an analysis can reveal more than the participants say about power and lecturing. Note 1: S = Sayings; D = Doings; R = Relatings; C-D = Cultural-Discursive arrangements; M-E = Material-Economic arrangements; S-P = Social-Political arrangements. Numbers in the left-hand column of the table refer to Turns in the conversation. Note 2: Square brackets […] indicate things implied by what is said, but not named explicitly; things we (observers) can reasonably infer from what is said.

3.12 Power II: A Conversation About Lecturing …

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Practices

Excerpt from transcript

Practice architectures

The practice of lecturing S: ‘Lecturing’ as ‘a mode of communication’; ‘something … they enjoyed’; with ‘an element of control, or an element of some sort of power’. D: [Implies the doing of lecturing, as an activity and as work: communicating, controlling…] ‘[T]he way in which people engage with lecturing as a mode of communication’ [implies that people can ‘engage’ with ‘lecturing’ in different ways]. R: (1) ‘control’, ‘power’, [hierarchy?]. (2) ‘[S]omething they enjoyed’ [enjoyable, pleasurable (?) for the lecturer]

Tyler: We’re just having an interesting conversation about the nature of lecturing and the extent, or the way in which people engage with lecturing as a mode of communication. And I just suggested to Alex it was interesting how in the last session [a month before] we were talking about the nature of lecturing and how people actually thought of that as something which they enjoyed and in part because there was an element of, I suppose, control, or an element of some sort of power, have I represented that very well?

C-D: (1) A discourse about lecturing as ‘a mode of communication’ [implied: about some topic or subject-matter]; (2) a discourse of ‘control, or an element of some sort of power’. [Note that Tyler and Alex are sociologists, bringing to bear a specialist sociological discourse about power.] M-E: [Some kind of activity time-space is implied, where a lecturer and those lectured to encounter one another as embodied persons in some site.] S-P: ‘an element of … control, … power’ (and an associated ‘element of control, … of power’): implies a [hierarchical?] relationship of power-over between a lecturer and those lectured to

2

Alex: Uh-huh

3

S: ‘[S]ome sort of sense of power’ that is ‘perhaps useful or valued in some way’. Power is being problematised (‘I’m not sure’) to invite Alex to comment further D: [The doing of lecturing continues to be implied.] R: Relationships of power-over as possibly ‘useful’ or ‘valued in some way’ to someone [by the lecturer? Those lectured to? Those served by the professional after graduation?]

Tyler: Of having some sort of sense of power and that as being something which was seen as perhaps useful or valued in some way, I’m not sure.

C-D: [Discourse of power—exploring whether the exercise of power can be ‘useful’ or ‘valued in some way’.] M-E: [The M-E arrangements continue to be implied, as in Turn 1] S-P: Exploring whether relationships of power[-over] may be ‘useful’ in some way [in producing something?]; as ‘valued’ [perhaps because useful in some way—to the lecturer? those lectured to? Perhaps ‘useful’ because Tyler is thinking power in some way causes learning in those attending the lecture.]

4

S: ‘I enjoy lecturing’ … ‘performance’ … ‘a performer’ … ‘I enjoy performing’ ‘I’m a good performer’ … ‘that doesn’t necessarily make me a good lecturer’ [problematises the relationship between ‘a good performer’ and ‘a good lecturer’] D: Lecturing as performance [in a performance space?], which can be done well or badly (‘doesn’t necessarily make me a good lecturer’) R: Lecturer relating to (performing for) an audience, who may or may not be well served by the lecture[r].

Alex: I can’t remember what I said actually. For me, I enjoy lecturing, but for me, I think it’s more around performance, it’s about performance, and I am a performer, and I enjoy performing, and I think I’m a good performer, that doesn’t necessarily make me a good lecturer, but—

C-D: [Some content or message in the lecture is implied.] Alex uses a discourse of ‘performance’ to describe lecturing; distinguishes and problematises ‘a good performer’ vis-à-vis ‘a good lecturer’. M-E: [Implies space-time for the performance of lecturing; a performance space (e.g., a stage, lectern, seats arranged for an audience)] S-P: Alex regards the performance of lecturing as ‘enjoyable’, although this doesn’t mean it is ‘good’ for those lectured to. [Alex implies an audience for the performance.]

5

Tyler: That’s interesting. (continued)

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(continued) Practices

Excerpt from transcript

Practice architectures

6

S: [Finding and having a ‘voice’ as teacher]. Sayings here are ‘about performing’ teaching: it ‘clicked’, ‘it felt right’, ‘I knew that was me’. ‘So I found a voice early’, ‘in a conventional way’ but others ‘do teaching in other more interesting, perhaps quite different ways’. In this turn, Alex has also [accidentally?] juxtaposed teaching with lecturing D: ‘doing teaching’—something that can be done in ‘conventional’ and ‘other more interesting, perhaps quite different ways’ R: [‘more interesting’ perhaps implies ways that are more engaging of/for students] Habitus: ‘Feel[ing] at home’ in the practice of teaching and lecturing: ‘everything clicked’, ‘it felt right’. ‘Found my voice as a teacher … very early’ [implies a career or long engagement in teaching; enduring in the role of teacher]. ‘A very conventional habitus’ [implies other kinds of habitus of teaching/lecturing are possible]

Alex: … there’s one more thing about performing, there’s something for me about … habitus, which is when I stand up in front of a class, I feel at home, and I always have, since one of my first pracs. I remember the moment when, I stood up in front of a class, it wasn’t the very first time, but, everything clicked and it felt right, it felt right, and I knew that was me, and what I was doing was me. So I found a voice as a teacher very early, but, you know, I think that’s quite a conventional voice, and I think there are other people who do teaching in other more interesting, perhaps quite different ways, but, I think I fit a very conventional … habitus, but, so lecturing is a part of that as well

C-D: Alex calls on a specialist discourse of habitus (a feel for the game) from Bourdieu (which Tyler shares): ‘[P]erforming’, for Alex, ‘clicked’, ‘felt right’, ‘I knew that was me’. ‘I found a voice early’, ‘in a conventional way’ but others ‘do teaching in other more interesting, perhaps quite different ways’ [problematising the discourse of teaching, which may be performed in ‘conventional’ and ‘other’ ways.] M-E: A time and space where one ‘stands up in front of a class [of students]’, but also ‘found my voice very early on’ [implies that Alex has had a long career as a teacher]. [Also implied is holding the students’ attention; being the focus of the students’ gaze.] S-P: [‘in front of’ also implies separate from, and perhaps a relationship of ‘being-above’ the people in the ‘class’]; ‘very conventional habitus’ [implies Alex inhabits a conventional role as a teacher, with power relations Alex regards as conventional for the role] [Implies a site or field (for Bourdieu) in relation to which Alex ‘feels at home’—a site or field which is, by the way, composed of C-D, M-E and S-P arrangements, but these are only distantly implied in what Alex says here.]

7

S: ‘[I]t’s the performance you enjoy’, ‘but there was an element of power associated with that’ D: Teaching as performing R: Power [probably in the sense of power-over, not power-with.]

Sam: It’s interesting because of the notion, when you said performance, that just reminded me, that’s exactly what you and Lou were talking about, it’s the performance that you enjoy, but there was also an element of power associated with that

C-D: Here, participant Sam enters the discussion to link the separate discourses of (1) ‘performance’ and (2) ‘power’, to yield (3) enjoying the ‘power associated with [performance]’ M-E: [A space for performing—a performance space—is implied.] S-P: The notion of enjoying performing because of ‘an element of power associated with that’ suggests that lecturing may serve the self-interests of the lecturer, whether or not it also serves the interests of those lectured to. [A related point appears below in Turn 10, when Alex speaks ironically of being ‘an entertainer’ as ‘terrible’.]

8

Alex: Sure. (continued)

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(continued) Practices

Excerpt from transcript

Practice architectures

9

S: ‘[W]hat gives that power?’ ‘What makes you feel comfortable?’ ‘Why is that a comfortable space?’ D: Performance of lecturing being done in ‘a setting’, a ‘context’, ‘a space’ [a space in what sense? Is it a performance space? R: Relating in ways that give a sense of ‘power’, yet in ways that allow the performer to feel ‘comfortable’ in the exercise of power

Tyler: So is there something about, like I’m just thinking about the context, is there something, for instance, I mean, what is it that gives that power, what makes you feel comfortable in that setting, why is that a comfortable space?

C-D: Tyler is deploying a sociological discourse of power, problematising power in terms of Alex’s relationships in a social–political space which includes students: (1) ‘what … gives that power?’ (2) ‘What makes you feel comfortable in that setting?’ (3) ‘Why is that a comfortable space’? M-E: Context, setting [implies a lecturing performance time-space] S-P: Tyler is problematising the social-political context in which Alex enjoys the performance of lecturing (it satisfies Alex in some way), perhaps because it puts Alex in a relation of power-over the students. But Tyler also explores questions of what in the setting confers the power? How does the arrangement of the space confer power? And ‘what makes you feel comfortable?’—does it come from that setting [a relationship of power-over students?] and ‘why is that a comfortable space’ [if/when you derive satisfaction from the exercise of power, what is it in you that responds to the exercise of power as ‘comfortable’?]

10

S: ‘Holding attention’, saying something ‘worthwhile’. But also—‘it’s terrible’—about ‘being an entertainer’, ‘play’, ‘being playful’, ‘feeling like part of you is really alive at the time, when you do it’ D: Lecturing as performing. R: Relating to students as a performer, and feeling ‘playful’ and ‘alive’ in the act of performance Note that there is a tension here about the project of lecturing as performance: bringing [guilty?] pleasure to the performer as well as bringing ‘worthwhile’ knowledge to those observing the performance

Alex: I think it’s about holding people’s attention, it’s about feeling like you have something to say that you hope or think is worthwhile. But it’s also about—it’s terrible—it’s about being an entertainer, it’s about play, it’s about being playful, and, feeling like a part of you is really alive at the time, when you do it

C-D: Alex now interlinks (1) a discourse of performing that ‘holds people’s attention’ (2) allowing the lecturer to feel ‘playful’, while also (3) offering students something ‘worthwhile’. But the discourse of play may be ‘terrible’ to admit to because the play makes the lecturer a [mere?] entertainer, although feeling ‘really alive at the time, when you do it’ M-E: [A space-time in which lecturer and lectured-to encounter one another, in which the lecturer ‘holds the attention’ of the audience, and ‘performs’, and is ‘an entertainer’, a performer.] (continued)

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(continued) Practices

Excerpt from transcript

Practice architectures S-P: Alex answers Tyler’s question of ‘what gives the power?’ by referring to [the power of] ‘holding people’s attention’, and the power of ‘having something to say’ [presumably to people who don’t know it]; ‘being an entertainer’, which Alex says is ‘terrible’ to admit [because the performance is satisfying to the one who performs, potentially at the expense of those performed to?]’. Does Alex’s sense of (1) being an actor performing a role (‘being playful’), and (2) that this might be ‘terrible’ to admit’, suggest that to perform this role is to be someone other than one’s usual self, and that one may be acting in bad faith?a [See also Turn 14 below: the ‘sense of power’ that goes with performance as ‘dangerous’ and (Turn 15) ‘an aphrodisiac’ [that brings pleasure, a sense of satisfaction, to the one who performs, regardless, as it were, of the ones seeing the performance] What is Alex referring to when saying that there is a particular ‘part of you [that] feels really alive at the time, when you do it’? Is it in the sense of “being in the flow”b of performance? Does Alex’s later assent (Turn 14 below) to Tyler’s suggestion (Turn 13) that this power is ‘an aphrodisiac’ suggest enjoying the exercise of power-over students in the performance of lecturing? There is also an element here of Alex ‘silencing’ the students in this account of lecturing: they appear as more or less passive recipients of the lecture, not as persons who actively shape the way the lecture unfolds.c (continued)

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(continued)

11

Practices

Excerpt from transcript

Practice architectures

Note the transition in this turn from talking about the practice of lecturing to working with groups of 20 or fewer students S: ‘[L]ecturing’ versus ‘working with groups of 20 or fewer students’ D: [Doing lecturing in such a way as to promote interaction with students] R: [Tyler contrasts one-to-many lecturing with ‘interacting and the extent to which the students can feed something into perhaps what I’ve said…’, and preferably working with groups of 20 or less students rather than in lecture theatres with 100 or so.] In this turn, Tyler is beginning to open up a critique of lectures versus workshops in relation to power

Tyler: It’s interesting because like I know, lecturing is not something I particularly enjoy as such, and something I find a little bit onerous, but the part of the sort of the teaching at a price that, I get more of a … as such, is actually the interaction and the extent to which the students can feed something into perhaps what I’ve said, or sort of go beyond or challenge it, or me challenge them or critique it, that’s the part that I find sort of most interesting, if it’s just me waxing lyrical, I find that, number one, hard work, and in part because of that performance process, process, like, that’s less of a natural fit for me as such. But I wonder if it’s something, is it something about the context, is it something about the situation in which these things become sort of normalised, so I’m much happier when I’m working with groups of 20 or fewer students within more of a tutorial situation than in a lecture theatre with 100 students or something?

C-D: Tyler now refers to a distinction between two kinds of teaching settings in this Australian university: ‘lectures’ and ‘tutorials’ [part of the discourse of university teaching in this university]. Tyler offers a critique of lecturing as ‘onerous’ and ‘hard work’ compared with ‘more of a tutorial situation’—in which ‘the students can feed something into perhaps what I’ve said, or sort of go beyond or challenge it, or me challenge them or critique it’ which is ‘most interesting’, as opposed to ‘just me waxing lyrical’ which is ‘less of a natural fit for me’ Tyler also refers ambiguously to the ‘performance process’ becoming ‘normalised’ in the lecturing setting in the lecture theatre [perhaps referring to normalising the exercise of power-over students in lectures]. [Tyler may be implicitly contrasting this with a more conversational or dialogical relationship between lecturer and students in tutorial groups of 20 students or less.] M-E: Two kinds of spaces are referred to: a usually tiered lecture theatre where one lecturer encounters 100 or so students and ‘waxes lyrical’ or ‘lectures’ (perhaps in the form of a monologue); and a smaller room in which the teacher is on the same level as the students, in a relation of one to twenty or so, with the aim of discussing the content so that students can become confident using particular ideas or practising certain techniques) (continued)

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(continued) Practices

Excerpt from transcript

Practice architectures S-P: [Tyler’s half-expressed, half-formed critique seems to imply that the discursive and material relationships of lecturing promote (or ‘normalise’?) relationships in which lecturers have power-over students, while the discursive and material relationships of tutorials promote more egalitarian, dialogical relationships between the lecturer and students. Tyler’s critique may also imply that tutorials ‘normalise’ more equal or dialogical relationships and thus avoid and do not produce relations of power-over that might have untoward effects for students and also for teachers.]

14

The juxtaposition of lecturing with teaching in secondary school classrooms S: Alex seems tacitly to agree with Tyler’s emergent critique: ‘that sense of performance and the power that goes with it is, to me, one of the most dangerous things you see in secondary classrooms all the time…’. Alex now labels this [power-over] as ‘dangerous’ D: Performance [of teaching] in secondary school classrooms. R: Acknowledging that relationships of power-over in secondary classrooms have ‘dangerous’ effects

Alex: But that sense of performance and the power that goes with it is, to me, one of the most dangerous things you see in secondary classrooms all the time, or that I did see in secondary classrooms, but, you know, power is an …, anyway one of those things

C-D: Alex introduces discourse about secondary school classrooms, which are different from university lecture theatres (and tutorial rooms), but similar in that they are spaces for ‘performance and the power that goes with it’. In this new context at least, power-over is now described as ‘dangerous’ [perhaps implying that it is or could be in university spaces also] M-E: [Secondary classroom school spaces referred to, by implied comparison with university teaching spaces.] S-P: [Alex refers to power relationships between teachers and students in secondary school classrooms, possibly implying that they are more prone to the ‘dangerous’ exercise of power-over than universities.]

15

S: Power as ‘an aphrodisiac’

Riley: So it’s an aphrodisiac?

C-D: Riley introduces the phrase ‘[power] is an aphrodisiac’, sometimes attributed to Henry Kissinger.d (continued)

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(continued)

16

Practices

Excerpt from transcript

Practice architectures

S: Alex assents to Riley’s description of power as an aphrodisiac. D: The teacher’s performance of relationships of power-over students in secondary classrooms R: Assenting to Riley’s phrase, and then elaborating to argue that teachers having power-over students that teachers ‘have’ is ‘empowering’ for teachers, ‘something they like’. Alex thinks that this is also ‘not necessarily a bad thing’, although ‘it can be’

Alex: That’s what I wanted. And a lot of teachers do feel that, that, that if they’ve got class where they want them, and they’re in charge, and they’re dictating the terms of their own performance, that it’s a very empowering thing and something which they like doing. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a, necessarily a bad thing, it can be, but it’s not necessarily, but taken to excess….

C-D: Alex offers further discourse explicating power and empowerment in teachers’ performances M-E: [Implies spaces in which teachers exercise power vis-à-vis students.] S-P: In this final turn of the excerpt from this transcript, Alex pulls together the sense that teachers have that ‘they have the class where she wants them’, that ‘they’re in charge, and dictating the terms of their own performance’, and she says that teachers experience this ‘as a very empowering thing and something which they like doing’. Alex says that this ‘doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a … bad thing’ (although ‘it can be’). Perhaps Alex is speaking of such teachers as ‘empowered’ not only in the sense that it is good for them; perhaps Alex is also saying that such moments are ones when they feel ‘empowered’ because they are doing what they intend to do, and that, under these circumstances, when teachers are in the flow, entertaining students, they are also fulfilling their educational purpose, and being at their most effective in provoking students to learn

a According to Sartre (1965/1993, pp. 167–169) to act in ‘bad faith’ is to give up one’s own existential freedom in order to play a role or act out values expected by others in a particular situation—like the waiter who gives up his or her own values and fulfils a role by acting in a manner that is ‘too waiterly’ b According to Csikszentmihalyi (2002, p. 49), we experience flow under the following conditions: “First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it c I thank Kathleen Mahon for this observation d This phrase is attributed to Henry Kissinger: “Power is the great aphrodisiac” (quoted in the New York Times, January 19, 1971, p. 1; https://www.nytimes.com/1971/01/19/archives/foreign-policy-kissinger-at-hub-foreign-policy-at-center-kissinger.html)

Tyler began this conversation by recalling that, at the previous meeting, Alex had implied that university lecturing involved an element of power, and Tyler hoped to explore this further in the present meeting. Tyler thus invited Alex to expand on this theme, which Alex did, describing the pleasure of performance, of being entertaining, and of “holding the students’ attention”, for example.

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As the conversation continued, however, it became evident that there is contestation over lecturing—contested language (sayings), contested ideas about how to inhabit teaching spaces (doings), and contested ideas about the lecturer–student or teacher–student relationships (relatings). These contests were evident in contested discourses about ‘lecturing’ versus ‘teaching’ (two slightly different discourses or sets of cultural-discursive arrangements). It turns out not only that lecturing and teaching have subtly different meanings, but also that they imply different discourses about the conduct of education in the university. The contests are also evident in Alex and Tyler’s responses to different kinds of teaching spaces (material-economic arrangements): ‘lecture theatres’ versus ‘tutorial rooms’ in the university versus ‘classrooms’ in secondary schools. Lectures and lecture theatres in universities may reproduce relationships of lecturers’ power-over students, but they may be justified if the lectures are ‘worthwhile’ and ‘hold [students’] attention’ because they may foster students’ learning and thus students’ power-to do what is taught. Tutorials and tutorial rooms, by contrast, foster more dialogical relationships between lecturers and students, and perhaps more readily foster students’ learning and thus their power to do what they have learned. In secondary school classrooms, however, Alex thinks teachers’ powerover students can hold their attention and encourage worthwhile learning, but this power can also be ‘dangerous’, presumably by reproducing students’ passivity and compliance. The juxtaposition of talk of ‘lecturing’ in the university and ‘teaching’ in the secondary school turned out to be very generative for Alex and Tyler in this conversation. It exposed the hesitations that Alex and Tyler (especially) have about the appropriateness of the lecture theatre as a learning space in the contemporary university. And the contests were also evident in Alex and Tyler’s views about the kinds of relationships appropriate to learning in the university (social-political arrangements), and how these relationships play out when framed as ‘lectures’ versus ‘tutorials’ versus ‘classrooms’. One might reasonably suspect that when Tyler opened the meeting, inviting Alex to think about lecturing and the element of control or power associated with it, there was a hidden-but-hinting agenda to Tyler’s questions. Tyler was well aware that Alex understands that power is exercised in lecturing—they are both sociologists interested in how power operates in social life—and Tyler hoped to get Alex to tease out how power operates in lecturing through the discussion. A crucial moment in the conversation came when Alex spoke about the habitus of the teacher, referring back to a time when Alex first went on teaching ‘prac’ (practicums) in secondary school classrooms. Alex liked the idea of being a teacher, being a performer. But, in referring to the school classroom setting, Alex had, more or less accidentally, juxtaposed two different ideas in the discussion: lecturing, which had been, until that moment, the ostensible topic of the discussion, and teaching. Of course both Alex and Tyler understand that a lecturer aims to teach, but being called a ‘lecturer’ rather than a ‘teacher’ implies something more: it implies a monological form of communication (remember that Tyler had mentioned ‘lecturing as a mode of communication’ in the opening turn of the discussion) ordinarily associated with ‘the lecture’, as opposed to other, potentially more dialogical forms of communication common in school

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classrooms (even though teachers’ talk often occupies up to 80% of the time in school classrooms). So: two discourses have collided in the discussion, one (the lecture) in which a teacher ‘performs’ and ‘holds attention’, and maybe even ‘waxes lyrical’, in a monologic relationship with ‘an audience’, and another (teaching) in which part of the repertoire of ‘teaching’ involves a teacher being in a more dialogic relationship with learners. What also happened when Alex brought ‘classrooms’ into the discussion was that a vast discourse of education was also invoked. In particular, I believe, it invoked the connection (pretty indissoluble in the discourse of pedagogy) between ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’. Having brought the notion of ‘teaching’ into the discussion, the issue of ‘learning’ was implicitly raised, prompting Tyler to speak of a preference for other kinds of teaching than lecturing, for example working with smaller tutorial groups in which learners play more active roles as interlocutors in ‘discussion’ and ‘critique’. This, in turn, implied a critique of lecturing as a specific ‘mode of communication’ aimed at engendering learning. Alex was sympathetic to this implied critique, immediately bringing up the idea that power is a ‘dangerous’ element in secondary school classrooms ‘when taken to excess’. My guess is that the discourse of ‘lecturing’ in universities is less elaborately theorised and understood than is the discourse of ‘teaching’, at least for these two sociologists of education, both of whom were once secondary school teachers. Perhaps, for Tyler and Alex, ‘lecturing’ is more justified by tradition in the university than it is by explicit educational theorising, while ‘teaching’ is more fully theorised and more indissolubly connected with the idea of ‘learning’ (especially given their education as teachers). Given this more explicit connection, the idea of ‘teaching’ thus called to Tyler’s and Alex’s minds a greater repertoire of techniques, strategies and tactics aimed at stimulating and fostering learning (especially in secondary schools). Their critique seems to imply that lecturing is a rather blunt mode of communication, to the extent that it aims at learning, and it is as likely to serve the vanity and interests of the lecturer as to serve the interests of learners. Lectures are not only given in tiered lecture theatres (or lecture theatres with raised platforms from which lecturers expound), and teaching in schools does not only occur in classrooms, where teachers and students are on the same level. Yet images of two distinct kinds of spaces seem to hover in the minds of Tyler and Alex as they converse. When Alex brought the school classroom into the discussion in the context of describing the habitus of the teacher, lecture theatres and classrooms were suddenly juxtaposed. From that moment, Alex and Tyler were mentally swapping between two different kinds of spaces that enable and constrain what lecturers and teachers can do—when they ‘perform’. To summarise: Tyler and Alex invoke two contrasting set-ups of materialeconomic arrangements: ‘lecturing’, which seems to be understood as occurring in lecture theatres, and ‘teaching’, which seems to occur in classrooms. In the university, lecturing is a practice tradition that is sedimented into the material architecture of the lecture theatre, which began as a pulpit raised above the flat floor of a hall (as in a traditional church), and then slid down to a lectern at floor level while the floor tilted up to make the tiered rows of many contemporary lecture theatres (to become more

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like the commercial theatres in which drama and comedy are performed). There is little doubt that the flat classroom floor, whether in a school or in a university tutorial room, goes some way to ‘levelling’ the social relationships as well as the physical relationships between teachers and students. By now it is clear that the discussion of power in lecturing has also made evident that ‘lecturing’ and ‘teaching’ support and are supported by different kinds of social-political arrangements. To use the cliché, lecturing implies ‘the sage on the stage’ (not only the sage but also the stage), while teaching implies ‘the guide on the side’.14 At the beginning of the discussion, when Tyler and Alex are first discussing lecturing, the students seem almost invisible: the students seem to be passive recipients of the lecturer’s words—an audience, an indistinct aggregation of listeners. As the discussion progresses, however, for example when Tyler’s talks about wanting to engage the students in discussion, and more particularly when the context is ‘classrooms’ rather than ‘lecturing’, Alex and Tyler see the students differently: not only as an audience but as learners who can be active participants in dialogue, and in the symbiotic relationship of teaching and learning. The discussion between Alex and Tyler reveals intuitions about the place of a lecturer’s project of teaching students within a venerable practice tradition of lecturing in the university. Each act of lecturing resonates across a constellation of practices that compose the institution of the university, as an organisation that “happens” (Schatzki, 2006). In the manner of its happening, then, lecturing evokes a spectre of the hierarchical authority of the university. In Reproduction in Education, Culture and Society, Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) spoke of pedagogical relations, pedagogical power and magisterial discourse as invoking a whole institutional machinery of power, of which the professor—here, the lecturer—is a mediator. This power reaches up to the authority of the discipline and the field, and down to the cowed students (are they really, today?) attending the lecture. Bourdieu & Passeron paint a compelling picture: To reduce the pedagogic relation to a purely communicative relation would make it impossible to account for the specific characteristics it owes to the authority of the pedagogic institution. The mere fact of transmitting a message within a relation of pedagogic communication implies and imposes a social definition (and the more institutionalized the relation, the more explicit and codified the definition) of what merits transmission, the code in which the message is to be transmitted, the persons entitled to transmit it or, better, impose its reception, the persons worthy of receiving it and consequently obliged to receive it and, finally, the mode of imposition and inculcation of the message which confers on the information transmitted its legitimacy and thereby its full meaning. The lecturer finds in the particularities of the space which the traditional institution arranges for him (the platform, the professorial chair at the focal point on which all gazes converge), material and symbolic conditions which enable him to keep the students at a respectful distance and would oblige him to do so even if he did not wish to. Elevated and enclosed in the space which crowns him orator, separated from his audience, if numbers permit, by a few empty rows which materially mark the distance the laity fearfully keep before the mana of the Word and which at all events are only 14 I am grateful to Kathleen Mahon for some of the insights here about the practice tradition of lecturing, with its silencing of students, and the way the ‘sage on the stage’/‘guide on the side’ duality seems to be invoked by what Alex and Tyler are saying.

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ever occupied by the most seasoned zealots, pious ministers of the magisterial utterance, the professor, remote and intangible, shrouded in vague and terrifying rumour, is condemned to theatrical monologue and virtuoso exhibition by a necessity of position far more coercive than the most imperious regulations. The professorial chair commandeers, willy-nilly, the intonation, the diction, the delivery, the oratorical gestures of its occupant, so that the student who presents an exposé ex cathedra is seen to inherit the professor’s oratorical manner. Such a context governs teachers’ and students’ behaviour so rigorously that efforts to set up a dialogue immediately turn into fiction or farce. The lecturer can call for participation or objection without fear of it really happening: questions to the audience are often purely rhetorical; the answers, serving chiefly to express the part the faithful take in the service, are generally no more than responses. Of all the distancing techniques with which the institution equips its officers, magisterial discourse is the most efficacious and the most subtle: unlike the distances inscribed in space or guaranteed by regulation, the distance words create seems to owe nothing to the institution. Magisterial language, a status attribute which owes most of its effects to the institution, since it can never be dissociated from the relation of academic authority in which it is manifested, is able to appear as an intrinsic quality of the person when it merely diverts an advantage of the office onto the office-holder. The traditional professor may have abandoned his ermine and his gown, he may even choose to descend from his dais and mingle with the crowd, but he cannot abdicate his ultimate protection, the professorial use of a professorial language (pp. 108–110).

(Is it too impertinent to suggest that, in this passage, Bourdieu and Passeron offer a critique of magisterial discourse while actually performing it?) But back to the conversation: as Alex and Tyler discuss lecturing and power, they may not explicitly refer to Bourdieu and Passeron on magisterial discourse (which they have certainly read), but they do reveal that they are well aware of the realities and the dangers of the lecturer’s power-over the students, and they want to avoid adopting the magisterial discourse, gestures and power relationships evoked by the persona of the professor, and even the lecturer. Moreover, they also reveal other, more constructive and productive senses of ‘power’ that they would rather enact: the lecturer’s evident power-to entertain or hold the students’ attention, and (although this is more muted in the transcript) the lecturer’s power-with the students, for example in forms of teaching favoured by Tyler, that invite students into dialogue, discussion and critique. And both lecturing and teaching may, in their different ways, help students to learn, and, thus, students’ power-to do what they have learned. Tyler and Alex are both sociologists: Bourdieuians by training. And they are well versed in various discourses of power, including Michel Foucault’s capillary notion of power as diffused through organisations and societies in the innumerable small acts of assertion and acquiescence that produce particular kinds of social realities. In Discipline and Punish (1979, p. 194; see Sect. 3.11, ‘Power I’), for example, Foucault described power as “producing domains of reality and objects of truth”; and “The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him [sic] belong to this production.” According to Foucault, power produces effects, and it does so in two senses, which Alex particularly touches upon. First, Alex invites us to see how a lecturer

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produces effects by disciplining learners, which might include not only methods of correction but also positive means like drawing students into a topic by being an entertaining performer. Second, Alex implies that the empowerment of teachers in such circumstances—when ‘they’re in charge, and they’re dictating the terms of their own performance, … it’s a very empowering thing’—produces the effect of imparting knowledge (a topic within a discipline) to students. In short, Alex seems to agree with Foucault on the doubleness of discipline, seeing lecturers as producing human subjects (students) who are disciplined by their teachers in the practice of teaching, and who, through this discipline, become subjects of a discipline—people who have learned the discipline that the lecturer was teaching. Or, to put it another way, it is to see lecturers as practising within a web of power relations that produces subjects who, by being subjected to their teachers, learn the subject the teacher was teaching. Perhaps the subjects thus produced go on to become, in their turn, teachers whose practices further reproduce and transform the practice and the practice tradition of lecturing, and the practice and the practice tradition of university teaching. In the light of the insights they have reached into lecturing and teaching, articulated by Alex and Tyler in this conversation, how might they now rearrange the practice architectures of lecturing and of teaching in the university, in the interests not only of lecturing and teaching, but also in the interests of learning and learners?

3.13 Power III: In Whose Interests? (Using the Theory Critically) As the previous sections have shown, practices are frequently contested, and often they are the (institutionalised) products of contestation. You want to mop up that spill on the floor with the cloth I use for cleaning surfaces in the kitchen; I want you to use paper towel to clean up messes on the floor. If I say nothing, you’ll use the cloth for surfaces, and may reproduce that practice on a future occasion; if I say something, you may use the paper towel, but you’ll also form a view about the rules in my head. Is it more in my interests to ask you to follow my rule, thus exposing that I have this rule, or is it better if I say nothing about my rule and, when you’ve cleaned up the mess on the floor and turned to something else, I quietly put the cloth in the laundry, replacing it with a fresh one? A critical use of the theory of practice architectures aims to discover the practice architectures—the conditions—that make practices possible, but also to explore whether those practices and practice architectures are • reasonable or unreasonable, in the dimension of semantic space and the medium of language, and especially in terms of the cultural-discursive arrangements that support the practice;

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• productive or unproductive, and sustainable or unsustainable, in the dimension of material space-time and the medium of activity and work, and especially in terms of the material-economic arrangements that support the practice; and • just or unjust, and inclusive or exclusive, in the dimension of social space and the medium of power and solidarity, and especially in terms of the social–political arrangements that support the practice. Much critical theory focuses in particular on the last of these three, aiming to ‘reveal’ the operation of power ‘behind’ a practice or the practice architectures found in or brought to a site. Thus, for example, a feminist critique may aim to reveal how taken-for-granted patriarchal arrangements serve the interests of men at the expense of the interests of women. We saw earlier how, in Discipline and Punish (1979, p. 194; see Sect. 3.11, ‘Power I’), Foucault argued against the view of power as ‘concealing’ or ‘masking’ or ‘excluding’: he wanted to see it as productive, as producing subjects. We might equally say that power produces practices. The crucial critical question I was taught to ask is “In whose interests does X happen?” The students sit quietly in the class, speaking when invited to do so by the teacher; in whose interests does this happen? Is it in the interests of the children, so that all may hear whoever is speaking in the class, to be informed or enlightened by it, or is it in the interests of the teacher to exercise power over the students, to subjugate them, and to domesticate them to a certain kind of authoritarian organisational life that preserves the teacher’s own prerogatives? In whose interests is it when the professor takes to the lectern and performs his (or her) magisterial discourse? Is it in the interests of the students who receive the wisdom that tumbles from the professor’s mouth? Or the interests of the professor, who reproduces his (or her) magisterial authority through the performance? Or the interests of the community of practice that constitutes the discipline the professor professes—an interest in the promotion of the discipline and its renewal through rising generations of scholars? Or the interests of the whole institution of the university, which reproduces its authority as keeper of the disciplines and as meting out discipline through every magisterial performance that reproduces the social relations that spread out around the professor and the university like a vast spider’s web? Of course, all of these interests are in play, but often very unequally: the chain through which the institution of the university authorises the professor, and the professor authorises the students, is a chain from strongest to weakest. And it is a chain that some students will climb, from the status of student to university teacher, from university teacher to professor, from professor to membership of the most powerful decision-making bodies of the institution, and to its highest offices of Vice-Chancellor, Rector or President. It is difficult for me to observe teaching in a classroom and not to be aware of the unequal ‘rights’ of the teacher and the students to move around the space, to touch objects, to open or close the windows, to stay or leave the room at will. In whose interests is the classroom ordered this way? To what extent does this arrangement serve the interests of the learners, and to what extent does it serve the interests of the teacher? Is it a ‘win-win’ situation, or a hoax, or a swindle, in which students are

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deprived of their rights and freedoms ‘in the nicest possible way’, as if the classroom rules, once voluntarily articulated and democratically agreed, were not afterwards employed as the means by which the students will find themselves oppressed? I try to believe that the rules are in the interests of all, and that they serve a common interest that learners will have the best conditions under which to learn, but I cannot shake the knowledge that the teacher alone will be arbiter, jury and judge when it comes to interpreting how the rules apply, and how they can be used to steer the practices of all who inhabit the classroom. Now, let us take our eyes off the practitioner, and her or his interests, and the interests of others in and around the situation. Let us look instead at the practices. As discussed in Sect. 3.11, ‘Power I: Power is Enacted in Practices’, we may look at the capillary action of power Foucault (1979) described, but we may also look, as Larrain (1979) did, at the way ideologies are secured through practices. When we do, we also see people’s subjectivities and identities as being shaped through their practices, in the process of self-formation that accompanies their interactions with the culturaldiscursive, material-economic and social-political conditions they encounter, each of which leaves its particular impression on the people who encounter one another in any particular site. Part of this formation of identities and subjectivities in the flow of practices is a complementary formation of self-interests—what I come to regard as ‘in my interests’ to do, or to be. My self-interests are also produced in the flow of my practices in interaction with the particular kinds of cultural-discursive, materialeconomic and social-political conditions I endure or enjoy. Situation by situation, I follow social norms that encourage me to act in particular ways, to be a particular sort of person (or woman, or man); I am understood or misunderstood; I encounter rewards and sometimes punishments (or the withholding of rewards); I attract support or provoke hostility. The flows of my practices are channelled by the conditions I encounter, and I take my memories of previous encounters into subsequent occasions and new situations. One flow produces and reproduces an authoritarian personality, another flow produces and reproduces an egalitarian; one flow of opportunities shapes me towards being a leader, another flow shapes me as a follower. And, in each of those dualities, I may tend toward one pole in one situation, and the other in another situation. What is in my interests—what my interests are—is shaped by my history, and my responses, in practice, to the conditions I have encountered. And so, to return to the critical view of the theory of practice architectures noted at the beginning of this section, we could ask whether my interests are • reasonable or unreasonable, • productive or unproductive, and sustainable or unsustainable, and • just or unjust, or inclusive or exclusive. But we should not ask those merely as abstract questions. We should ask about how those interests were formed, through what kinds of life experiences, and under what kinds of conditions and circumstances. We should ask how these interests were formed in and through my practices in the variety of circumstances I have encountered.

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And then you might use those questions to flesh out questions like these: In whose interests am I writing this book? In whose interests are you reading it?

3.14 Intersubjectivity V: Happening, Lifespace (World War I, Organisations, and the Community of Life on Earth) In previous sections, I described three dimensions of intersubjectivity, evoking the ways we encounter one another and the world in semantic space, physical (or material) space-time, and social (and political) space. As already suggested, these three ‘dimensions’ are abstractions; they can be separated only in the abstract—when we analyse a video recording of a practice, for example. In reality—the real world we live in—they are never separate. We always encounter them together, combined in practices as they happen (Schatzki, 2006). We encounter one another in the world simultaneously as interlocutors in language, as embodied beings in activity and work, and as social beings in relationships of power and solidarity. In Sect. 3.1, ‘Passages Through Time’, I suggested (following Schatzki, 2013) that “We live our lives in practices”. Awake and asleep, we move from one activity or practice to another, inhabiting an envelope of time and space that is our living—our lives. We inhabit some languages, not others; some places, not others; some webs of relationships and not others. And we fill the times and spaces that constitute our lives in our own unique ‘passage through time’ that makes its own distinctive space, although our distinctive lifespace is also interwoven with the lives and lifespaces of others we encounter at different moments in time, and different locations in space. As we know, the Cosmos began with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, and flared out to occupy an expanding envelope of time and space, and it continues to expand today. Outside that envelope of time and space, however, there is no time and no space. There is nothing at all beyond that envelope, not even the abstraction that suggests that there exists a time and place beyond the envelope that we expect the Cosmos to expand ‘into’. There is nothing beyond the Cosmos for the Cosmos to expand ‘into’. Time and space are within the Cosmos, and come from within the Cosmos, not from beyond it. I think our lifespaces expand to inhabit time and space, just like the Cosmos. There is a ‘you’ beyond ‘me’, and you inhabit your own lifespace, and billions of ‘you’s that I will never know, all inhabiting their own lifespaces. Our lifespaces may never intersect. Yet you are as real as me, and as human as me, and your time and your place on Earth is as real and as important as mine, even if we never encounter one another in reality—although you, the reader of this book, have certainly encountered some trace or some echo of me in these pages. So life on Earth is a mass of human and non-human lifespaces that are sometimes entangled and ensnared with one another, and sometimes distant from one another. Of course, it is also important to note that significant things can happen when our lifespaces encounter one another, when we interact or intersect in some way.

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Transfers of ideas, of objects, of relationships can occur, and either or both of us can be transformed as a result. We can be re-oriented in our thinking, our activities and work, our relationships with others and the world. This is especially so when we encounter one another in practices. We just passed the centenary of Armistice Day, when the guns fell silent at the end of World War I at 11.00 a.m. on the 11th of November 1918. That whole War was a vast and venomous orchestration of converging and colliding practices. Millions did not survive those practices; millions had their future practices diminished or distorted. Children lost parents; parents, children; wives, husbands; husbands, wives. Or lived on with kin, and friends, and workmates, whose life possibilities had been diminished by wounds or experiences that left lasting damage. It was not just men and women who had been mobilised into the War; it was practices. Immense coordinated and colliding arrays of practices of production, practices of destruction. The War was unleashed, and people and nations scrambled in thousands of personal practices, and thousands of different kinds of what we might call professional or occupational practices, until, after negotiation, came the Armistice. And, as nations counted the massive cost in blood and treasure, human beings counted the terrible costs borne by the dead, and the wounded, and their loved ones. Among those practices of war were soldiers and sailors taking aim and firing guns, soldiers digging and maintaining trenches, and general staff planning strategy and tactics. Alongside them were the practices of doctors and nurses caring for the wounded in field hospitals and rehabilitation hospitals, barmaids serving beer to weary soldiers in pubs a few hours’ march from the front lines, welders and boilermakers building ships and tanks, factory workers producing arrays of armaments and shells, graziers producing cattle for beef, canners preparing and canning salt beef for rations, women in their homes knitting socks for soldiers, women in factories doing jobs vacated by men, schoolchildren learning the geography of the War, journalists writing dispatches from the battle for newspapers, politicians debating wartime national budgets, postboys delivering longed for letters and dreaded telegrams… The First World War is a violent example of the intersection of heaving millions of practices that arm and feed and sustain two sets of allies pitted in deadly combat with one another. It seems coherent—it seems to have boundaries. Some things appear to be in the First World War, and some things appear to be (but perhaps may not be) outside it—things that are not in that War, including many things that happened in that wartime, like a picnic in the countryside with a boy- or girlfriend on a 2-week home leave. But there is no doubt of the vastness of the arrays of practices that contributed to, and were part of, the conduct of that 1914–18 War. There are many examples of practices coordinated at vast scales, unfolding and happening in and across distant, connected, entangled spaces, in a present plunging forward like a tsunami into an uncertain future. Across the planet, through their practices, billions of people contribute to global warming and climate change and their consequences, while millions struggle to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 °C; through their practices, billions of people engage in trade and commerce; and, through their practices, billions of people interact on Facebook. And as they do, the world is happening. All over the planet, and all over the Cosmos, things are

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coming into being, bursting or blooming from the past into the present towards the future. Schatzki’s marvellous (2006) essay ‘On organisations as they happen’ paints a picture of an organisation not as it appears in its organisation chart, or as a list of its functions or operations, but “as it happens”. Across the organisation, in different locations in the building, things are happening. Mail is being sorted in the mailroom; office workers who started early are going to the staff room to get a coffee; a committee is meeting in the twelfth-floor boardroom; cleaners on the early shift are packing up in the basement, getting ready to go home; a salesperson at her desk is taking an order; a person in the packing room is despatching an order; someone at the help desk is trying to work out where an order went astray so it did not arrive at its destination. And all of these practices are happening at once, in the breaking wave of the present, following their own different projects (their ends and goals)—their own internal teleology or purposefulness that is (mostly) part of the overall teleology, the purposefulness, of the whole organisation. The organisation unfolds in a whole constellation of practices, all involving their own special discourses, activities and relationships with others and the world. Each of those separate practices has ramifications for others. A manager pays the price for harassment by learning that his employment has been terminated; someone unpacks the green widget that has been returned, having already despatched the blue one that was ordered; an envelope is passed from the mailroom to the personal assistant who opens the letter and puts it in the manager’s in tray; the accountant completes the quarterly reconciliation of the accounts ready to report to the Tax Office; the marketing department plans the new advertising campaign, which includes big discounts on the green widgets. If you listen carefully, you can hear the low rumble of dozens of conversations around the building, some face-to-face and some on the telephone or the videomeeting; you can hear the incessant tapping on hundreds of keyboards as people answer and create emails, letters, reports; you can hear the hum of thinking as people work out what to do next among the rush of jobs to be completed before the day is done. If you watch carefully, you can see the hive of activity, as busy as a hive of bees, as workers go about their many different tasks, using different arrays of equipment, in different parts of the building. And if you strain your sensitivity, you will feel the emotions of the workers as this group cooperates in solidarity to complete a complex task; as that person in the marketing department puts the finishing touches on a report that describes the success of the campaign to get rid of the surplus green widgets; as that much-despised manager puts another subordinate ‘in their place’; and as that worker tearfully reports that manager’s harassment to the HR department. In short, if you pay attention, you can sense all of the sayings, doings and relatings of all of the practices that make up the organisation as they simultaneously pour forth into the present, happening all at once, all over the place. And you can sense the ways those many practices are being enabled and constrained by the culturaldiscursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that channel them

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like streams in their different courses: the different discourses that orient the work; the different offices and workshops and spaces where they happen, along with the different equipment and resources they require; and the different webs and kinds of relationships that enable and constrain the work of different departments and areas of the organisation. In general, the teleology of the organisation orchestrates what happens—what comes into being by happening—across the organisation as a whole. Yet other things happen too: that manager’s harassment of that subordinate is not only against company policy, and the laws of the nation, but it is profoundly contrary to the culture that the Board and management of the company have worked hard to create. That manager’s practices will be repudiated, and he will be fired. Morale will lift around the company as people who know about the case heard that he is gone. Some people will gather in support around the whistleblower; many will admire her courage in standing up against the harassment and her harasser. And, in addition to the happening of the company’s purposes, a worker will receive a phone call telling them to pick up their sick child from daycare, another will call his girlfriend to make a date for a drink after work, another will take a call to receive a job offer from another company… Yet despite these centrifugal forces distracting people from the purposes of the organisation, they are also present in the organisation, and their ordinary work practices contribute to the centripetal force that holds the organisation together, the teleology of the organisation. All of this happening—this happening of the organisation, for example—happens in intersubjective space. In one dimension, it is a semantic space, in which people encounter one another as interlocutors, using language. In another dimension, in physical space-time, people encounter one another and the material world as embodied beings, in the unfolding of their activities and work. And in a third dimension, in social space, people encounter one another as social beings, in webs of relationships of power and solidarity. But these dimensions of intersubjective space overlap; they coexist. When people engage in practices, they do so in all of these dimensions simultaneously; their practices happen simultaneously across those three dimensions. So: everything is exploding into being in its happening. All new moments and new states are bursting into being everywhere in an expanding universe where happening is happening everywhere in relation to everything else that exists. We see that happening unfold in the leap of the lion towards the gazelle, the slow march of the snail, the leisurely drift of the jellyfish, the rising of the moon, the inferno of the supernova. Because we move in concert with them, blinded by our sense of perceptual constancies, we see a world of illusions—a world of entities: the lion, the snail, the moon. But the reality is different: it is all flows, motion, incarnation: things transforming, coming into being, disappearing. Our practices are part of this flow, this flooding into existence of the next moment, the next state, the next thing. Our practising is an important mode of our happening, as we flow through the flow of being, as we swim with or against the tide, as we become whatever we will be next—in the next moment, tomorrow, or a decade from now (if we still have a decade of living and being in us).

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We do not do it alone. We do it in relation to everything else that is happening in the Cosmos and the community of life on Earth. And we have direct and indirect connections, some palpable and some impalpable, to everything else that is bursting into being in its happening. In May 2019, the report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel SciencePolicy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released a report, drawing on 15,000 scientific publications, which showed that around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history. The average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900. More than 40% of amphibian species, almost 33% of reefforming corals and more than a third of all marine mammals are threatened. The picture is less clear for insect species, but available evidence supports a tentative estimate of 10% being threatened. At least 680 vertebrate species had been driven to extinction since the 16th century and more than 9% of all domesticated breeds of mammals used for food and agriculture had become extinct by 2016, with at least 1,000 more breeds still threatened. “Ecosystems, species, wild populations, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing. The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed,” said Prof. Settele. “This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world” (Media Release, 2019, p. 2).

It is through our practices that we human beings are fraying and tearing the interconnected web of life on our planet, not only putting a million other species at risk, but also our own. Among them are our practices of transport (especially vehicles using fossil fuels), energy use (fossil fuels again), but also land clearing for farming, and our practices of industrial production and packaging that produce unsustainable mountains of waste. To put it in other words, our ways of happening are destroying the ways that other species happen, and the ways that various environmental and geophysical processes happen, in the community of life on Earth and in the Cosmos. In our practices, we steer ourselves imprecisely through life, choosing how to go on in a universe of determinations that unfold among events and outcomes that are at other scales quite undetermined (until they are about to happen, when they tilt into being), in which everything is changing in relation to everything else that is happening in the flow. Our species, Homo sapiens, is becoming more conscious of how our happening affects the flow of happening for others species on Earth, and for the environmental and geophysical processes of our planet, in the air, in the oceans and rivers, in the glaciers, and on land. But this consciousness, by itself, is not enough to produce the change needed to address our predicament and the predicament of the community of life on Earth. It needs to be converted—urgently—into changed practices that will allow our being to happen more lightly for the Earth and the other creatures with which we share the Earth. We are discovering many less harmful practices, and they are slowly becoming more widespread: for example, replacing one-use plastic shopping bags, re-using and recycling, choosing less harmful modes of transport and energy production. The IPBES Report shows us that we need to amplify these efforts very quickly indeed in the years and the decades ahead, if we

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are to avoid the worst of the irretrievable decline in species in the community of life on Earth—species that have evolved together in interdependent ways, and that continue to depend upon one another for their survival. With my colleagues, I research practices as they happen (for example, Kemmis, et al., 2014). We aim to discover, how these three dimensions of the happening of practices unfold together, in relation to one another. In one way, we try to tease them apart, to see the ‘motors’ that drive practices in each of these dimensions separately: for example, the internal logics of discourses, the blunt necessities of action in the material world, the galvanising affordances of power and solidarity. But we also try to discover how those dimensions interconnect—whether they are smoothly integrated or appear to be in conflict with one another, for example. We want to answer not only the question ‘Why did that happen?’ but also the question ‘How did that happen?’ And we also want to ask the critical question: ‘In whose interests did it happen?’ We are searching for the conditions of possibility of practices: what makes practices possible. We search for the cultural-discursive conditions that made a practice possible, along with the material-economic and the social-political conditions that made it possible. And we want to discover how these conditions together made that practice possible.15

References Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. Lenin and philosophy and other essays (B. Brewster, Trans.) (pp. 121–176). New York: Monthly Review Press. Aristotle. (2003). Ethics. (J. A. K. Thompson, Trans. [1953]). Revised with notes and appendices [1976] Hugh Tredennick, with an introduction [1976, 2003] Jonathon Barnes, and preface [2003] A.C. Grayling. London: The Folio Society. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J.-C. (1977). Reproduction in education, culture and society (R. Nice, Trans.) (Foreword, T. Bottomore). London: Sage. Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: parent-child attachment and healthy human development. London: Routledge. Capella, A. (2009). The various flavors of coffee. New York: Bantam. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2002). Flow: the psychology of happiness (2nd ed.). London: Ebury Publishing. Kindle Edition. Dunne, J. (1993). Back to the Rough Ground: ‘Phron¯esis’ and ‘techn¯e’ in modern philosophy and in Aristotle. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Fassler, J. (2013). The case for writing a story before knowing how it ends. The Atlantic, October 8. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/10/the-case-for-writing-a-storybefore-knowing-how-it-ends/280387/ Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage. Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. 15 We

will return to the question of what is and is not possible in Sect. 5.1‘Practices at small scale’.

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Chapter 4

Praxis, Agency, Contestation, Learning

Abstract This chapter (Sects. 4.1–4.6) looks at particular topics of concern in the theory of practice architectures. Section 4.1 explores praxis, the good for the person, and the good for humankind. It is followed by Sect. 4.2, a poem, ‘Choices,’ that concerns a person’s agency in addressing the life situations they encounter. Sections 4.3 and 4.4 discuss contestation, reminding us that practices do not unfold in entirely smooth, untroubled, harmonious ways: their paths are frequently shaped by contests: misunderstandings, disagreements, collisions and conflict. Sections 4.5 and 4.6 focus on learning as an element of practices, and perhaps as a process that always shadows practices as they unfold.

4.1 Praxis, the Good for the Person, the Good for Humankind and the Good for the Community of Life on Earth In the light of Sect. 3.14 (‘Intersubjectivity V: Happening, Lifespace’), I’m tempted to ask “Where is all of this happening going?” The world is rushing into existence everywhere, all over the planet. It is not just people who are doing things; every living thing is doing things. And all sorts of non-living things are going through different kinds of changes and transformations as they interact with other things in the world. And the whole Cosmos continues to rush into existence, black holes, dark matter and all. The flowering plum tree in my back garden has produced its small fruits; SulphurCrested Cockatoos, Rainbow Lorikeets, Murray (Yellow) Rosellas and Common Blackbirds have been eating the fruit and seeds; over recent days, I have seen all of these visitors outside my back window. ‘Who is there now?’ I wonder. Cars rumble along the road in front of the house, their sound rises as they come towards the house, then falls as they pass, giving voice to the Doppler Effect. Air passes through the house, driven by the evaporative cooler, depositing droplets of water on my skin that soon evaporate, giving me the sensation of cooling. The dog sleeps in the basket under the return of my desk. I sit here, writing. Even in this house, there are too many things happening to mention. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 S. Kemmis, A Practice Sensibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9539-1_4

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Amongst all of this prodigious happening, we make choices about what to do. Sometimes, there are so many urgent demands upon us that it is difficult to choose what to do next; at other times, we are at liberty to choose. The ancient Greek and Roman philosophers had already come to the conclusion that they wanted to live “in accordance with Nature”. By that, they meant living in ways that accorded with what they knew about how the world worked, from their studies in Logic (or Dialectics), Physics (natural science) and Ethics. According to the historian of Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy, Hadot (for example, 1998, 2002), they studied these things in order to live good lives, and to live good lives they needed to speak and think well, to act well in the material world, and to relate well (and appropriately) to those around them. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Bartlett & Collins, 2011) collects his lectures to the students in the Lyceum on the subject of how to live a good life. At the beginning of Book One, Chapter Two, he says: Now, since the present subject is taken up, not for the sake of contemplation, as are others – for we are conducting an examination, not so that we may know what virtue is, but so that we may become good, since otherwise there would be no benefit from it – it is necessary to examine matters pertaining to actions, that is, how one ought to perform them (Bartlett & Collins, 2011, p. 27).

To emphasise: “we are conducting an examination, not so that we may know what virtue is, but so that we may become good” (emphasis added). And so Aristotle goes on to give an account of the eleven moral and the five intellectual virtues,1 and of the different kinds of reasoning needed to deal with different kinds of questions. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes three major forms of action, each guided by its own telos or aim, and with its own characteristic disposition. Following Habermas (1972), we might add another form of action to these three: emancipatory action (Table 4.1). The first kind of action is the one Aristotle thought most noble: contemplation about the nature of things—the work of the philosopher. The second is necessary to much of life: the technical, making action we do in order to achieve our goals, 1 The

moral virtues, all except one of which, in Aristotle’s view, are ‘means’ (averages) that steer between ‘extremes’ of excess and insufficiency, are: courage (acting in a way that accords with the ‘mean’ that steers between the excess of recklessness and the insufficiency of cowardice), moderation (between the extremes of licentiousness and ‘insensibility’), liberality (between prodigality and stinginess), magnificence (between vulgarity and parsimony), greatness of soul (between vanity and smallness of soul), ambition (between an excess of ambition and lack of ambition), gentleness (between irascibility and ‘unirascibility’), truthfulness (between boastfulness and irony), wittiness and tact (between buffoonery and crudity, and boorishness and dourness), friendliness (between obsequiousness or flattery, and surliness and quarrelsomeness) and justice (which is a mean without extremes, but whose opposite is injustice) (after Bartlett & Collins, 2011, pp. 303–4). Bartlett and Collins (2011) summarise Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues as (1) art, which is craft or technical knowledge useful in making different kinds of external objects (p. 305); (2) science, which is scientific knowledge (p. 314); (3) prudence (or phron¯esis), which is the virtue that permits a person “always to choose the correct action in a given circumstance and to perform it well and for the right reason” (pp. 313–4); (4) wisdom (sophia), “that which the ‘philosopher’, the ‘lover of wisdom,’ most seeks” (p. 316); and (5) intellect (nous), “the intellectual grasp of what something is” (p. 310).

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Table 4.1 Four kinds of action (Adapted from Kemmis & Smith, 2008, p. 25) Theoretical perspective

Technical perspective

Practical perspective

Emancipatory perspective

Telos (Aim)

The aim of attaining of knowledge or truth

The aim of producing some external object

The aim of acting for the good of humankind

The aim of overcoming irrationality, unsustainability and injustice

Disposition

Epist¯em¯e: the disposition to seek knowledge and truth

Techn¯e: the disposition to make things correctly, following the appropriate rules and techniques

Phron¯esis: the disposition to act wisely and prudently in the world, for the good of humankind

Critical: to free people from previously accepted ways of living, traditions, customs and habits that have untoward consequences

Action

Theoria: Contemplative action: theorising, doing philosophy, doing science

Poi¯esis: Making an external object, using the appropriate techniques and following the relevant rules

Praxis: Acting wisely and prudently for the good of humankind, conscious both that one acts in (and forms) history and also that one’s actions are acts of self-formation

Critical praxis: Acting for the good for humankind, but also interrogating and transforming existing ways of doing things that currently have untoward consequences

especially the production of things external to us, like making a salary, a salmon pie, a story or a skyscraper. The third, praxis, is action that makes history, and it forms us and our characters—who we are. The fourth, critical praxis, is what we do when we act to identify and to overcome irrationality and unreasonableness, unproductiveness and unsustainability and injustice and exclusion. Kemmis (2011) suggests that there are two principal traditions in the study of praxis today. The first is the neo-Aristotelian tradition, according to which praxis is understood as “action that is morally-committed, and oriented and informed by traditions in a field” (Kemmis & Smith, 2008, p. 4; see also MacIntyre, 1981). The second is the Hegelian–Marxian tradition, according to which praxis is history-making action: action with moral and political consequences (see, for example, Bernstein, 1971; MacIntyre, 1998). In the first tradition, praxis is an action that is intended to be good (there is only ‘good’ praxis); in the second, praxis is action that turns out to have moral and political consequences (so there can be both ‘bad’ and ‘good’ praxis). In our Pedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP) international research network (Edwards-Groves & Kemmis, 2016), we discovered that our Anglophone partici-

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pants (largely from Australia and the UK) generally understood praxis in the neoAristotelian sense, while our colleagues from Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Netherlands tended to understand praxis in the Hegelian–Marxian sense. Nowadays, PEP researchers tend to see praxis as having both of these two aspects, with one or the other being emphasised in different contexts. Thus, Kemmis (2011) suggested that, from an observer perspective, praxis is frequently seen in Hegelian–Marxian terms as action with moral and political consequences, while from a participant perspective, praxis is frequently seen from a neo-Aristotelian perspective, as ‘trying to do the right thing’ under the prevailing circumstances. In Book Six, Chapter Five of the Nicomachean Ethics (Bartlett & Collins, 2011, p. 120), Aristotle makes a crucial distinction between technical action (poi¯esis, guided by the disposition of techn¯e) and practical action (praxis, guided by the disposition of phron¯esis): … prudence [phron¯esis] is a true characteristic that is bound up with action [praxis], accompanied by reason, and concerned with things good and bad for a human being. For of making [poi¯esis], the end is something other than the making itself, whereas of action [praxis], there would not be any other end: acting well itself is an end.

In Aristotle’s view, then, techn¯e produces things (external objects) other than itself, while praxis is aimed at producing the good for humankind, and in doing so also forms the character and dispositions of the one who acts (self-formation). Since action forms the character and dispositions of the one who acts, I have argued (Kemmis, 2012) that, while the disposition of phron¯esis guides the praxis of the one who acts, the commitment to and enactment of praxis also contributes to forming that disposition. Phron¯esis, understood as ‘practical wisdom’, does not come into being of its own accord; rather, it comes into being through reflecting on one’s efforts to act well in the circumstances in which one finds oneself, and the consequences of those efforts. While I think that reflection on the experience of one’s praxis and the consequences of one’s praxis is the principal means by which one develops phron¯esis understood as ‘practical wisdom’, I nevertheless concede that phron¯esis can be learned indirectly, for example, through the study of history, some art and observation of others’ actions and their consequences. In Aristotle’s view, the point of life is to live well, according to the virtues. For him, this meant to live nobly, with arête, the distinction of the aristocrat. In our more democratic times, we might nevertheless aim to live according to the virtues, although we would not restrict that ambition to an aristocratic class of men, landowners, citizens who are members of the polis and thus lawmakers—a class excluding women and slaves and everyone who is not Athenian. In fact, in our time, the democratic ethos is not only more inclusive, but it is also more restlessly interrogative: we actively search for ways in which we are being misled by custom, habit, tradition, superstition, fashion and the self-interests of different people and groups. Thus, we engage in critical praxis that helps us to find out how we have been led to see things in certain ways that obscure injustice—as, for example, patriarchal perspectives obscure injustices endured by women, and racist perspectives obscure injustices against people of this or that racial or ethnic group.

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And when we find such untoward states of affairs, critical praxis impels us to try to find ways to overcome them, and to transform the practices by which those untoward consequences have been produced. In Sect. 3.11, ‘Power I’, following the French theorist of ideology, Jacques Larrain (1979), I discussed how ideology is not only the product of practices, but also carried in practices: it is built into the ways we do things. To use a hoary example from the 1960s and 1970s, women refused to allow men to open doors for them because they saw that the mere act of opening the door, intended perhaps as merely ‘good manners’, necessarily, repeatedly and in those days infuriatingly positioned women as the weaker sex, as ones who needed protecting and defending by well-mannered, middle-class men. In those years, I opened doors for my brothers, my parents, and any passenger getting into my car, but the universality of the gesture was undoubtedly a disguise, unmasked by the knowledge that it was a custom optional for others, but mandatory in the case of women. In this book, I discuss practices more dangerous than the opening of doors: practices of war, violence, discrimination, colonial dispossession, destruction of the community of life on Earth, and even some practices said to be ‘educational’ although they are not (for example, practices of schooling that do not foster individual and collective self-expression, self-development and self-determination). It is the aim of education for critical praxis to help people be vigilant about whether practices produce such untoward consequences, and, if they do, to find ways to transform them so they no longer produce these consequences. In ‘Life in practices: Challenges for education and educational research’ (Kemmis, 2018; see also Kemmis & Edwards-Groves, 2018) , I made the case that education and educational research aim for the good for each person and the good for humankind. I argued for an education that initiates people into practices that will help us sustain the community of life on the planet, rather than aiming just to initiate people into knowledge. I advocated for curricula of practices rather than (or in addition to) curricula of knowledge. In my view, all actions deliberately intended to be praxis or critical praxis aims at the good for humankind. That is what the ancients thought when they described what it meant to ‘live in accordance with Nature’. Hadot (1998) believed that the good for humankind was at the heart of the meditations of Roman citizen and Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180 AD, Emperor 161–180), his reflections as he prepared himself to face the world each day. Hadot has shown that the focus of these daily meditations was nearly always one or another of three disciplines the Stoics practised in their approach to the world: • the discipline of assent (or attention), by which the philosopher does not act on first impressions, but deliberates to form a clear view of something that is to hand (not giving in to fear at the sound of a building collapsing, for example, but forming a sound view about what the situation is and requires); • the discipline of desire, by which the philosopher avoids becoming too attached to things in the world, as happens when people yield to comfort or convenience or gluttony or lust, for example, and instead taking a path of moderation and

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‘remaining indifferent to that which is indifferent to you’ (not complaining about things that are not willed against you); and • the discipline of action, by which the philosopher strives to act in all things for the good for humankind (Hadot, 1998, pp. 101–231). For Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics, then, in relation to the situations and circumstances in which we find ourselves in the world, we should strive to see things clearly, resist giving into our desires and convenience, and do our best to act for the good of humankind, while remembering that what, in this case, the good for humankind may be is frequently contested. To return to the image with which this section began, the happening of the world going on all around us: we sit at the top of an erupting volcano of happening that hurls us from the past and present on into the future. In this eruption of happening, some things are beyond our control, individually and collectively. But, regarding the things that are within our control, each of us can choose how to act: whether in terms of self-interest or for the good for humankind, whether on the basis of reason or unreasonably, productively or unproductively, sustainably or unsustainably, justly or unjustly. As we hurtle towards environmental catastrophe, for example, each of us can choose, within limits, whether to continue our practices as they are, or change our practices of transportation, energy use or eating—to name a few—in ways that will limit global warming and the threat of irreversible climate change. But it does not follow from this that, collectively, everyone will choose to act in the same way. That is why individual practical deliberation topples inevitably into the realm of the social and the political. Nor does it follow that climate change is reversible solely by human action: the biological and geophysical processes already unleashed have their own causalities and will produce their own consequences, even as we seek to unwind what humans have done to cause global warming. In the face of the cataclysmic intergenerational injustice of leaving the world a mess for our grandchildren and their grandchildren, humankind already has the knowledge to prevent global warming. But knowledge is not enough. Somehow, humankind must collectively choose to transform the unsustainable practices of billions of people around the globe. And in order to transform those unsustainable practices, we must transform the practice architectures that hold them in place— ways of thinking and doing and relating that have become calcified in our cultures, our economies, and our societies. Freire (1970) argued that a cultural revolution was necessary to bring about the social revolution that would put an end to poverty and injustice in the world. In my view, we need simultaneously to transform our culture and our ways of thinking, our economies and our ways of working in the material world, and our societies and our ways of relating to one another and the world. They are all interdependent, and one does not change without the others also changing. But perhaps Freire is right, and the first step is to know and to understand (in language) that we are in trouble. For their part, climate scientists leave us in no doubt that humankind is in trouble. In ‘Life in practices’ (2018), I argued that each of us and all of us ought to work not only for the good for humankind, but also for the good of the whole community of

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life on the planet. Our obligations are not only to humankind; our science has led us to understand how our anthropocentric views have led us into our current crisis. For this reason, because for centuries people treated the Earth as an (apparently) infinite resource provided by a benevolent God for our exploitation, we have been slow to recognise the Earth’s finitude, and its depletion. On the grounds that humankind is bringing about the environmental crisis already engulfing us, palaeontologists and stratigraphers dub our era the Anthropocene (see also Somerville, 2017). It is our delusion that we are somehow above the rest of the community of life that is at the heart of our crisis. Only when we see ourselves within the community of life on the planet can we recognise that it is the vast web of interdependencies of species that makes life possible for all species and for each—including our own. Throughout these essays, I have tried to emphasise that these interdependencies are not static facts; they are dynamic; they are expressed in living relationships. For us human beings, these interdependencies are expressed, and lived, in our practices. To secure a sustainable planet, we need to transform the ways we live; we need to discover and secure a whole constellation of new and sustainable practices. In my view, these will be practices that enhance the community of life on the planet rather than damaging, depleting and diminishing it. And if we are to discover and disseminate such practices, we will need to overthrow many of the existing practice architectures that currently sustain our unsustainable practices, and work urgently to secure new practice architectures for sustainable living in all human cultures, economies and societies, across the globe, dedicated not just to their own survival but to the survival of the community of life on the planet.

4.2 Choices (A Poem)2 Since Marx, we have known that you and I make history but not under circumstances of our own choosing.3

2 Initially (25 September 2004) this poem was written for a young friend, and later (September 2014)

I adapted it for a text I produced for first-year undergraduate students in an Education Studies subject in a Bachelor of Education (Primary) degree programme at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga. It would be wrong to suggest, however, that the person to whom the poem is addressed has complete freedom as an Autonomous Agent; in fact, their agency, and their freedom to act, is always enabled and constrained by the conditions and circumstances in which they find themselves (as indicated in Sect. 3.2: ‘Intersubjectivity I: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity’). Moreover, what choices people have depends greatly on what they notice and regard as relevant and salient in the unfolding flow of their practice, as they enmesh with the arrangements that exist in the site. 3 In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx (1852) says: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

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Still, each of us makes choices and all of us share the consequences. It is our common fate, our common destiny.

Each day, each moment, by choosing what to do now, you are making your own memories, and making a history all of us will share.

You are choosing what you will know, what conversations you will have, what your ideas and memories will be, how you will think with others now and in the future.

Sayings Semantic space Language Cultural-discursive arrangements

You are choosing what you will make, what you will produce and consume, what you will be able to do in the future, how you will fit in the productive life of society.

Doings Physical space time Activities and work Material-economic arrangements

You are choosing who you will know, what relationships you will have with them, what you will do with, for and against others, and how you’ll connect with others and they with you.

Relatings Social space Power and solidarity Social-political arrangements

You are choosing whether to be, and the extent to which you can be, the primary cause in your own life – a producer of experience – or a consumer of experiences produced by others. You are choosing what will be the conditions of life for all our children.

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4.3 Contestation I: Australia Day and ‘Change the Date’ Our ideas, and our practices, are contested—they are subject to contestation. That means that different people have different ideas about such things as what a word means or implies, or how to do things. These different ideas and views about how things should be done sometimes collide—in talk between people, when they encounter a misunderstanding or a disagreement, or in practice, when different people do things in different ways. In fact, contestation occurs in each of the three dimensions of the intersubjective space in which we encounter each other: in semantic space, physical space-time, and social and political space. For example, the idea that the world was created by God in 6 days is a product of one discourse; the idea that planet Earth formed 4.53 billion years ago out of a cloud of dust and gas near the Sun comes from another discourse. In some schools, different teachers, students and parents take one view, while others take the other view. When it comes to the practices of teaching religion or science, there may be a conflict between these views, and between the people who hold them—contestation. This contestation is visible not only in the difference between these ideas, but in people’s practices of espousing the ideas, and using them in talk and texts. And it is visible in practices like teaching and learning—or practices of religious observance, where literalist Christians, for example, are at odds with other Christians who find no contradiction between their faith and believing in the Big Bang and the evolution of life on Earth. Ideas, work and activities and identities and relationships encounter one another in intersubjective space, sometimes colliding and conflicting, and sometimes forging new connections. Kemmis, Wilkinson and Edwards-Groves (2017, p. 245) write that our kinds of analyses [analyses using the theory of practice architectures] appear to some readers to suggest that practices unfold seamlessly in sites because of the prefigurative power of the relevant arrangements. This reading gives the false impression that the performance of practices, and the securing of practice architectures, occurs in ways devoid of contestation and struggle. We think that, on the contrary, while social reality is often reasonably harmonious, practices and practice architectures are usually formed in ways that are messy, contested, and conflicted. Practices are analogous to living things. They unfold in the ‘happening-ness’ of actual sites, occupied by human beings performing their daily routines and actions (Schatzki, 2006). Practices do not spring forth fully formed or predetermined from the practice architectures that sustain them; rather, they must be struggled over and constantly reasserted as part of the micropolitics at play in social arenas. Practices and practice architectures may be replaced if more robust alternatives come along, ready to compete for their own survival.

As these authors suggest, contestation is a very ordinary, even normal, state of affairs. We frequently find ourselves embroiled in misunderstandings, misperceptions, disagreements, miscalculations, collisions, and conflicts with others. When I look around me here in Australia, I see a successful multicultural society; the ‘Australian Patriots’ (an Australian white supremacist group), by contrast, see Australia’s society and values being threatened by immigrants from diverse cultures and societies. I see a world undergoing global warming and climate change which may lead to an environmental catastrophe; some climate change deniers in the Australian Parliament see talk of climate change as a ‘green-left’ threat to Australia’s coal exports.

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I see the challenge for Australian education as being to initiate people into practices that will engender a culture based on reason, an economy and environment that are sustainable and productive, and a just and democratic society; others see the challenge for Australian education as being to initiate people into the knowledge laid down in the Australian Curriculum. Such differences of perspective are commonplace. And under some circumstances, they lead to contestation, in which two or more opposing ‘sides’ in a disagreement must struggle to reach a shared understanding, or to accept one side or another as ‘right’, or else they may break off communication altogether so that each side can preserve its own view in the face of the other. In the examples just given, I have emphasised contestation in or over ideas. But there is also contestation about what we should do: contestation in practices. Should I separate my rubbish into the separate organic waste green bin, the recycling bin, and the general waste bin provided by the Wagga Wagga City Council, or should I sneak that organic waste and those recyclables into the general waste bin? Should I drive my car to work or take public transport? Should I buy fast fashion T-shirts that will last only a few washes, or should I buy clothing that will last longer? Should I send my child to a government school or a church school or a private school? Should I feed the birds in my garden or let them forage for themselves? Should I stay on Facebook or close my account? Should I stay quiet about your view that Australia should maintain its coal industry and exports while we can, or should I try to persuade you that we should be making the transition to renewable energy as quickly as feasible? Contestation frequently occurs when different or contradictory practice architectures support peoples’ practices, like the Christian literalists’ reliance on the discourse of the first verses of Genesis in some particular translation of the Christian Bible, and the scientific discourse of astronomers and astrophysicists about the formation and development of the Cosmos. In the case of contestation over practices, as happened when the Wagga Wagga City Council introduced new recycling bins and protocols, and different groups objected to the change. One group objected because they feared that the smaller general waste bin, now collected only every second week, would cause an accumulation—and perhaps an overflow—of unpleasant waste in these bins (used disposable nappies/diapers were frequently mentioned in letters to the local newspaper). The new bins and waste protocols provided by the Council were new practice architectures that prefigured new practices of waste disposal, and those hostile and objecting Wagga Wagga ratepayers feared the new bins and protocols would not meet their needs. They were being asked to practise waste disposal differently, and they were unhappy about what they thought the consequences would be. Because contestation is a normal, everyday state of affairs in human coexistence, most of us learn ways to live with it, avoid it, and work through it in different ways in different situations with different people and groups. Sometimes, however, it bubbles to the surface in overt and sometimes destructive conflicts. And sometimes it can be avoided or overcome when people come to understand and appreciate one another’s views, even if they don’t necessarily wholeheartedly agree.

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Here is a contemporary case of contestation: Yesterday, January 26, was Australia Day. There is a lively and heated debate among Australians about whether the Australian Government should act to change that date. Should Australians continue to observe Australia Day on January 26, the anniversary of the 1788 landing of Captain Arthur Phillip at Sydney Cove to establish the new British colony, or should we change the date to recognise and respect the views of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that January 26 is ‘Invasion Day’, the beginning of their dispossession? The current government,4 led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, is adamant that Australia Day should continue to be observed on January 26, since that date is now widely accepted. Others reject that view and argue that observing Australia Day on January 26 was determined only about 80 years ago, beginning in the state of Victoria in 1931 and in the other states and territories in 1935, and that it could be changed again. Some argue that it would be more appropriate to celebrate ‘Australia’ Day to commemorate the foundation of the Commonwealth of Australia—the date on which the states entered the federation of Australia—and that, since this occurred on 1 January 1901, 1 January would be a more suitable day to celebrate the birth of the nation. In any event, on Australia Day this year, many tens of thousands of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians—a number that seems to increase each year—marched in the streets to demand that the Government change the date. As a citizen of Australia, I am committed to the notion that Australia should be a nation based on principles of • individual and collective self-expression to secure a culture based on reason, • individual and collective self-development to secure an economy and environment that are sustainable and productive and • individual and collective self-determination to secure a just and democratic society. On these grounds, I believe that all Australians should recognise and respect the profound damage done by the dispossession imposed on Australia’s Indigenous peoples by the European settlers in 1788, and recognise and respect that the consequences of that dispossession continue to reverberate through Indigenous people’s lives and communities to this day. If we seek truth and reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, then it seems to me that, in conscience, all Australians cannot celebrate a shared national day in the face of Indigenous peoples’ pain, suffering and outrage. On these grounds, January 26 is the most difficult day of the year for Indigenous Australians to join other Australians in celebrating our shared Australian-ness. For Indigenous Australians to feel included, as they must be, in the collective life and unfolding story of our nation, I believe that Australians must therefore choose to celebrate our Australian-ness on some other date. The difficulty we Australian citizens face is that some conservative Australians believe that January 26 is now a kind of sacred day, memorialising an originary moment for an Australia whose roots are not in the land itself, nor in the culture, environment and society that existed here before 1788, but in the culture, economic 4 At

the time of writing, in January 2019.

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structures and social and political arrangements brought to this land from Europe by the First Fleet settlers. January 26 was the date on which European Australia was founded. Indeed, it was a 1930s campaign by ‘the Australian Natives Association’ that advocated for an ‘Australia Day’ to be held on January 26, the foundation date of their Australia. The Australian Natives Association was an association not of Indigenous people, but of men (not women, at least initially) who were ‘nativeborn’ (that is, they were born in Australia, not Europe) and of European descent (not Indigenous). Formed as a mutual benevolent society in Melbourne in 1871, the Australian Natives Association also advocated for Federation, and also for the White Australia Policy that restricted immigration to Australia by non-Europeans. Despite these advocacies, we should nevertheless note that the Association also advocated for women’s suffrage and for political education for all. The history of Australia Day, thus, reveals connections with an era in which white Australians were privileged in a way that most contemporary Australians would nowadays prefer to repudiate, including most Indigenous Australians.5 I have discussed the debate over when to celebrate Australia Day as an example of contestation. Part of this contest is being conducted in the streets, where people marched in demonstrations whose aim is to ‘Change the date’, and another part is being conducted in the media where politicians and pundits of various views put their cases for one side or the other. The contest will be resolved only if and when the Australian Parliament acts—or does not act—to change the date. One might say that the ‘opposite’ of contestation is institutionalisation. In 1935, the Australian Government institutionalised January 26th as the date for Australia Day. In the years since, the day itself has become something of an ‘institution’. On the one side, it is celebrated by solemn and happy local government citizenship ceremonies where, each year, thousands of immigrants swear allegiance to Australia and its laws. On the day, the media also customarily broadcast an Address to the Nation by the Governor General of Australia (the representative of the Queen of Australia, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, also the British monarch) which emphasises our shared values, and recognises those who, in a great variety of ways, defend and support their fellow citizens. Many Australians also celebrate the Australia Day long weekend by 5A

similar contemporary contest is being addressed by several Australian universities. They were invited to introduce a course on ‘Western civilisation’, to be funded by the Ramsay Centre, established in 2017 “to advance education by promoting studies and discussion associated with the establishment and development of western civilisation” (https://www.ramsaycentre.org/about-us/). The Australian National University determined to reject the course, as, so far, the University of Sydney has done. The University of Wollongong recently agreed to offer the course with the support of the Ramsay Centre (https://www.ramsaycentre.org/ramsay-centre-and-university-of-wollongongsign-memorandum-of-understanding/). Advocates of the course say that it introduces students to the European cultural tradition central to Australian culture; opponents say that Australian culture now draws on many more diverse cultural traditions, and to privilege ‘Western civilisation’ is to privilege Australia’s British and European heritage above others, including the cultures and heritage of Indigenous Australians, and the cultures brought to Australia by immigrants from elsewhere in the world. As in the debate over Australia Day, the conservative side in Australian politics appears to privilege the culture and heritage of European-background Australians over the culture and heritage of other Australians.

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going camping in the bush, perhaps recalling a connection with the European pioneers and their forays into the Australian ‘wilderness’. In many places, the day is marked by fireworks intended for families and children. On another side, the day is also celebrated by free-floating, increasingly jingoistic gatherings of (mostly) young men, wrapped in Australian flags, and wearing images of the flag on baseball caps and T-shirts, occupying territory on public parks and beaches around Australia. Here, they loudly proclaim a crass solidarity that seems to me to stand against the values of recognition and respect for difference, otherness and diversity, and compassionate care for the stranger at the gate. If Australian-ness were to be defined in terms of the principles I outlined a few paragraphs back (I should be so lucky!), then those jingoistic celebrations would be judged un-Australian. The present contestation over the date of Australia Day, then, has been caused by its institutionalisation on January 26, commemorating the landing of the First Fleet, and inflaming the anger of Australians who see that date as setting in train the dispossession of Indigenous people whose lands were seized by the occupying invaders with their superior weaponry. This current period of contestation might be brought to a close by a different act of institutionalisation: the Parliament of Australia institutionalising some other date for Australia Day. We may thus see contestation and institutionalisation as in a kind of dialectical tug of war, in the same way that we might think of war as a state of peace breaking out, and peace as a state of war breaking out, or winter heralding summer, and summer heralding winter. On this view, contestation heralds new acts of institutionalisation, and institutionalisation heralds new acts of contestation. Institutionalisation is not always, although it can be, formalised by a law or regulation or rule, or an agreement of some kind. It can also be realised in a kind of practice that becomes ‘settled’ and normalised as ‘the way we do things around here’. And contestation is not always marked by disagreement and conflict. It can be in the form of a discussion that throws light on such things as unintended or unanticipated consequences, which, when they are recognised, lead people to change the way they do things to avoid untoward consequences in the future. If we want to get to the causes of the contestation between competing ideas and practices, we need to investigate what holds the contests in place. Disagreements, misperceptions, misunderstandings, and conflicts are generally signs that competing ideas or practices are supported by different and competing underlying practice architectures. As we have seen, one example of competing underlying practice architectures is the discourse that leads one person to think that God created the world in 6 days, and the different discourse that leads another to think that the Earth was formed 4.53 billion years ago by the consolidation of clouds of dust and gas near the Sun. Another example of competing practice architectures is the different arrangements made for the education of girls and the education of boys in, say, eighteenthcentury Britain, coupled with contemporary laws about property and the rights of husbands over wives, and the different rights of men and women when it came to voting for members of Parliament. These arrangements deprived women of equal rights under the law, and made them dependent on men for support and the means to a satisfactory life. Needless to say, these arrangements gave men considerable

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power over women, and the injustices of men’s oppression and domination (Young, 1990) of women. Long years of contestation over those educational arrangements, property laws and rights to vote finally overthrew those practice architectures, and opened—and institutionalised—new spaces for women and girls to participate in British cultural, economic and political life. A critical theory of practice aims to investigate whether particular practices have consequences that are in some way untoward, by being unreasonable, unproductive, unsustainable, undemocratic or unjust (see Sect. 3.13, ‘Power III: In Whose Interests?’); and then to identify the practice architectures that make those practices possible, and hold them in place. As we have seen in the case of our Australian practices of celebrating Australia Day, for example, the date on which we celebrate it means that Indigenous Australians are excluded from celebration, since the day recalls for them the origins of their dispossession. Young (1990) says that injustice takes two forms: oppression, which is found in practices and structures that unreasonably limit people’s self-expression and self-development, and domination which is found in practices and structures that unreasonably limit people’s self-determination. She identifies five forms or faces of oppression: exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence. I regard the practice of celebrating Australia Day on January 26 as unjust on the grounds that it involves some of these forms of oppression (at least marginalisation, powerlessness, and cultural imperialism), and on the grounds that it also involves domination, by virtue of being a practice that unreasonably limits the self-determination of Indigenous Australians on matters close to their Indigenous identities and interests, and their Indigenous rights, rooted in their prior sovereignty of the lands their First Nations occupied, and recognised by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,6 to which Australia is a signatory. To reiterate: when we come upon issues—matters about which people disagree— we should try to look behind the surface of the disagreement to see (1) how the issues play out in practice and (2) what practice architectures make that practice possible. Recently, I read a news article about girls at some Australian schools being required to wear dresses as part of their school uniform, while boys were obliged to wear shorts or trousers. Girls and their parents wanted these rules changed, so girls would have the right to wear shorts or trousers. Advocates of the change said that the girls would be able to play more freely and comfortably in shorts or trousers; their opponents argued that the dresses were recognised as part of the custom and tradition of their schools, imparting a kind of school identity to the girls who wore them. We can see that people on opposing sides in this argument relied on very different discourses: an appeal to comfort and convenience versus an appeal to tradition. People on opposed sides of the argument also privileged different voices in the debate: the voices of the girls and their parents who wanted more comfortable clothes, versus the voices 6 Adopted

by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 13 September 2007, with 144 states in favour, 4 against (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States of America), and 11 abstentions. After the Declaration was adopted, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States of America all reversed their previous positions and adopted the Declaration (https://www.un. org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html).

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of the principals and alumni of the schools who wanted to preserve ‘tradition’ as evidenced in the distinctiveness of their schools’ uniforms, perhaps as part of the marketing of the schools. The clothes are part of the practice architectures of the practice of playing, for example, supported by additional practice architectures like the school uniform rules and the procedures for determining the rules. The issue about appropriate school uniforms for girls reveals that different practices are privileged in the debate (play vs. marketing, for example), and that the debate relies on different, and perhaps incommensurable, kinds of discourses to justify the rules about the girls’ school uniforms (comfort and convenience versus tradition and marketing). Bringing such differences into the open may or may not resolve a particular issue at stake. In the girls’ uniforms debate, some will still insist on tradition while others will demand convenience. When points of view are entrenched, and when substantial selfinterests are at stake, however, such contests may be difficult to resolve. Sometimes, despite the entrenchment of views and the self-interests, efforts must continue to resolve a contest. For example, despite the immense difficulties, people and groups on opposite sides of the Israel–Palestine issue, and others willing to help with the peace process, must keep trying to negotiate a way through the apparent impasse until a breakthrough that promises long-term peace can be achieved—preferably a two-state solution that all sides can accept. Under some special circumstances, there can be a breakthrough in entrenched contestation when people shift from interest-based bargaining to communicative action. In interest-based bargaining, negotiation is seen as bargaining aimed at maximising the attainment of one’s own self-interests to the greatest extent possible when another is also aiming to maximise the attainment of their self-interests. Frequently, in such cases, reaching an agreement requires that each party has to give up something to accommodate some of the claims of the other. Communicative action opens a different route to agreement. Habermas (1987) says that communicative action can occur when people give up their ordinary ‘strategic action’ (action aimed at getting things done, achieving goals, satisfying their selfinterests) in order to focus on finding the most reasonable solution to a difficulty. In communicative action, the focus is not on (self-)interests but on reasons and reasonableness. Needless to say, in many situations, people are simply unwilling to shift from bargaining based on their self-interests to negotiations based entirely on reasons and reasonableness, and in these cases, communicative action is unlikely to be feasible. Communicative action has three important components: it is communication that strives for (a) intersubjective agreement about the ideas and language we use, (b) mutual understanding of one another’s perspectives and points of view (without necessarily agreeing) and (c) unforced (uncoerced) consensus about what to do in the situation in which we find ourselves (see also Kemmis, McTaggart, & Nixon, 2014, pp. 34–48). Now, as noted, people are not always willing to give up interest-based bargaining in favour of communicative action because the latter strives for agreement based on the weight of reasons rather than self-interests. Habermas (1987) argues that, in cases where it is unclear what we should do, communicative action is always

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likely to be superior because it seeks the better-justified course of action, a course of action justified by reasons rather than by self-interests. In the case of the Australia Day debate, I argued for changing the date because the reasons for continuing to celebrate it on January 26 seem to me to be outweighed by the reasons for changing the date. In my view, the argument for maintaining the date is based on a ‘tradition’ that has dubious origins, and maintaining that date is offensive to Indigenous Australians; the argument for changing the date recognises the suffering and outrage caused by celebrating Australia Day on January 26, and suggests that there might be a more important, or at least less painful, moment to commemorate Australian-ness, for example, January 1, which commemorates the date of the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia on 1 January, 1901. This argument recognises self-interests (the self-interests of Indigenous people, for example), but it aims to reach consensus about what to do by weighing arguments rather than self-interests. Were I conducting this argument with an interlocutor who holds the opposite view to mine (keeping January 26 as the date), it could be an example of communicative action if my interlocutor and I genuinely strove to reach (a) intersubjective agreement about the language we use by exploring, for example, the history of possible appropriate dates: the arrival of the First Fleet on 26 January 1788 and the establishment of the colony, or the formation of the Australian Federation on 1 January 1901. We would also need to strive for (b) mutual understanding by recognising one another’s points of view, and perhaps also recognising the offence caused to Indigenous Australians by memorialising the date of the origin of their dispossession, while nevertheless recognising that European settlement of Australia, which has continued ever since, began on that day. And, finally, we would need also to strive for (c) unforced consensus about what to do by agreeing what we should do, and perhaps by coming to the agreement that steps should be taken to ask all Australians to weigh the arguments in good faith, and to do what seems best under the circumstances. This year, many tens of thousands of Australians marched in the streets demanding a change to the date, following their conscience. As noted earlier, others believe calls for changing the date should be resisted, either on the grounds of ‘tradition’ and recognition of European settlement and, effectively, the settlers’ acquisition of the land by conquest, or, for a tiny minority visible in ‘counter-demonstrations’ (usually of less than 50 people), as a racist assertion of white supremacy. The current Australian Government is resisting the call to change the date, but politicians on all sides of politics have seen the strength of outrage expressed by the Indigenous marchers, and the strength of the solidarity of the even-larger number of non-Indigenous marchers who marched with them. I would say that the date of Australia Day has now become a political issue that will demand resolution: politicians and parties will have to decide where they stand, and on what grounds, and then determine whether and how to act on the issue. When practices collide or contest, as they frequently do, we should look for the practice architectures that hold them in their current trajectories—like the culturaldiscursive arrangements represented by the discourses of ‘tradition’ and ‘invasion’; the material-economic arrangements that support some Australians in celebrating

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the day in one way, and support others in taking to the streets in protest; and the social-political arrangements that cause some to stare down the offence and outrage experienced by Indigenous Australians, and others to take to the streets in a spirit of solidarity and mutual recognition. The theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014; Mahon, Kemmis, Francisco, & Lloyd, 2017) invites participants in practices, as well as researchers into practice, to explore whether practices are contested. At one time, Australia Day seemed to be celebrated in citizenship ceremonies and speeches, without very visible protest. But it turned out that there have long been protests by Indigenous people and their friends. Year by year, those protests have swelled in the streets. As a practice theorist, I explore the conditions—the practice architectures—that underpin these contesting practices of celebration and protest, trying to understand how this particular case of bumpy human coexistence has come to be. And then, as a critical practice theorist, and even if the participants in the action do not explore their situation in the mode of communicative action, I use the theory of communicative action to explore participants’ ideas and reasons, their understandings of their own and each other’s perspectives, and their willingness or readiness (or not) to reach consensus or agreement about what to do under the circumstances in which they find themselves. In this way, I reach towards some critical interpretation of a case of contested ideas and practices that manifests itself in apparent or more hidden conflicts between people in a particular situation.

4.4 Contestation II: Academic Practices and University Management In the life of the contemporary university, there is a profound tension between the practices for which the university exists, and the institution of the university. MacIntyre (1981) famously defined practices in terms of their ‘internal goods’: By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those forms of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended (p. 175).

The internal goods of practices are things that can only be had by the practising of the practice, like ‘good’ histories that can only be had through the ‘good’ practices of historians. Examples of what makes these internal goods ‘good’ are things like careful historiography, the discovery and critical interpretation of sources, and the historical imagination that make ‘good’ histories possible. Similarly, the work farmers do to secure the productivity and sustainability of the practice of farming is an internal good of the practice of farming, and the development and deployment of strategic abilities are among the internal goods of the practice of chess. In each case, these goods involve finding new ways to strengthen the excellence of the relevant practices.

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Academic practices include such things as teaching, research, and engagement with the various communities we serve in the disciplines and the professions, as well as our geographical communities. They are practices in MacIntyre’s sense because • they are relatively coherent and complex forms of established and cooperative human activity, which are the product of long traditions of teaching, research and community engagement grounded in the collective work of the communities whose academic work constitutes these different disciplines and professions; • they are oriented in their course by internal goods distinctive to teaching, research and community engagement in the communities of these different disciplines and professions, and aim to achieve excellence in forms that are ‘appropriate to and partially definitive of’ work in those disciplines and professions; and • the academic practitioners in these disciplines and professions aim to develop and extend their human powers to achieve the distinctive forms of excellence, and the distinctive conceptions of excellence, which are appropriate to their particular disciplines and professions. Six or seven pages later, MacIntyre takes a new turn, arguing that practices can be made vulnerable by the institutions that are intended to nurture and support them: Practices must not be confused with institutions. Chess, physics and medicine are practices; chess clubs, laboratories, universities and hospitals are institutions. Institutions are characteristically and necessarily concerned with what I have called external goods. They are involved in acquiring money and other material goods; they are structured in terms of power and status, and they distribute money, power and status as rewards. Nor could they do otherwise if they are to sustain not only themselves but also the practices of which they are the bearers. For no practices can survive for any length of time unsustained by institutions. Indeed, so intimate is the relationship of practices to institutions – and consequently of the goods external to the goods internal to the practices in question – that practices and institutions characteristically form a single causal order in which the ideals and creativity of the practice are always vulnerable to the acquisitiveness of the institution, in which the cooperative care for the common goods of the practice is always vulnerable to the competitiveness of the institution. In this context, the essential function of the virtues is clear. Without them, without justice, courage and truthfulness, practices could not resist the corrupting power of institutions (p. 181).

We live in an era in which academic practices are indeed vulnerable to the acquisitiveness and the competitiveness of universities as the institutions established to nurture and support academic practices. In Australia, this vulnerability has come about partly through the decline in the proportion of funding for universities in Australia that comes from the Australian federal government. It has also come about through the emergence, in response to this decline in funding, of a kind of new ‘profession’ in Australian universities: a profession of university administrators who act as managers of academic work. Once upon a time, university administrators were the civil service of the university, doing their work without fear or favour, advising academics and academic bodies on the nature and likely effects of various kinds of policies and procedures. Their work was to sustain the institution so the institution could sustain academic work. In recent decades, however, people from academic backgrounds (sometimes very

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distinguished backgrounds) have been appointed (rather than being nominated by election) by more senior managers to positions in a hierarchy of managers: a hierarchy that in Australia includes a Vice Chancellor and President who is the Chief Executive Officer of the institution, who stands above Deans and Heads of Administrative Divisions, who stand above Heads of Schools or Departments, some of whom are meant to ‘manage’ the work of academics. This hierarchy of managerial officers of a university is rarely congruent with the hierarchy of academic ranks in Australian universities (Professor, Associate Professor, Senior Lecturer, Lecturer) in the university; or with the hierarchy of the academic standing of members of the academic staff in their respective fields locally, nationally or internationally; or with their standing as public intellectuals in the eyes of the wider community or society. Academic staff of a university permit themselves to be managed in order to be able to continue their work as autonomous professionals, but they will not long endure being treated as if they were not autonomous professionals. They will leave to go elsewhere; they will recede from managerial view in order to continue their work uninterrupted; or they will grow restive, resistant and oppositional. A university can ill afford any of these outcomes on too large a scale—and the academic community of any university is highly sensitive to offences against the professional academic autonomy of its members. A university will be hollowed out of its best staff if it long maintains such offences against academic autonomy; it may persist as an organisation, but not as a university. It will no longer be a serious producer of knowledge, but a retailer of knowledge produced elsewhere. Although it is increasingly unrecognised, this is what makes a university great: the professional autonomy of its members, and their individual and collective striving for excellence in research and teaching and service to their disciplines, their professional fields, and the communities and societies they serve. While members of a university community might have been ‘disciplined’ in Foucault’s (1979) double sense (disciplined by being corrected by their teachers, and ‘disciplined’ in becoming adherents of and contributors to their chosen discipline, their academic field), they also see themselves as members of the university as a community based on reason, not as a hierarchical organisation that can compel compliance and obedience by virtue of the offices held by managers in the organisation. In the university, truth does not yield to power, but if and when it does, truth itself is harmed, whether by distorting the direction of research, undermining the substance of what is taught, or misleading the community and publics that rely on the university for the development of knowledge and the formation of professionals needed for the well-being of the community. Perhaps worst of all, when truth yields to power in the leadership and management of the university, the legitimacy and authority of the university as an institution is radically undermined, both within the university and beyond its walls. A good teacher does not become so by diligently following orders, any more than a good researcher becomes so by complying with the dictates of authorities in her or his field, or by yielding to an order to produce research publications. A good academic becomes so by participating in the conversations and debates that constitute the field, extending the knowledge of the field, bridging its gaps, and reconstructing its prior, flawed ways of understanding things. In this endeavour, researchers might be

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competitors, but they are also interdependent: they depend profoundly and inevitably upon one another’s honest efforts to disprove and to dispute as well as to discover ways of understanding things. I think that there is no such thing as a ‘command and control’ university, not that I have ever heard anyone advocating for one. But I do see university managers, in several parts of the world, acting as if ‘command and control’ is a feasible option for managing a university. I have no doubt that universities today need to make strategic decisions, to apply their resources where they will yield the best results, and to manage the scarcity of public funding and trust they are compelled to endure by governments who believe that austerity breeds excellence: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But when university managers believe that strategy and management are their prerogatives alone, they have already abandoned the university. You can manage an organisation, but you can’t manage the productivity of autonomous professional academics. Only they can produce what they produce through their research and teaching and community service. Managers can support academic production or they can interrupt it,7 but they cannot conjure it out of the air. They can only conjure it out of academics by giving them the opportunities and the means to do their work— the work they constitute through their substantive practices of research and teaching and service. By describing academics’ practices as ‘substantive’ I mean that they are in fact knowledgeable, scholarly, expert and authoritative in their academic fields, and thus able to know what research might best be done at this moment, what rising professionals in this discipline or field might need to know, and what a difference this knowledge, and new emerging knowledge, might make in and to and for the world we live in. There is thus a contest for control in some, perhaps many, contemporary Australian universities. On the one side are the academics who depend on their professional autonomy to participate in the communities of their disciplines and professions, both within and beyond the university, and who find solidarity and legitimacy for their work through that participation, and who depend, ultimately, on participation in those communities to test the justification and reasonableness of their ideas. On the other side are the university managers obliged to manage universities under increasingly difficult financial conditions, often forced to make tough decisions about which areas of academic work to maintain and which to abandon, and forced to rely on fewer experienced continuing staff and more fixed term and casual staff to sustain the university’s teaching programmes. For these managers, the acquisitiveness of the institution (as MacIntyre put it, quoted above), to maintain its work, becomes an increasingly strident imperative, and they must oversee academic work under increasingly difficult circumstances of competition for resources within and beyond the university, and in relation to other universities. I have discussed this contestation over conceptions and practices of university work to present a critique of university management that fails to account for the professional autonomy of academic staff. To me, the existence of this contest indicates that there is a profound threat to the university as an institution in contemporary 7 I owe this felicitous distinction to Professor Barbara Czarniawska of the University of Gothenburg.

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times, when universities are—most unreasonably—expected to do more for less, and when these conditions threaten the integrity of academic work, which depends on academic freedom and commitment to a life of the mind enacted in communities based on reason. It is as if those who fund universities, and some of those who manage them, have forgotten what universities are for, and what they need in order to do that: teaching rising generations of people so they can participate in the contemporary life of the disciplines and professions, critically extending the knowledge and practice needed in the disciplines and professions, and serving their communities locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. At the beginning of this section, I quoted MacIntyre on the tension between practices and institutions. At a more granular level, we also see, in this tension, a tension between practices and the practice architectures that make them possible (or impossible). The changing conditions of university management create a contest between academic practices and the practices of management of academics, each of which is conditioned by its own practice architectures—the practice architectures of an academic field, or the practice architectures of an institution intended to support academic work but sometimes, in fact, interrupting and stifling it. My friend David Boud suggested that maybe the decline of the collegial university was inevitable in the face of the rise of the mass university: in spite of rising student numbers, and fee income for universities based on increasing student enrolments, there were simply not enough resources for universities to continue to manage their affairs collegially. This argument has weight. But I think rise of the mass university— dislodging the elite universities of former times—has come at a substantial cost. More students are shaped for the professions with less care than in former times; research time and opportunities are frequently diminished, especially for junior and casual staff; and many innovative research programmes are harder to secure institutionally and nationally. Many universities work to try to secure great teaching and research by nominating priority fields, areas and research centres, allowing other areas to fade by comparison. Some universities, especially those with large financial endowments, do what they can to sustain themselves as research-intensive universities, distinguishing themselves from other universities unable to maintain research intensity in any but a few fields. I believe, nevertheless, that Australia needs to find much more funding for its universities before it sacrifices those that are unable to maintain their research intensity across all or most of the fields in which they teach. And those that maintain ‘researchintensive’ status may need to do more to support vigorous collegial decision-making by academic staff, rather than allowing academic managers to run things, often guided by (money, status and power) values other than the goods internal to academic practices in various fields—that is, the goods that ensure the excellence of research in history, or in medicine, or agriculture, or any of the other fields in which universities teach and research. Producing the changes needed to preserve the academic virtues will not just be a matter of academic managers relinquishing administrative and economic power; it will also be a matter of academic staff retrieving responsibility for the administration of academic work, and for the allocation of resources in the

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university. Sadly, such changes will not be secured without conflict, and they will only be achieved if the resources available to universities are sufficient for the task. To reiterate MacIntyre’s point, however, this discussion has dealt not only with the contestation between academic and administrative practices, it has also addressed the contest between academic practices, essential to the university’s work of teaching, research and community engagement, and the institution of the university, which was created to nurture and defend those practices, and which now, under the changed conditions of government funding and administrative regulation of recent decades, makes those practices vulnerable.

4.5 Practices and Learning I: In the Menswear Store I needed some new polo shirts and shorts for the summer, so I went to a well-known menswear store in town. Buying clothes is not my favourite activity. As I walked into the store, I recognised the sales assistant approaching me and he recognised me: he is also a waiter at a restaurant I regularly frequent in Wagga Wagga. I had learned that he worked two jobs. I wondered, but didn’t ask, whether he was also a university student. I said, “You work everywhere!” He laughed. I told him I wanted to buy some shorts and some polo shirts. He led me a few paces to a rack where shorts were arranged on hangers. “These are shorts with trouser-style pockets.” he said, then, leading me to the other side of the rack, “These are ones with jeans-style pockets. These ones on the left are jeans-style, and these on the right are ‘smart casual’”. I had learned the two places where the shorts were on display, and that I had a choice of three kinds of shorts in several colours. I had a look at the sizes of the shorts on display. I had learned that the shorts on the hangers ranged between waist sizes 34 to 38. I deduced that I was not the typical-sized customer served by this menswear store. “What size are you?” the sales guy asked. “44-waist,” I replied guiltily. “OK,” he said, “I’ll go check out the back whether we have any 44s in stock.” “Where are the polo shirts?” I asked as he started heading towards the back of the store to look for the 44 shorts. “Over here,” he said, leading me to them, towards the back of the store. Some were on hangers on racks, and some were in piles on shelves. I had learned where they displayed the polo shirts. “Are they cotton?” I asked. “All cotton,” he replied. “These are mercerised cotton,” he said, indicating some on hangers. “They have the smooth finish and the stripes. And these” (he indicated

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several piles on shelves of single coloured polo shirts, in navy blue, beige, black, yellow, green, and red) “are not mercerized.” I had learned that I would be able to buy 100% cotton polo shirts, and about the range available. “Have you got some that will fit me?” I asked. “I could try one on while you look for the shorts.” “Are you 2XL?” he asked. “No,” I replied, guilty again, “probably 3XL, but I think your sizes may be more generous than other brands.” I began to look through the piles on the shelves for a 3XL sized polo shirt. They were S, L, XL and XXL. I had learned that I was not the usual-sized customer in polo shirts, either. The sales guy found a navy blue polo 3XL on a hanger, and passed it to me to try on. “You can change in any of these three changing rooms,” he said as he walked towards the back of the store. I went into the changing room, and tried on the 3XL polo shirt. I saw in the changing room mirror that it was a good fit, then came out of the changing room to see if he had yet found any 44-waist shorts. I had learned that I would probably be successful in buying some polo shirts today. He appeared in few moments. “I have these,” he said, handing me a pair of 42-waist and a pair of 44-waist jeans-style shorts. “The shirt looks good. Try the shorts.” I went back to the changing room, took off my shoes and shorts, and tried on the 42-waist jeans-style shorts. As I buttoned the waist, I realised the fabric was stretch denim. They fitted snugly, and I noticed that they folded in an odd way across the pockets. They were too snug. I took those off, and tried the 44-waist shorts. They fitted well, and were very comfortable, although I was not entirely enamoured of the blue jeans look. I had learned that this store sold shorts that I found comfortable, and that I would probably also buy some new shorts today. I came out of the changing room into the store, and said I liked the 44 shorts, but that the 42s were too tight. I said I would take the 44s. “I couldn’t find any more 44s out the back,” he said, “but I can order some in. Maybe you should try these 42s with the trouser-style pockets. I have a friend who is a 44, and he is much bigger than you. I think these 42s might fit you.” He handed me a pair from the first rack he showed me. Taking the shorts, I went back into the changing room. I tried the 42s. They were not in stretch material, and they were way too small to button up at the waist. I took them off, put on my own shorts and shirt again, and went back out carrying the 44-waist shorts and the navy polo shirt I would buy, as well as the 42-waist shorts I wouldn’t buy. I handed him the 42 shorts. “These are nowhere near big enough,” I said. “It’s a pity. I liked them.” I had learned that some of the shorts I liked were not available – and I had guessed that even a pair of 44s in this style would be unlikely to fit me.

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Indicating a small pile of polo shirts, he said: “While you were trying the shorts, I found these 3XL polo shirts out the back.” I looked at the pile. “I’ll take the beige, and the navy I have here, and – let me look at the green… no … OK I’ll take it, but maybe not the red…” “It’s a nice red,” he said, letting it unfurl in front of me. “OK, I’ll take the green, and the red, but not the black,” I said. “If I wear that to the restaurant, you may expect me to be on the other side of the counter.” “Taking drinks orders,” he said. I had learned that I would be wearing plain coloured polo shirts that were bright but not too bright, and suiting my idea of what I should look like. Women––partners, daughters––have sometimes suggested that I would benefit from having them at my side when I went clothes shopping. I had learned that they were probably right. But I didn’t feel I was challenging the boundaries of taste with the purchases I was making today. I thought my choices had been conservative but sensible. He collected the polo shirts I’d indicated, and we headed back towards the front of the store. He led me over to the second rack of shorts he showed me when I first arrived, and showed me some alternatives that he could order in my size. “OK,” I said, “Could you get me a pair of these, and these, and these, please?” “Sure,” he replied. He took the shorts I’d indicated from the rack, and we headed for the counter. He folded the polo shirts and shorts, scanning their details into the electronic sales register. “I’m sorry,” said the first sales assistant, “I’ve forgotten your name.” “Stephen,” I said. “Stephen K-E-M-M-I-S, Kemmis.” “What’s your phone number?” “Isn’t that already in the system?” I asked. “No,” he said. “We had a big and expensive upgrade on the system a few months ago, and they lost a whole lot of our contacts.” “Bad luck,” I said, and gave him my phone number. I had learned that I had dropped out of the sales system at this store, but that my details had been added once again. I wondered whether I would now get promotional material from the store in the mail. At that point, another sales assistant came to the counter. “Stephen,” he said, “this is my colleague Sean. And Sean, this is Stephen” “Hi, Sean,” I said. I had just learned Sean’s name, but realised I had not learned the first sales assistant’s name, and I had learned that the precise moment to ask it had just passed. Hmmm… Happily, I already knew how to go on in such situations: I pretended that I did know the first assistant’s name. “Would you please read me the codes on those three pairs of shorts?” the first assistant asked Sean. “Sure,” he replied.

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So Sean read out the codes, and my sales guy entered the details into the register, changing two of the digits in the codes to enter the correct size for the shorts he was ordering. I had learned that he expected that I would pay, in a moment, for all of the shirts and all of the shorts, including the ones he was ordering. I wondered whether I should pay or refuse to pay for the shorts he was ordering until they arrived in the store. “How long will the shorts you’re ordering take to come in?” I asked. “Two or three working days,” he replied. I had learned that the time taken to fill orders was pretty fast, so I decided I’d just pay for everything today. The sales guy told me the total cost. I tried to keep a poker face, and avoided sucking in my breath as I passed him my credit card. I also learned (had I forgotten or repressed it?) that clothes from this store are pretty expensive. They have a good reputation for being hard-wearing and colourfast, as most of the things I’ve bought here have been. But you wouldn’t necessarily have thought that this little pile of clothes would cost precisely that. “How is it out in the sunshine?” Sean asked while the sale went through and the first assistant put my shirts into a carry bag. “Getting hot,” I replied. “It’s hot out the back where I’ve been working,” said Sean. “I noticed it was stuffy back there in the changing rooms,” I replied. “I have to stay out of the sun,” said the first assistant. “Five minutes and I start going red.” “I mostly stay out of the sun,” I said. I had learned that the back of the store was hot. I had noticed it when I was in the changing room, but I now guessed that the metal roller blinds that opened on to the alley behind the store must get direct sunlight falling on it in the afternoon, making the storeroom out back uncomfortably hot. I had also learned that my sales guy was prone to sunburn. Having put the shirts in one carry bag, the first sales assistant took a second carry bag from under the counter. “Don’t do it!” I said. “They’ll both end up in land-fill. They can’t be recycled. Put everything in the one bag.” So he did. “See you at the restaurant in your new outfit!” he said. “Indeed you will!” I replied. I had learned that we are now acquaintances, and that I will have to broach the subject of his name when next I go to the restaurant. We learn all the time, through the most banal of our everyday activities. As we do, we adapt the way we conduct our practices. I bought some shirts and polo shirts, adapting my choices in the light of what was available. I had learned what was and what was not available in terms of what fitted me, and what I liked. I had also learned a bit about the sales guy and his colleague, and that will also change the way I interact with the sales guy when next I see him in the restaurant.

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I learned a lot that was tacit: the layout of the store, how to navigate it, the places in the store relevant to my intended purchases, the stuffiness of the changing rooms. I also learned some things explicitly: for example, where the things I wanted were to be found in the store, and what shorts and polo shorts were available in my size, or could be ordered for me, and Sean’s name. I did not learn the first sales assistant’s name, but I did learn that he is susceptible to sunburn. I also learned that it was hot out the back in the store room. I also learned some things by inference, for example, from the fact that the store does not routinely display shorts in my size, I inferred that my size is… well… outside the range of the store’s typical customers. I expect to get a phone call in a few days to tell me it’s time to go back to the store to pick up the other three pairs of shorts when they arrive. I will probably try on the shorts before taking them home, and I will be slightly more familiar with the store when I return. I will also probably interact with the first sales guy again: maybe I will ask him his name then. (A few days later, the manager of the store phoned to tell me the shorts had arrived. When I went to pick them up, she mentioned the first sales assistant’s name in passing: he’s Bryce.) I have learned a little more about what Wittgenstein (1958) called ‘knowing how to go on’ in the practice of clothes shopping—how to practise clothes shopping. And, to use Gilbert Ryle’s (1946) distinction between knowing how and knowing that, in addition to learning how to go on in the practice of shopping, I learned that the store doesn’t stock a wide range of shorts in my size.8 This story about my going shopping for shorts and polo shirts is meant to show the ordinariness, the everyday-ness, of learning, and how learning happens in the context of practices. As my colleagues and I have observed, “all of what is conventionally called ‘knowledge’ arises from, recalls, anticipates, and returns to its use in practices” (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 58) and our learning “arises from, represents, recalls, anticipates, and returns to its use in practice” (Kemmis & Edwards-Groves, 2018, p. 120). And yet we educators go to such trouble to construct settings designed to enable students to learn, or to be “initiated into practices” (Kemmis et al., 2014, pp. 56–61). We do so in order to help students learn the things we want them to learn, or, to put it more precisely, the things we intend to teach them. As Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 98) put it, in their definition of teaching, teaching is a practice of designing and enacting practice architectures that will enable and constrain the practices of students, in ways that initiate them into a substantive practice being taught.

When I went into the menswear store, no one intended to teach me anything. But the sales guy did show me things, and informed me about things. And I did indeed learn a bit more about how to go on in a menswear store, buying shorts and polo shirts—and I was further initiated into the practices of clothes shopping, especially in that store. But I still learned a variety of things. 8 See

Sect. 3.4, ‘Intersubjectivity II: Entanglement in Semantic Space’ for a little more on Wittgenstein and Ryle.

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Perhaps I was too hasty to conclude that no one intended to teach me anything when I went into the store. The layout of the store, its “set-up” (Schatzki, 2002), was designed so I could encounter the clothes on display in a customer-friendly way. Of course, I have previously learned much about shopping in clothing stores, so I already knew a good deal about how to go on in the practice of shopping in a clothing store (or a supermarket, or other kinds of stores). If I were browsing alone in this particular store, without a sales assistant, I would soon have found the shorts and the polo shirts I was looking for, and I would soon have discovered what sizes were on display. I might have gone to try some things on without assistance from the sales guy. Or, knowing that sometimes a store has additional stock “out the back”, I might have found an assistant to ask whether they had shorts or polo shirts in my size. My point here is that the layout of the store was designed to ‘teach’ me how to serve myself—and I believe that there is a whole field of psychology devoted to just this matter. Perhaps the store itself is indeed teaching me how to shop there, and doing so within the meaning of the (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 98) definition of teaching just quoted. The ‘teacher’ in this case, however, was a retail store designer, and that person was not present when the ‘teaching’ was happening as I shopped in the store. I did get guidance from Bryce, however, as he helped me navigate the store and the ranges of the merchandise I was interested in. I think the examples of learning I have given in describing this shopping event are not entirely trivial cases of learning. I think they are typical cases of learning, and something like what happened on this occasion would have happened with or without a teacher or the salesperson present. I think learning is ubiquitous. I think the enactment of any practice—like my shopping for clothes—almost always entails learning, as we adapt our former ways of conducting the practice to this case, under these circumstances, at this time, and in this place. And so the overall repertoire of my shopping practices—my knowing how to go on in shopping practices—was marginally extended, and slightly refined (for that time and place, under those circumstances) by the conduct of my shopping practice as it unfolded on this occasion.

4.6 Practices and Learning II: Coming to Know How to Go on (Inhabiting Practices) We live our lives in practices. We adapt the ways our practices unfold to meet the circumstances of each new enactment, in each new site, and we learn more about how to go on in the practice from how things turn out each time we enact it. In this culture, most people become very skilled at shopping, at being students, patients, and workers and parents, and many other activities. That is, we become knowledgeable and skilled in the practices relevant to living our lives. Learning is at the very heart of practices. If it is true that our learning “arises from, represents, recalls, anticipates, and returns to its use in practice” (Kemmis

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& Edwards-Groves, 2018, p. 120), then practices are also at the heart of learning. Practising and learning are dialectically related: the ongoing flow of my practices produces learning, and learning produces changes in the flow of my practices. The world ‘speaks’ to me through my practices just as I ‘speak’ to the world through my practices: my practising changes the world, and the world changes my practising. The world ‘speaks to us’ as we encounter it in our practices, as we interact with it, and as we get feedback from it. And so knowledge of the world comes into us, not just ‘into our heads’ but through our whole bodies, mediated by our practices (Hopwood, 2016; Grosz, 2004). And we have an impact on the world through our knowledge of it, but that knowledge is mediated by our practices—our interactions with the world (Fig. 4.1). About our knowledge: Whatever ‘messages’ are recorded in the electrobiochemistry of the brain, they are not recorded in a form that is like words written on a page. I think they must be recorded in a way similar to the way we experience the world, in a flow that passes through our bodies and our brains as we say and think and do things, and as we relate to others and the world, when we enact a practice. It seems to me likely that it is this flow that is ‘recorded’ and that the ‘record’ is like the bed and banks of the river that shapes the next flow when we begin to experience something familiar as our practice unfolds. We recognise that a familiar experience is beginning, and our body and brain monitor what happens to see how this new enactment shapes up in relation to past enactments, both recalling past enactments and anticipating what might come next, while also being ready to adapt, immediately, in the light of emerging circumstances. There is some neurological evidence for this speculation in the activity of ‘mirror neurons’ in the brain that fire as we watch someone perform an action: a basketball player, for example. Aglioti, Cesari, Romani, and Urgesi (2008) observed extremely precise ‘anticipatory resonance mechanisms’ occurring in brain activity in the relevant regions of the brains of elite basketballers as they watched video of other players playing, right down to activation of the region of the brain responsible for movement of the little finger before, during and after a shot at basket (in the theory of practice architectures, doings). These resonances were present but less precise in the brain activity of basketball coaches and sports journalists, and still less precise in the brain activity of non-basketball playing students. In the case of the elite athletes,

Fig. 4.1 Relationships between knowledge, learning, practising and the world

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activity was observed in the ‘strictly congruent’ neurons for the action, while for the non-basketball-playing students, the firing occurred in neurons that were ‘broadly congruent’—in the relevant area, but not at the fine-grained activity of the exact brain regions controlling the specific muscles involved in the throw. In another study, involving hockey players, similar effects were also observed in relation to players and non-players hearing different sentences (in the theory of practice architectures, sayings) about particular actions in hockey, with the brains of players more precisely activated, and non-players less precisely activated, vis-à-vis the relevant muscles for the actions described in the sentences (Borreli, 2016). Borreli reports similar activation of the emotions of players and non-players watching a game; emotions that accompany the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine when a fan’s team is winning, or the neurotransmitter cortisol when the team is losing (reflecting, in the theory of practice architectures, relatings). The literal flows of those neurotransmitter hormones shape the ways practices unfold on subsequent occasions, with heightened caution if previous enactments of the practice released cortisol, and with heightened enthusiasm and anticipation if previous enactments released dopamine. The activity of these mirror neurons suggests that we learn knowledge in the form of flows of brain activity, and that what we learn may be retained in the form of pathways for the flow of our neural activity when we use our knowledge in new situations similar to or different from situations we have encountered in the past. Perhaps Wittgenstein (1958, Sect. 143) was right, all the way down to the level of brain activity, when he said that, when we learn, we learn “how to go on” in an activity or a practice. Maybe we learn a pathway to follow in our practices. As a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the early 1970s, I made one of my first serious attempts to study learning qualitatively, in an independent study unit with Klaus Witz, a mathematician who also taught in engineering, anthropology, and educational psychology courses. I set out to study how 5-year-old Daniel learned the hand-clapping rhyme ‘A sailor went to sea-seasea…’ from his sister Ruth. I video-recorded Ruth chanting the rhyme to Daniel, demonstrating the movements, as Daniel tried to mirror Ruth’s movements while chanting the rhyme with her. At first, he was mostly unsuccessful, but by about the sixth try, he was mostly successful. It struck me at that time how powerfully Daniel’s body was stimulated as it pulsed to the rhythm of the chanting, prompting him to move in time with the chant, though the movements at first failed to connect with Ruth’s hands. But each repeat performance seemed to prompt fewer misplaced movements, and more of the right movements—the ones when Daniel’s hands struck Ruth’s at the right moment, or when he clapped his own hands in parallel with Ruth’s clapping her hands. I watched the videotape on an editing machine, at normal speed, and at various speeds in slow motion, trying to work out how Daniel learned to put his hands in the right places through the rhyme. I spent about a hundred hours watching and trying to analyse the video. I wondered whether Daniel was learning ‘expectations’ about where his hands should be, but soon realised that there was nothing in the video that could reasonably be described as evidence of ‘expectations’, which, if they were the unseen forces guiding Daniel’s hands, were operating out of my sight,

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and in Daniel’s mind. What was evident was the manifest fact that Daniel’s hands were, increasingly, in the right place at the right time in the rhyme—a phenomenon which didn’t need the concept of ‘expectations’ to explain it. Mirror neurons are also invisible to the naked eye, except with specialised technology like functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). One way to see Daniel’s learning to clap along with ‘A sailor went to sea-sea-sea…’ is thus to see it as a case of learning by imitation, made possible by the operation of these mirror neurons in the brain, normally invisible but sometimes made visible by fMRI. By following the activation of his mirror neurons, Daniel was soon able to refine his movements so they coincided with Ruth’s. My colleagues and I have sometimes described learning as an initiation into practices, or as being stirred into practices (Kemmis et al., 2014, Ch. 4; Kemmis et al., 2017) . But we have also noticed that the ideas of ‘initiation’ and ‘stirring in’ seem to imply someone apart from the learner who does the initiating or the stirring in. We use these formulations because we have worked so long in education, and in the education of teachers, and we too easily think of the learning that happens when a teacher is present. But we have also come to the conclusion that much learning, maybe most learning, occurs in the absence of a teacher. In such cases, we are then obliged to say that ‘Jenny initiated herself into that practice’ or ‘Johnny stirred himself into that practice’. From the perspective of the neuroscience being discussed a moment ago, could we say that the electro-biochemistry of the brain is arranged so it functions as an organ for recording and adaptively anticipating and replaying sequences of events, like participating in the hand-clapping rhyme ‘A sailor went to sea-sea-sea’? Is this what ‘being initiated into practices’ and ‘being stirred into practices’ look like from the perspective of neuroscience? Daniel has learned to mirror Ruth’s movements, so that when she thrusts her right (or left) hand forward on certain stressed syllables of the rhyme (‘a sail-or went to’), he also thrusts his right (or left) hand forward to meet hers, and when she claps her own hands together on ‘sea-sea-sea’, he also claps his own hands together. Was the learning all in the mirror neurons? My own view is that some, but by no means all, of the learning was in the mirror neurons. Perhaps these neurons are a ‘surface’ on which the ‘script’ of the sequence— the hand-clapping rhyme— was ‘written down’. But a couple of things seem to be left out in this formulation: first, it omits reference to Daniel’s practices, which are the medium in which, in actuality, his hands encounter or do not encounter Ruth’s in time with the rhyme; and second, it describes the fact that Daniel can do it, but it does not touch on Daniel’s meta-knowledge that he can do it. Because, once he has learned it, Daniel knows he can do it. He understands that he can do it. And this is something in addition to being able to do it. And I don’t know that the mirror neurons include this other level of Daniel’s knowing that he can do X. Even less, it seems to me, do the mirror neurons include Daniel’s knowing that he knows that he can do X. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein (1958) delicately teases out the meanings of (among other things) ‘meaning’, ‘understanding’ and ‘learning’. He gives the example (1958, Sect. 143) of A showing B a series of numbers, writing

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them down as 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … B then copies the series. Now, writing the numbers in a line below the first series, A shows B a new series: 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, … And then 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, … And B exclaims “Now I know how to go on!” and completes the series to 99. For Wittgenstein, the notion of knowing how to go on was crucial to the idea of learning. One might not be able to say exactly at which number in the series that A showed B that B knew how to go on, but we can know roughly when B ‘worked it out’. So, for Wittgenstein, learning is coming to know how to go on, and my colleagues and I have adopted his formulation. I now think the notion of coming to know how to go on in a practice encompasses and improves upon the notions of being initiated into practices and being stirred into practices. It is more inclusive, and allows for the case where B, the learner, is learning alone, without an A to do the showing or teaching or initiating or stirring. B has learned when she or he knows how to go on. And to know this is not only to be able to ‘go on’ (to do the thing being learned) but also to know that one knows it. I get the picture, I might say—and this implies a consciousness of the ‘I’ who ‘gets the picture’, as well as the object, ‘the picture’, of the action of ‘getting the picture’. So: knowing how to go on is a simultaneous consciousness of the knower and the known; it is evident in the confidence of the knower that he or she knows how to go on in this situation, and that she does know how to go on is evident to herself, and anyone else, in her practice. Now I begin to think that learning, coming to know how to go on, is not just in the neurons, or the brain, but in the mind and in the body9 as well, distributed in capacities that involve many parts of the body relevant to the practice, whether counting to 100, riding a unicycle, or managing a classroom of 25 adolescents on a windy Friday afternoon. It is this sense—of learning occurring throughout our bodies and being—that Lave & Packer (2008, p. 43) so perfectly capture when they describe learning as “an ontological transformation”. It would be a mistake, in this context, not to mention Lave & Wenger’s (1991) notion of “legitimate peripheral participation”: the newcomer watches the old hands in the workplace, tries to participate in workplace practices in the ways the old hands do, and is forgiven for making early mistakes when ‘having a go’ (as we say in Australia). Perhaps novices also learn how to go on through imitating—mirroring— the practices they see in the workplace. In Sect. 3.4, ‘Intersubjectivity II: Entanglement in Semantic Space’, I noted Ryle’s (1946) distinction between knowing that (propositional knowledge) and knowing how (know-how). Following the prompts of the theory of practice architectures, which notices not only sayings and doings, but also relatings, might it be that we could identify three kinds of knowledge rather than the two Ryle distinguished? I think there are. We learn not only 9 Hopwood

(2016, p. 90) acknowledges that the mind–body dualism has such a strong grasp on our thinking that it is difficult to overthrow. He suggests that we may be able to override it, however, by following Grosz’s (2004) use of the metaphor of the Möbius strip: Grosz “uses the metaphor of a Möbius strip—holding mind and body in play, yet allowing for their folding together without one collapsing onto or being subsumed within the other”.

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• knowing-sayings (propositional knowledge; cognitive understandings: knowing how to go on in the sayings or language games of the topic, and also sometimes how to disrupt the usual flow of a language game by asking questions or by inviting people to communicative action) and • knowing-doings (know-how; skills and capacities: knowing how to go on in the doings of the activity, and sometimes how to do things differently), but also • knowing-relatings (knowing how to position oneself in the social relations in a practice; relational, affective and emotional understandings: knowing how to relate to others in the social situation, and sometimes how to resist or oppose or contradict those relatings). On this view, coming to know how to go on in a practice implies that one learns how to go on in all of these things in combination: the knowing-sayings, knowing-doings, and knowing-relatings of the practice. We might also say that these knowing-sayings, knowing-doings, and knowing-relatings together underpin the disposition that allows one to enact the practice, and allow one to develop and to experience the habitus of the seasoned practitioner of the practice. Or, to side-step Bourdieu’s term habitus, we might say that knowing these things together allows one to inhabit the practice. From the perspective of the theory of practice architectures and the three kinds of knowing just mentioned, it is attractive to speak of inhabiting practices, since to ‘inhabit’ is a verb, an action, the doing of the inhabiting, the ‘going on’ in the practice. ‘Habitus’, by contrast is a noun, a disposition, a thing rather than an action. It might thus be similarly attractive to speak, where possible, of knowing rather than knowledge, to emphasise that knowing is grounded in practising. I think that when we learn something, we learn a narrative form, something like a story that is not just ‘in the mind’ but distributed through our bodies. The researchers studying mirror neurons saw evidence of that in the firing of relevant neurons when spectators watched a sport, even when they were not participating in it. In some bodily sense, they were ‘ready’ to participate. And to be ready to participate in the practice necessarily invokes the participant as well as the participation—as suggested a moment ago, an awareness of the knower as well as the known. Coming to know how to go on in a practice, then, is to be conscious of oneself as a part of the practice, part of a narrative arc of the practice, of a story of the practice (of its teleoaffective structure, Schatzki, 2002; of its activity time-space, Schatzki, 2010). Being conscious of one’s participation in the practice is built into the project of the practice, which Rönnerman & Kemmis (2016, p. 95) define in this way: The project of a practice is what people say when they sincerely answer the questions ‘What are you doing?’ and ‘Why?’ while they are engaged in the practice. The project of a practice encompasses (a) the intention (aim) that motivates the practice, (b) the actions (interconnected sayings, doings and relatings) undertaken in the conduct of the practice, and (c) the ends the actor aims to achieve through the practice (although it might turn out that these ends are not attained).

We become aware of how the practice unfolds, and that, although it may be prefigured, we play a part in steering how it will unfold on this occasion, under the current circumstances in this site. The narrative arc of the practice may be given, in

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part, by tradition and circumstances, but, to a greater or lesser extent, we are also agents in the unfolding of the practice; we are also co-narrators, co-participants with others, in the collective narration of the practice. Earlier, I said that learning and practising are dialectically related. Now, thinking about learning as always having this dynamic, flowing, essentially narrative form, in which we learners are always part of the story by virtue of knowing the story, it seems to me that, as Hopwood (2016) and Grosz (2004) suggest, learning is always some sort of mind-and-body story. If so, then these mind-and-body narratives are themselves the forms in which “what we learn arises from, represents, recalls, anticipates, and returns to its use in practice” (Kemmis & Edwards-Groves, 2018, p. 120). I conclude that coming to know how to go on in a practice is to have learned how to inhabit a narrative arc of that practice. We learn not only practices (as objects), but also, and simultaneously how we (as subjects and agents) inhabit them.

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Kemmis, S. (2018). Life in practices: Challenges for education and educational research (Ch. 16). In C. Edwards-Groves, P. Grootenboer & J. Wilkinson (Eds.), Education in an era of schooling: Critical perspectives of educational practice and action research. A Festschrift for Stephen Kemmis (pp. 239–254). Singapore: Springer. Kemmis, S., & Edwards-Groves, C. (2018). Understanding education: History, politics and practice. Singapore: Springer. Kemmis, S., Edwards-Groves, C., Lloyd, A., Grootenboer, P., Hardy, I., & Wilkinson, J. (2017). Learning as being ‘stirred in’ to practices (Ch. 3). In P. Grootenboer, C. Edwards-Groves & S. Choy (Eds.) Practice theory perspectives on pedagogy and education (pp. 45–65). Singapore: Springer. Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R., & Nixon, R. (2014a). The action research planner: Doing critical participatory action research. Singapore: Springer. Kemmis, S., & Smith, T. J. (2008). Personal praxis: Learning through experience (Ch. 2). In S. Kemmis & T. J. Smith (Eds.) Enabling praxis: Challenges for education (pp. 15–35). Singapore: Springer. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014b). Changing practices, changing education. Singapore: Springer. Larrain, J. (1979). The concept of ideology. London: Hutchinson. Lave, J., & Packer, M. (2008) Towards a social ontology of learning. In K. Nielsen, S. Brinkmann, C. Elmholdt, L. Tanggaard, P. Musaeus & G. Kraft (Eds.), A qualitative stance: Essays in honor of Steinar Kvale. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacIntyre, A. (1981). After virtue: A study in moral theory. London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. (1998). The theses on Feuerbach: A road not taken. In K. Knight (Ed.), The MacIntyre reader (pp. 223–234). Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Mahon, K., Kemmis, S., Francisco, S. & Lloyd, A. (2017). Introduction: Practice theory and the theory of practice architectures (Ch. 1). In K. Mahon, S. Francisco & S. Kemmis (Eds.), Exploring education and professional practice: Through the lens of practice architectures (pp. 1–30). Singapore: Springer. Marx, K. (1852). The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. https://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm. Rönnerman, K., & Kemmis, S. (2016). Stirring doctoral candidates into academic practices: A doctoral course and its practice architectures. Education Inquiry, 7(2), 93–114. Ryle, G. (1946). Knowing how and knowing that: The presidential address. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society New Series, 46, 1–16. Schatzki, T. R. (2002). The site of the social: A philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Schatzki, T. R. (2006). On organizations as they happen. Organization Studies, 27(12), 1863–1873. Schatzki, T. R. (2010). The timespace of human activity: On performance, society, and history as indeterminate teleological events. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Somerville, M. (2017). The Anthropocene’s call to educational research (Chapter 2). In K. Malone, S. Truong & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 17–28). Singapore: Springer. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 5

Practices at Different Scales

Abstract This chapter (Sects. 5.1–5.5) addresses the way practices unfold at various scales, sometimes in vast webs, constellations or ecologies of interconnected practices. These sections intend to convey the notion that, while practices may appear to unfold in entirely local sites, they nevertheless connect with other practices to form larger and larger webs that have ramifications for history and nature.

5.1 Practices at a Small Scale: Morning Coffee (Practices Unfolding in Intersubjective Space)1

I It is nearly 10.00 a.m. My body is prompting me: “Time for a coffee.” Where did that feeling come from? It felt as though it was somewhere in my torso. Obviously, some message has also been handled in my brain. Getting up from the blue couch, I go to the refrigerator, open the door and take the milk tank (part of my fancy coffee-making machine) from the shelf in the door. I check the milk level: “There’s enough. I don’t need to top it up”. I close the fridge door, and walk behind the island bench to the coffee machine on the benchtop opposite (against the wall, below a bank of cupboards running the length of the wall), carrying the milk tank in my right hand. With my left hand, I unplug the hot water nozzle from the coffee machine, put it on the bench to the left of the machine and plug the milk tank into the aperture previously occupied by the hot water nozzle. I check that the pointer on the top of the milk tank is turned to the position on the dial showing a medium foam, for a latté, rather than the maximum foam for a cappuccino, or the minimum foam for a flat white. I adjust the nozzle on the milk tank so it will direct 1 This

piece was written to give a sense of the moment-by-moment unfolding of a practice as a performance. Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012, p. 8) distinguish practice as performance from practice as entity. If we think of ‘coffee-making’ in general, or as it is generally done in some place, we are thinking of it as an entity, rather than as a performance. Shove, Pantzar and Watson (p. 15) say these two ways of looking at practices are recursively related. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 S. Kemmis, A Practice Sensibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9539-1_5

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the foamed milk into my coffee cup when I place it in the right location on the tray of the machine. For the moment, that location is occupied by a ceramic mug left there to catch water and drips from the coffee machine. When I turn the coffee machine on by pressing the ‘Power’ button with my left hand, the LED display on the top and front of the machine lights up. The LED display announces that the coffee machine is “Rinsing” and it spurts a few bursts of water into the ceramic cup on the water tray. The LED display then announces “Heating up. Please wait”. Opening the cupboard above the right-hand side of the cooktop, I take a vacuumwalled, clear glass coffee cup from the shelf. I note that two of the cups are absent and recall that they are in the dishwasher. I make a mental note that there are more than enough coffee cups for when I give Narelle a coffee this afternoon. I notice, that, after a few seconds, the coffee machine emits a short humming sound, readying the mechanism to grind beans. Placing my coffee cup on the benchtop, I pick up the airtight plastic sugar container in my left hand. With my right hand, I remove the lid, put it on the benchtop and grasp the handle of the spoon inside. I put two small scoops of sugar into my coffee cup. I return the lid to the sugar container with my right hand, check if it is properly closed and put it back on the bench in its usual position. The coffee machine emits a short stream of water into the ceramic cup that rests on its tray. (It could go directly into the water container in the tray, but that would mean I would have to empty the tray even more frequently than I now do.) The coffee machine is now ready to deliver a coffee. With my right hand, I pick up the ceramic cup, now about a fifth full of hot water, and put it on the bench to the right of the coffee machine. I then pick up my coffee cup, and place it in the right location on the tray under the nozzle of the milk tank and the two coffee nozzles on the machine. Checking the buttons on the display at the top of the coffee machine, I select the ‘Latté’ button and press it. There is no sound, but the words ‘Latté preparation under way’ roll across the display. I take a step back, and lean my lower back on the island bench next to the sink. After a few seconds, the coffee machine emits a whizzing noise as it collects beans from the hopper on the top of the machine, then another whirring sound as it grinds coffee beans, then a clunk as it locks the ground coffee into the coffee-making position in the mechanism. The LED display announces “Latté”. The device at the top of the milk tank now starts up. It pumps milk up into the head of the tank, then heats and foams it. A stream of foamed milk spurts into my coffee cup. I note that there is a little less of it today than some other days and times of the year. The foam varies in quantity depending on the proportion of the fats in the milk, which varies, I understand, depending on the time of year and the quality of feed the dairy cows are getting. After the milk is delivered, the coffee machine cranks into operation. It seems to take a gulp of water, which it pushes at high pressure through the ground coffee, at first just to wet it with water at high temperature, so the beans will more readily release the oils in the coffee. A small amount of this first release, perhaps half a teaspoon, streams from the two coffee nozzles into my cup. Then there is a moment’s pause while the ground coffee in the machine soaks in the water. Then the machine pushes

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water through the beans and out through the nozzles in two continuous streams into my cup. The milk foam floats up as the coffee streams through it. Then the streams of coffee stop. The LED display shows the message ‘Please wait’ while it undertakes the self-cleaning operation which completes the making of my latté. After the LED display shows the message ‘Ready or Clean’. I step forward. I note that the display is also showing ‘Standard coffee taste’. I make a small harrumphing sound and decide not to throw out the newly made latté in my coffee cup. I press the button on the display showing two coffee beans of different sizes, twice, until the display shows ‘Extra-strong taste’. Then I press the button labelled ‘Standard’ to add an extra shot of coffee into my cup, hoping that one standard shot and one extra-strong shot will at least make a strong coffee rather than a standard strength coffee. I step back again to lean on the island bench while the second shot is prepared. The machine whizzes and whirrs again, and soon delivers the second shot into my cup. The display says ‘Please wait’ until the process of returning the machine to its ready state is completed. Then it announces: ‘Ready or Clean’. I step forward, and take my coffee from the tray, and put it on the island bench behind me. I turn back to the coffee machine, pick up the ceramic mug and put it under the milk nozzle and the coffee nozzles. I turn the dial on the milk tank to the ‘Clean position’. Immediately, the LED display says ‘Rinsing’, and the machine starts pushing bursts of hot water through the foaming mechanism on top of the milk tank to clean it, drizzling the water into the ceramic mug. While this operation is underway, I turn back to the island bench, take a teaspoon from the cutlery compartment of the dish rack next to the sink, and stir my coffee. I am extremely embarrassed to admit that, as I make short, back-and-forth sweeps to stir the sugar into the coffee, I count to myself silently: “1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8; 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8; 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8; that’s one”; then “1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8; 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8; 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8; done.” (I have made 48 individual stirring actions with the teaspoon.) More or less at the moment I finish stirring (although sometimes a bit before or after), the machine stops pushing bursts of water into the mug; the head of the milk tank is now thoroughly rinsed. Swinging the faucet handle hard to the left to deliver hot water, I rinse the teaspoon in the sink in the island bench, put it in the cutlery compartment of the dish rack then turn back to the coffee machine. I now unplug the milk tank from the coffee machine (‘Beep!), and re-insert the hot water nozzle into the aperture (Beep!). I press the power button (Beep!), and the display shows ‘Turning off. Please wait.’ I take the milk tank and go to the fridge. I open the door, and put the tank back in the shelf in the door. I close the fridge door. I walk back to the coffee machine. The display shows ‘0:00’ and then goes black. I take the ceramic mug, now three-quarters full of water from the start-up and rinse cycles and pour the contents into the sink. I then give it a quick rinse under running water, and return it to its usual position on the tray of the coffee machine. Turning back to the island bench, I pick up my coffee and walk over to the blue couch.

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II In this vignette, my mind took a journey. It began with an awareness that I wanted a coffee, and, looking at my watch, I consciously confirmed that it was, indeed, about coffee time. From there, I was launched on a mission to get a coffee. From that moment, I was seeing the world from a coffee-making point of view. Other things appear to have been excluded from my attention, and I passed by them without noticing them—or perhaps they were imperceptibly noticed before being dismissed as irrelevant to the immediate task at hand. They retreated into the background. I passed by other objects as I navigated from the blue couch to the refrigerator, but apparently noticed them only enough to avoid bumping into them. I was subliminally aware of walking, but I also know that I did not need to pay attention to any other object in particular, except for the unfolding feedback from my eyes, my mind and my body that I was ‘on course’ for the refrigerator. I did not notice the other food in the refrigerator as I got the milk, but I was aware of checking that there was enough milk in the milk tank. I steered between the island bench and the wall bench with the same sense of proprioceptive feedback that I was ‘on course’ for the coffee machine, and I went to work to attach the milk tank to the machine so I would be able to make a latté. I went through a sequence of other steps to ready the machine to make my desired kind of coffee, and waited for it to heat up and rinse itself ready before moving the ceramic mug on the tray to the side. I reached for my coffee cup from the cupboard, noting that there were enough cups left for later—knowing that I wouldn’t need to wash a cup immediately after using it. I put the sugar into the cup, and at the appropriate moment, I put it in the correct position on the tray to receive the foamed milk and the coffee. I pushed the buttons on the display at the appropriate moments, and noted that the display informed me of what the machine was doing as we proceeded through the steps, with the machine prompting me about possible next actions. When the coffee was made, I put the machine into its rinse mode, and stirred my coffee, with that embarrassing OCD (Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder) counting. As the rinse cycle finished, I turned back to the machine and pressed the power button to put it into its turning off mode, then returned the milk tank to the fridge and emptied the rinse water from the ceramic mug before rinsing it and returning it to the tray. Then I walked back to the blue couch carrying my coffee. Throughout, my attention was on the coffee-making process. I was noticing objects and stages in the process, following the narrative arc of the coffee-making journey. If an Australian Magpie had landed on the pergola outside the back door and begun its carolling to attract my attention, I might have turned from the coffeemaking narrative to detour through the Magpie-feeding narrative before returning to the sequence of steps in the coffee-making process. But neither Magpies nor other things distracted me. Perhaps my embarrassing counting during the stirring of my coffee is a way to sustain my attention on the coffee narrative and to avoid distraction from it. Perhaps I was tacitly aware of other things, but they seemed to be as they should be, and I did not need to leave coffee-making to attend to something else.

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I was fully absorbed in the coffee-making ritual; fully occupied by it. All the other objects around me in the kitchen and the living area were a visual background that required no response, no diversion from the task of making coffee. This is what I meant when I said “I saw the world from a coffee-making point of view”. That is part of what happens in the unfolding of a practice: some objects in the world become salient for the practice, and others are ignored. I see the wall bench as a surface to rest the hot water nozzle on when I remove it from the coffee machine, for putting my cup on while I add the sugar, for putting the ceramic mug on while I am operating the machine. I see the island bench as a place to put my coffee cup when I stir the coffee, and as the housing for the sink when I rinse my teaspoon after stirring the sugar into the coffee, and for rinsing the ceramic mug. My project of making a coffee was guiding me through the activity, giving the variety of my unfolding actions a coherent sense and purpose. My habitus in the coffee-making journey is the ‘feel for the game’ of an experienced maker of coffee using this machine. I draw on relevant cognitive knowledge, relevant skills, and relevant values and emotions, orchestrating them to unfold appropriately in the passage of the whole of the activity, from beginning to end. It strikes me that, although I am subsidiarily aware of other things in my surroundings, they do not grab my attention. There is a knife in the cutlery compartment of the drying rack beside the sink: I barely notice it as I take the teaspoon to stir my coffee. I must certainly have seen the fruit bowl on the bench in some sense, but it did not register at all in my mind as I made the coffee. The fruit bowl must have remained outside the time-space of this activity (Schatzki, 2010), outside its teleology: “The timespace of human activity consists in acting towards ends departing from what motivates at arrays of places and paths anchored at entities” (Schatzki, 2010, pp. 38, 40). My mind moves purposefully among the cultural-discursive arrangements relevant in making the coffee: registering the names of objects, reading the words on the LED display, following the knowledge I long ago internalised from the instructions in the manual that came with the machine, doing what makes sense step by step through the sequence of making a coffee in my kitchen, with this machine, these cups and so on. My body also moves purposefully among the material-economic arrangements relevant in making this coffee, my double-shot latté. It is striking that my body, my feet, my eyes, my hands and my ears are moving appropriately in an unfolding sequence of actions as I work. They go to particular appropriate locations at the proper moments in the tasks. My hands, for example, pass from refrigerator door to milk tank, to the refrigerator door, to the hot water nozzle on the coffee machine, to the bench, to the coffee machine and so on. They are carried as part of the ensemble that is my whole body, but they move through time and space in a smooth, coordinated way, oriented in their course by my mind, my intentions, my knowledge of what I am doing and my proprioceptive awareness of the location of different parts of my body in time and space. And my hands come into contact almost exclusively with things salient to the task, except for odd moments when, for example, I lean my back on the island bench and stand idle but watching while the machine completes delivering

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the latté (and I notice that there is slightly less foamed milk than usual), and while the machine delivers the additional shot of extra-strong coffee into the cup. It turns out that I am also moving among social-political arrangements relevant to the task of making coffee. I am a consumer using the machine purchased for the task, and I purchased the things it needs to operate: coffee beans, water, milk. I use equipment—a cup, a mug, a teaspoon—I have also purchased, in a kitchen designed and installed by our kitchen guy. And I am in the house I purchased, among the things—blue couches, refrigerator—I purchased. And I am in distant, attenuated relationships with the designers of these objects, the manufacturers of these objects, and the miners who dug the raw materials, and the farmers who owned the cows that supplied the milk, and the salesperson from the company that provided the farm’s milking machine, and the sellers of coffee machines, cups, milk and kitchens, to name just a few of the things in the vast constellation of practices that were necessary to compose the conditions of possibility for making this coffee in my kitchen today. Moreover, while the act of making this particular coffee was for my solitary enjoyment, the machine—and the cups, and the blue couches, for example—are parts of the arrangements that support having coffee with friends, having coffee before we start our research meetings in this house, and again when we have a break during the morning. The machine is not just for me, it anticipates guests, visitors, friends, colleagues. And so I affirm that I inhabited this practice of coffee making in mind and body and sociality in an intersubjective space composed of a particular semantic space, a particular physical space-time, and a particular social space, together composing a site in all its particularity and uniqueness. In my practice, I brought to bear a certain habitus, deployed certain knowledge, embodied certain actions, acted in a web of sociality that stretches out into the social and political world around me. I entered the narrative arc of this particular practice; a particular timespace of human activity (Schatzki, 2010), of which Schatzki says, “The timespace of human activity consists in acting towards ends [having a coffee] departing from what motivates [the feeling that I wanted a coffee] at arrays of places [the blue couch, the refrigerator, the coffee machine, the island bench, the faucet and sink] and paths [the walk to the refrigerator, to the coffee machine, and so on] anchored at entities [the refrigerator, milk and milk container, sugar container, coffee machine, spoon, and so on]” (2010, pp. 38, 40). I was a being in the world, being in the world. How much of that world, the whole world, how much of the Cosmos was necessary for me to enact that activity of coffee making? Just a bit? A lot? All of it? In Ulysses, Joyce (1914/1992) puts the character Stephen Dedalus in a history classroom among boys to whom history seemed unreal, like a myth or a story. Musing as he interacts with the boys, Stephen wonders about what is possible: For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop. Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind (p. 25).

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Was it possible for me to make my coffee this morning any other way than the way I made it? It seems as though I could have. Easily. But I did not. And, as we have seen, a great many things were necessary conditions of possibility for my practice of coffee-making this morning. How many of the events and things in the vast unfolding of the Cosmos were necessary to have things happen in the way they did in my practice of coffee making this morning? Do these events and things include the shift from an anaerobic to an aerobic atmosphere on planet Earth with the rise of carbon dioxide-using plants, the extinction of the dinosaurs, the life and death of Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire, the local discovery of the possibility of making a drink from the seeds of the coffee plants indigenous to Yemen some time before the fourteenth century A.D., and Jeannie, who some years ago gave Rozzie and me the vacuum-walled coffee cups (I have replaced some that were broken), and Christine, who, a few weeks back, made me a gift of the particular coffee beans I used this morning? I followed that particular narrative arc; I inhabited that practice of coffee-making in today’s distinctive and particular way. As I did so, in general, I reproduced the pattern of my coffee-making on countless other occasions, but perhaps slightly varied to adapt to the circumstances of today. And that helps us to grasp the mystery of how practices bundle with arrangements, as Schatzki (2012) puts it. My practice of coffeemaking today unfolded amongst conditions of possibility (practice architectures) that emerged from the long trajectories of their own histories to form the unique and particular web of circumstances that existed here, in my kitchen, this morning, as the distinctive site which unfolded in its happening in ways intimately comingled with the happening of my coffee-making practice.

5.2 Practices at Larger Scales I: Meetings as Sites for Reproduction and Transformation A meeting has a duration. But it also has activities that precede it (let’s say, ‘preparation’) and activities that succeed it (let’s say ‘follow-up’—which can also be preparation for the next meeting). The meeting itself has a beginning with greetings, a welcome and probably an introduction. Then there is the body of the meeting, which might encompass a single agendum or a number of agenda. And then there is the close of the meeting, which might include an evaluation of how the meeting went, proposing a next meeting and perhaps working out when it will be held, and some kind of farewell, perhaps a round of goodbyes. Most of us are pretty skilled at all of these parts of the practice of meeting. There are, of course, occasions when we are not so skilled: for example, when you haven’t done the required reading, and attempt to skim it in the meeting, half listening to what others say about it. Or perhaps the meeting runs into a collision of wills, and fragments the communicative space into competing parties or coalitions, and gets mired in uncomfortable interactions which will need repair, if you’re lucky,

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in the form of apologies, requests for forgiveness and promises to do better. (If you’re not lucky: unresolved arguments, contested actions, galvanised emotions and fragmented positions that can calcify into factions.) Each of the parts of a meeting—sub-practices that together compose the practice of meeting—has its own familiar sayings, doings and relatings. In the opening stages, people will welcome and be welcomed (sayings), perhaps accompanied by open gestures (doings) intended to signify inclusion (relatings). These sayings, doings and relatings hang together in a project for the meeting—perhaps with the ideal in mind of launching the participants into an intersubjective communicative space that participants hope will be realised in communicative action (the pursuit of intersubjective agreement about the language being used, mutual understanding of each other’s points of view, and unforced consensus about what to do in a particular practical situation; Habermas, 1987; Kemmis & McTaggart, 2005; Kemmis, McTaggart, & Nixon, 2014). Each of us comes to a meeting with our own unique background, history and experiences of meetings, however, and our own ways of contributing to the common cause of the meeting—some more constructive and some (intentionally or otherwise) more destructive. We don’t all practise ‘meeting’ in the same way. But we are all used to that as well. We may expect any particular meeting to unfold in ways that fit our expectations, but we are also used to the fact that things sometimes unfold in ways that may surprise or even shock us. We expect things to unravel sometimes, when topics are contentious, and we expect that various kinds of (more or less explicit) apologies, forgiveness and promises may be needed to repair the damage done when conflict erupts. We know that meetings can be lumpy and bumpy as well as smooth, and that they can end in disagreement and schisms as well as agreements and harmony. So we are prepared to adjust our practice in many ways, as any particular meeting unfolds. In the particular site that is this meeting, we may support or challenge or change the ideas in play, the activities underway, or the way relationships are being constructed and contested as the discussion unfolds, and as possible consequences are explored and foreseen or anticipated. Even sitting back as a silent observer is a form of participation in the meeting that is taken into account by the other participants as they engage in it. The meeting is an intersubjective space in which everyone is a participant—in which the only way not to be a participant is to leave (or not to attend). The meeting is conducted in a discourse appropriate to meetings, and appropriate to discussions of the topic of the meeting. It is conducted in activities and work familiar to the practice of meeting, and related to the activities and work relevant to the topic of the meeting. It is conducted in ways of relating to others in the meeting, and relatings relevant to the topic being discussed. But the world of the meeting is not just a world internal to itself, a world entirely of its own. The sayings, doings and relatings within the meeting invoke discourses, work and relationships in the world beyond the meeting. What happens within the meeting orients us in ways that may reproduce or transform the ways we think and talk, act and relate to others and the world beyond the meeting.

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The Pedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP) Research Network, of which I am a member, has different kinds of meetings that are occasions for the reproduction and transformation of practices over time—in our cases, the practices that secure and extend PEP in space and time. In a given year, I might attend one 4-or 5-day PEP International meeting (in person), one 2-day PEP Australia meeting (in person), five or six 1-day PEP CSU meetings (in person), six 60–90 min PEP International Research Theme Group meetings (one in person, and five via some videoconferencing platform), six or more 60–90 min PEP International Research Questions Book group meetings (one in person and five via video) and six 60-90 min meetings of the Steering Group for the book (one in person and five via video). I might attend six 90-min PEP CSU Reading Group meetings (in person), and ten or more 60–90 min PATChat meetings (some in person, some via video) of various groups in various places. That’s about 131 h in meetings a year, for an average of about two and a half hours a week! And of course, this leaves aside the time spent preparing for the meetings, doing assigned tasks afterward, and all the rest. In all of these meetings, various elements of the overall PEP Research Program are being enacted and realised, and in all of them, the various discourses, activities and relationships of PEP work and life are being reproduced and transformed through being used. And not just for me: also, to a greater or lesser extent, for all the other participants in the meetings. And so our autobiographies become unique enactments and realisations of the overall history of PEP, and no one participant carries the whole history of PEP in their own experience. PEP has escaped the clutches of its progenitors, and has become a network, a web, a constellation of practices. And it is not just meetings. Between meetings, we conduct research, we do fieldwork and analyse evidence, we draft reports and write articles, chapters, books. Such individual work is indispensable to PEP, but none of us has a monopoly on it. And the work we do as PEP researchers takes us out into the field in places like schools and colleges and universities and early childhood education and care settings, and into our own and others’ workplaces. Our reading and conversations draw us out into the communities of our disciplines, our professions, our students and the geographical communities in which we live and work. We take ‘PEP’ out into those settings, and we bring discourses and data and relationships from those settings back into our PEP work, individually and collectively, reproducing and transforming PEP so PEP itself transforms and evolves even as it persists and continues in more and less established, more and less orthodox ways of ‘doing PEP’. Like everyone else, I have missed PEP meetings of one kind and another. I have missed out on some of the things that happened there, and afterward I am anxious to hear from people who did attend what happened and how things went. Perhaps I was also missed at some of those meetings: things didn’t quite unfold as people expected because I wasn’t there. It is not just me: the same is true for all of us, especially the ‘old hands’. We do not just miss PEP but many of us feel we have missed out when we weren’t there. It is a big thing in PEP: one is not a ‘member’ of a club; one is a willing, committed participant in a work program: the Research Program of PEP. Continuing, committed participation is living evidence that one is

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part of the PEP community, a living contributor to the work and the net-work. We are seen and see each other at the meetings, in the activities. We renew and revitalise the network through our participation, along with the solidarity we feel towards one another, the friendships, the trust. And when people leave, there is a sense of loss, a sense of absence—as with some of our colleagues who have retired and allowed themselves a distance from the day-to-day, month-by-month, yearly cycles by which PEP renews itself. Not to mention the grief that shuddered through the network when Rozzie died.2 We PEP people are inhabitants of a particular kind of ecology, with our own particular kinds of practices that not only contribute to our own survival in our own sites, and in the transnational work of PEP, but also contribute to the survival of the ecology itself. Work in Wagga Wagga contributes to work in Tromsø, Trondheim, Gothenburg, Borås, Vaasa, Jyväskylä, Leiden, Bogotá, Port of Spain, Southport, Coolangatta, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, and work in those places contributes to work in Wagga Wagga. These reciprocities play out across the network, and in subgroups within the network who have worked together over years, sometimes more than a decade. We contribute actively to the research conferences and publications of various research associations; they also contribute to our survival, when we meet in PEP International meetings that we hold before or after these international conferences, in order to broadcast our findings through the conferences and their publications and websites. Our universities are also part of the PEP ecology; they support us in our PEP research, and we contribute to their survival through our research productivity. Our homes and families are sites where we write and meet, and sometimes we also host visiting local or international PEP colleagues. As we travel for PEP meetings, we contribute to the turnover of airlines, hotels and restaurants in the locations where we meet, as they contribute by carrying, accommodating and feeding us. So our practices reproduce and transform not only our practices themselves, but also the ecologies we inhabit, locally and globally. Our meetings renew our practice memories of PEP, the differentiated sayings, doings and relatings of PEP, and the various projects we undertake through PEP. They renew our capacities to participate in PEP, and our capacities to enact and develop and extend its Research Program, not only by reproducing past practices, but also by transforming them to meet the needs of new and emergent circumstances, situations and possibilities. And so PEP is, for us, the kind of thing that German scholar Haug called “a collective work of memory”.3 PEP is something that exists as an object of

2 My wife Roslin Brennan Kemmis died in July 2015, having been a part of PEP from its beginning. 3 Haug

(1907) used the term to describe female sexualisation—how girls and young women were shaped by their participation in family and community life to understand themselves as sexual beings. The group of young women Haug worked with in this study reported their experiences of such moments in their lives as ‘the first kiss’ or ‘the first bra’, and were surprised to discover how such experiences, that had seemed intimate and unique to their own experience, were in fact common. Haug argues that autobiographical methods make their subjects the heroes and victims in their own lives; the approach of ‘memory work’ shows how individuals’ experiences are often part of a social world, and social circumstances, that can affect people in broadly similar ways.

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our collective thought, although each of us remembers it differently, from our own experiences and points of view. In this sense, PEP is a collective memory. This quality of being different things to different people, while also being an object in common for us, is one of the most powerful sources of the generativity and emergence of PEP and the practices that constitute it. It is what makes it possible for our practices to colonise new sites, to exploit emergent opportunities, to respond to challenges and crises, and, most importantly, to evolve. It reminds us that, even while we bring our current projects to completion, we must also be alert to new possibilities for new projects, and for new directions to replace existing ones in the PEP Research Program. We are at such a point at the moment. As we bring to completion the book summarising our findings on the five research questions that have oriented PEP since its beginnings, we recognise that there may be new ways to construct the questions for the years ahead, and perhaps a need to modify or move on from one or more of the existing questions in favour of new questions, new possibilities. Reviewing our past to summarise and synthesise some of our achievements is not an innocent activity; it invites us to think critically and to think otherwise. It is an end of a beginning that is also the beginning of an end. It is not just a moment of celebration as a prelude to perseveration; it is a moment that invites transformation and evolution. It could even be, though I fervently hope it is not, a moment that signals a spiral into termination. And if it is not to be that, then it must be a moment of renewal; a new Spring heralding a new Summer—and Autumns and Winters yet to come. Our next PEP International meeting is a month or so before the Southern Summer solstice; the northern Winter solstice: the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end? The practice of meeting runs through the PEP network—and our academic work in our own universities. To some extent, each meeting reproduces our practices of meeting (different in Sweden, Finland and Australia, for example). But these meetings also reproduce the work of PEP: research, writing, presenting papers at conferences, publishing our findings… This happens not just locally, for each of us who participate in the meetings, but also collectively, in ways that reproduce the network, and sometimes in ways that transform it. So the network appears to have a life of its own. But it only appears so. It is reproduced and transformed through the interconnected actions and practices of the people who participate in it, all acting in ways that are oriented by a consciousness of their wider or narrower connections with the actions and practices of others who are also participating in meetings, also participating in research projects, also participating in the life of the network as a whole. In this, we may be like the bees in the hive, the termites in the termite mound.4

4 For

an intriguing argument that the different kinds and roles of individual termites in a termite mound fit together to carry out the functions––like eating, defence, sexual reproduction—of other animals, see the wonderfully engaging The Soul of the White Ant by Eugène Marais (1937/2009).

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5.3 Practices at Larger Scales II: Local Actions Constituting a National and International Research Network Every history is a particular history, dealing with some particular topic or case which is usually unique, although different historians frequently produce competing historical accounts of similar events. Thus, for example, Peter Brown’s (1971/2014) The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150–750 disputes the account most famously advanced in Edward Gibbon’s six volume (1776–1788) The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon saw the Roman Empire collapsing under the weight of its own greatness, weakened from within by its rulers’ tastes for luxury and by growing Christian pacifism, and insufficiently vigorous to repel the advances of barbarian invaders, for example, the Franks in the late 300s AD, who eventually settled in, and gave their name to, France; the Visigoths in 378 and 410 AD; and the Vandals in 455, who went on to settle in Andalusia, giving their name to that region of Spain. As the barbarians swept through the Empire, and as the medieval period advanced, the institutions of the Roman Empire were increasingly unable to sustain the knowledge and virtues that Rome had inherited from Greek antiquity. The French historian Jacques Le Goff, in his (1964/2011) Medieval Civilisation: 400–1500 writes vividly (for example, Chapter Five, ‘Genesis’) of the ignorance that followed the collapse of the philosophical schools of antiquity that had survived in Roman Europe for the first five centuries after Christ, but were eventually brought under the control of the Christian Church by Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, in 529 AD, effectively wiping them out. Gibbon’s view of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and Le Goff’s picture of life in the fifth to the tenth centuries AD, portray a Europe bereft of knowledge, of many kinds of high-level technical skills, and of forms of imperial organisation capable of maintaining an advanced and increasingly urbanised civilisation. Peter Brown’s history of late antiquity (150–750 AD), by contrast, shows a larger picture: an increasingly unequal tension between the Latin Church in the West, centred in Rome, and the Greek Church in the East, centred in Byzantium/Constantinople. While knowledge from Greek antiquity was lost in Europe (as described by Gibbon and Le Goff), that knowledge nevertheless survived and thrived in Asia Minor, at first under the Christian Emperors in Byzantium/Constantinople, and then, after the fall of Christian Constantinople to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1453, in the world of Islamic scholarship, reaching, for example, into Persia. In fact, it was that Islamic scholarship that eventually ‘returned’ knowledge from Greek antiquity to Europe, for example in the lost texts of Aristotle made available through the twelfth-century commentaries of Ibn Rushd, born in Moorish Cordoba in Andalusia, and known to the West as Averroes. The famed thirteenth-century Dominican scholar Thomas Aquinas, first studied Aristotle through Averroes, and later tried to square Aristotelian philosophy with the philosophy of Plato that had been preserved in Christian texts (Kemmis & Edwards-Groves, 2017, pp. 52–53). I have taken you on this tour of fun facts about late antiquity only to establish that each history attempts to account for some unique case, although this particular

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case may have resonances with other cases or events. In what follows, I discuss the case of our Pedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP) research network. It has its own history or histories, and they may or may not be like the histories of other research networks. Later, I will suggest that this network may have resonances with other kinds of networks–for example, one kind of international network described by Nicolini (2017). Since 2008, our 4- or 5-day PEP International meetings have been held every year, usually alternating between Europe and Australia, and frequently held before an international educational research conference, so we can go on to the conference to present the emerging findings of our current work, much of which is later published in books or articles. Usually in parallel with, or overlapping, these PEP International meetings, we hold a Doctoral School under the topic Researching Professional Practice for candidates wanting to do research on some aspect of professional practice (Rönnerman & Kemmis, 2016). The candidates share their research ideas, and read the work of several PEP researchers working on research into professional practice, then meet and discuss the work with the authors. The doctoral schools have been one formal way that novices to research on professional practice have become PEP researchers; the PATChat (Practice Architectures Chat) meetings I hold with newcomers to the theory are another, more informal pathway into the PEP network. Since 2016, we have held 2-day PEP Australia meetings, getting together our Australian PEP researchers from Charles Sturt University (CSU), Griffith University, the University of Queensland, Southern Cross University and Monash University. Over 10 years, PEP CSU has spawned a diaspora, as doctoral candidates and former CSU Wagga Wagga staff have taken up positions in these Australian universities, as well as universities in Colombia, the Caribbean and Sweden. In a jigsaw of smaller groups of five–ten researchers, PEP International researchers work together on transnational research collaborations on various topics and themes related to the five core research questions that have guided PEP since 2007. We collect data in our different national contexts, and identify similarities and differences that play out in our different national and local contexts. Since 2016, about 25 PEP International researchers have also been working in cross-national teams reviewing the findings of the corpus of work produced by PEP researchers, to be summarised and synthesised in chapters for a book on the five research questions of PEP. Every one of the meetings of these transnational research groups, held at various intervals through every year, usually via Skype or Zoom or Adobe Connect, refreshes our shared discourses, renews our joint research work intersecting across different national contexts, and revitalises our friendships and relationships with one another within the shared solidarity of the network as a whole—as does every PEP International and national PEP or local PEP meeting. Many of these research projects and resulting publications use action research; many use the theory of practice architectures. The theory of practice architectures has grown and developed through this fertile and dynamic international exchange.

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The PATChat meetings are an important liminal space for people new to the theory: a safe place to ask beginners’ questions, and for legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) in PEP. Like the doctoral school, the PATChat meetings are a practice architecture that introduces people to the intersubjective space of practice theorising, and research on professional practice, often but not only in education (Mahon, Francisco, & Lloyd, 2018). They are also an important part of the generational sensibility of PEP. Some PEP researchers have retired, and no longer actively participate in the life of the network. (I have retired, but seem too addicted to participation to be able to leave.) And new researchers come into PEP, some through being doctoral candidates supervised by PEP members, some through the doctoral schools, or, increasingly, through being supervised by others who are interested in the theory, in other universities. And some are people like Shirley, Sue, Lori and Linda, who come across the theory through our publications and other networks. In general, participants in PEP (especially established ones) have a strong sense of PEP needing to be conscious about its succession planning: we want to welcome novice and new researchers, to support early and mid-career researchers as their work develops and matures, and we want to ensure that established researchers make an essential human and social contribution to our research field by taking their turn to be stewards of the field, and mentors and supporters of rising generations of researchers. Our work also spreads through the hundreds of PEP publications and publications about the theory of practice architectures. It is reflected back to us in citations: selfcitations, citations by our PEP colleagues, and citations by others who hear about our work in the literature or at conferences or in other ways. And it grows to include others in our research community, and to help us to be included in other research communities with whom we interact and communicate. Nicolini (2017) writes about the study by Jarzabkowski et al. (2015) of global reinsurance markets, describing these markets in terms of ‘nested relationality’. Of the practices of the reinsurers in this market, he writes each of these practices constitutes the context for each other – first locally and later translocally. The complex web of relationality … is sustained through practitioners’ membership of the same community of practice and utilisation of specific … technologies [in our case, like the theory of practice architectures; SK]… More important, maintenance of the web also depends on the organising effect afforded by (1) collective sharing … of the same set of practical understandings, that is, the know-hows that govern ordinary activities [in the case of PEP, in our collaborative research; SK] …; (2) the circulation of the same general understandings of how the network of relationships works, why and what is legitimate and acceptable within this particular regime of practice; and (3) the specific temporalities inscribed in and reproduced by the collective practice – e.g. periodical renewal dates punctuating the process which provide specific time horizons for the different activities and constitute an object towards the gamut of activities converge and precipitate [in the case of PEP, including annual meetings, regular local meetings, conferences, and deadlines for the production of various kinds of research publications; SK] (Nicolini, 2017, p. 106).

In the case of the global reinsurance markets, organised internationally around five major hubs, these are the features that Nicolini identifies to show that the market is constituted as a more or less unified entity—through these practices, and the particular features he identifies in this quotation.

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As my interpolations into the quotation above from Nicolini suggest, PEP is also constituted through practices as this kind of ‘web of relationality’. Participants in the network are widely distributed across the globe, and not only travel to meet faceto-face but also communicate by virtual means (e.g. email, videoconferencing) to maintain the research work of the network as a more or less continuous, coherent and evolving whole. But if you take your eyes off the participants for a moment, however, and watch the practices: you can see us discoursing, disagreeing, converging, exchanging, researching in the field, analysing at our desks and in research teams, producing publications, meeting, collaborating, caring, repairing—weaving the web of relationality of which we embodied persons are some of the ‘stuff’ that is in play, along with the words we exchange, translating across languages, as interlocutors, and along with the patterns, generational and solidary, that are formed as we meet one another as social beings—as friends and collaborators for whom relational trust is a central virtue. This is the intersubjective space we create and inhabit; this is the space where PEP happens. These are the reasons for being in, and the raison d’être of, the network. To cite Nicolini (2017, p. 104) again: When practices happen, they become part of the happening: they take up available doings, sayings and relatings; they modify them; and they leave behind traces that in turn become part of the practice architecture of future activities. Activities and the architectures within which they unfold are therefore shaped by other practices and their architectures, and in turn shape them. Practices thus ‘feed upon each other’ (Kemmis et al., 2014: 47) and in so doing constitute ecologies understood as ‘distinctive interconnected webs of human social activities that are mutually necessary to order and sustain a practice as a practice of a particular kind and complexity (for example, a progressive educational practice)’ (Kemmis & Mutton, 2012: 15).

PEP is such an ecology; such a ‘distinctive interconnected web… of human social activity’. Its various practices, including such practices as of researching, meeting, travelling, discussing, debating, writing, and publishing, compose PEP as a living, growing, evolving entity, that has gradually taken new shapes unimagined at the time of its origin in meetings in Amsterdam and Gothenburg in 2005. For the time being at least, that evolution continues. PEP is a unique research network, with its own distinctive practices of collaborative researching (with their own particular foci, for example), and encompassing a diversity of local practices that nevertheless contribute to a more-or-less coherent practice in its international meetings, researching, and publishing. No doubt it also has resonances with other kinds of local, national, and international research networks and associations that also conduct meetings, research and publish through their own practices. In this account, I have tried to show how PEP is a network composed in and of its own distinctive kinds of practices, many of which have to do with advancing the development of the theory of practice architectures.

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5.4 Practices and Cycles: Recruitment, Entanglement, Spirals Practices appear to have a cyclic character. They begin, continue, and end. When I made my coffee, I got up from the blue couch, went through various steps to make the coffee, and I returned to the blue couch. But I was not in the same place I left to make the coffee; I was in a new place—I was in a different moment in time, and the place now included a cup of coffee. In the endless present, I had emerged from that particular past in which the coffee was made. Or, as Heraclitus put it: ‘We never step twice in the same river’5 . The PATChat (Practice Architectures Theory Chat) meetings also have the appearance of cycles, with beginnings, middles and endings, as do the meetings of the PEP (Pedagogy, Education and Praxis) International Research Network and its subsidiary meetings dispersed through the annual cycle. But they, too, end in places that are at some distance from their beginnings. In fact, we stopped that Wagga Wagga PEP CSU (Charles Sturt University) PATChat group because members felt that they could now converse freely in other settings using the specialist discourse of the theory. As suggested in Sect. 4.6, ‘Practices and Learning II: Coming to Know How to Go on (Inhabiting practices)’, the people who had been novices to the theory of practice architectures, working with it but also learning by legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991), had now learned enough about how to go on in using the theory that they could now continue their learning by participating in other settings where other ‘old hands’ were using the theory in their research. But other PATChat groups continue, presumably with their own unique durations and endings to come. In such PEP meetings, we move forward in time, and in our learning, and in our collaboration, accumulating knowledge and skills and values and friendships, and producing new work that reproduces some of our ideas while also taking them into new territories, and sometimes producing fresh insights and new knowledge, sometimes of a kind that was quite unanticipated—as, for example, when we stumbled upon the idea of ecologies of practices after observing that practices are sometimes dependent on, or interdependent with, other practices (as in, for example, Kemmis & Mutton, 2012), or when Christine Edwards-Groves and Christina Davidson (2017) used the theory of practice architectures along with conversation analysis to produce new insights into dialogic pedagogies in literacy classrooms in primary schools. In ‘Little Gidding’, T.S. Eliot (1959, p. 49) writes We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

The end Eliot is alluding to here is an origin, the source of the river of life, the source of Creation. Our end, he suggests, is a return to our origins. In ‘Little Gidding’, 5 Finkelberg

(2017, pp. 154–155) cites Plato, Aristotle and Plutarch as sources for this quotation from Heraclitus (b. Ephesus 541 BC, d. 484 BC).

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this was a Christian end, a return to the Garden of Eden before the apple tree and the snake, a return, one imagines, to the presence of God. From my atheistic point of view, my end will be somehow similar, but in my case, it will be a return to the stuff of which the Cosmos is made. The stuff of my body will continue to participate in the Cosmos, but no longer in (my) human form. Most of the practices my colleagues and I study have more mundane beginnings and endings. The cycles by which practices appear to be reproduced are ‘cycles’ only when seen from a two-dimensional perspective, in which beginning and ending only appear to coincide. Seen in three dimensions, practices follow the trajectory of spirals, with beginnings and endings that stretch back and forward in time. It seemed to me that I followed my usual routine to make my coffee, and so I did, but this coffee was the first ever made in today’s unfurling history, in this house, with the coffee machine at this stage in its long march towards breakdown, and today’s milk, still fresh though packed some days ago. The coffee machine, the cup, the spoon, the beans, the water, the milk and I are all hurtling through time towards our ends, although, for the coffee-making ritual, we come together once again as old friends in a familiar dance. And this dance gives the illusion of solidity. We are orchestrated in time as objects familiarly acting and acted upon, stepping into, occupying, and stepping out of our proper places in relation to one another. Reliable as ever, we are there when needed. But once they step out of that practice, that activity time-space (Schatzki, 2010, pp. 38, 40), some of those objects, like a teaspoon in a kitchen drawer, appear to lie resting, dormant and unnoticed, until needed again, though it also seems to me that they recede from my mind towards a vanishing point at which they could depart even from my memory. And I, too, am recruited into practices like the making of that coffee, as Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012, pp. 66–69) say. In a similar way, the coffee machine is recruited; it waits for a person with the required literacy to ‘read’ and use it. And the spoon waits for someone to hold it by the handle, and for a liquid to stir. In the unfolding enactment of the practice of making coffee, those objects and I are brought together, entangled (Hodder, 2012). And when I make us both coffees, you are also recruited into a coffee ritual, and into the life of research and collegiality and friendship practised in the conversations that unwind among these blue couches. But we continue to comprehend those spiralling practices as cycles, as if they had their own definite beginnings, durations, and endings. We compress time. We see ourselves reproducing them even as we vary them. I step out of making the coffee to feed the Australian Magpie on the pergola by the back door, then, effortlessly, step back into the coffee making. And the cycle varies in its course: this time Christine asks for two standard shots of coffee in her cup rather than the long black I used to make her. Sometimes, I use ground decaffeinated coffee to make Jane a decaffeinated latté; it involves an elaborate diversion, deploying the special scoop, the special package of decaffeinated coffee, and the special ground-coffee aperture on the top of the coffee machine.

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So, in their actual happening-ness (Schatzki, 2005), their unfurling in the ontology of this site (Schatzki, 2002, 2003), the cycles are not quite cycles, even when they appear identical in the abstraction ‘beginning, middle, end’. In reality, reproduction always occurs with variations, sometimes begetting transformations—new ways of doing things in addition to, or instead of, the way we did things before. The cycles unfold in wandering, wayward spirals that sometimes spawn new ways of doing things, changed practices, new practices.

5.5 Vast Ecologies of Practices: The Melbourne Cup Today is the first Tuesday in November. In the US, it is an election day, as it is every couple of years. Here in Australia, the first Tuesday in November is Melbourne Cup Day, the day of “the race that stops a nation”. First run in 1861, it is a long race, 3,200 m, for Thoroughbreds, 3-year-olds and over. It is a handicap race. The record time, by Kingston Rule in 1990, is a fraction over 3 min and 16 s. Practice theory is no stranger to racehorses and racecourses. Schatzki’s (2010) The Timespace of Human Activity devotes many pages to observations about the practice landscapes of the horse farms around Lexington, Kentucky, “the thoroughbred capital of the world”6 . Today, thousands will go to Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne to watch the racing, to celebrate a day out, to see and be seen. It is a state holiday in Victoria; not in other states, but millions of Australians will stop work at 3.00 p.m. Australian Eastern Summer Time (if not at 2.00 p.m.) to cluster around a television screen and watch the race. In most workplaces, people will organise ‘sweeps’, paying $1 or $2 in exchange for the name of a horse drawn randomly from a hat, and hoping to win $10 or $20 if they have the winning horse. Of course, millions more will place bets on the race, at Flemington, or betting in betting shops or online. Usually, the bookies make money on the Cup, but once in a few decades, a rank outsider wins, and there are massive payouts to delighted bettors. The horses have been prepared for the race over months and years. This year, there are horses from Germany, Great Britain, France, Ireland, Japan and New Zealand, as well as Australia. Owners, trainers, jockeys, strappers, saddlers, smiths, veterinarians and others have been thinking race strategy, preparing for the horses’ condition to peak on the great day, doing track work every morning, grooming… They have been worrying about diet, sore pasterns, fatigue, harness, equipment, horse transports… Many owners and trainers have horses they hoped to enter, but could not get a start. The whole industry has been galvanised, and not just in Australia. Then there are the other nine races on the card for today. All of those horses and associates have been

6 My thanks to Ted Schatzki for this soubriquet for Lexington, and for saving me from the egregious

error of naming Lexington as the home of the Kentucky Derby (it is in fact run in Louisville, Kentucky).

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training, primping and pampering, too, amongst all of those practices of breeding, feeding, grooming, auctioning, buying, training, riding, transporting, racing… Today is the day of the big race, but it is the second day of the Spring Carnival, after last Saturday’s Victoria Derby Day. And there is racing next Thursday, Oaks Day, and Saturday, Seppelt Wines Stakes Day, too. Melbourne Cup Day is the people’s day, though—it is the public holiday. So thousands of people go to Flemington dressed in their finest. For some, the event is one of the most important High Fashion days of the year. Some compete in ‘Fashions on the Field’ and hope to be selected for a best-dressed award. Some women have been planning their outfit for months, and, having decided on the frock, they have arranged for a matching hat to be created. They have shopped in the months ahead, visited fashion houses, gone for fittings, briefed their milliners… Even the least committed have chosen a special outfit for the day—usually a new one. Seamstresses, milliners, tailors, textile merchants have all been busy for months plying their trades, practising their specialisms, for the great Reveal on race day. Another constellation of practices rears into view: cloth-making, selling, buying, pattern-making, dress-making, transporting, purchasing, dressing, wearing… The ground staff at Flemington have been preparing the track for racing, of course, but the whole spectacle at Flemington is famous. The gardens have been designed and planted and pruned with care to ensure that the thousands of rose bushes will be in full bloom for the Spring Carnival, and especially Melbourne Cup Day, when images from Flemington will be broadcast around Australia and around the globe. Yet another constellation of practices appears: building the track, maintaining it, mowing, aerating, designing, planting, feeding, gardening, pruning, spraying, weeding… Thousands of caterers are supplying food at restaurants at Flemington Racecourse, and also in dozens of company and private marquees. Menus have been suggested, revised, approved. Food has been ordered, prepared, offered to guests, eaten, binned. Hundreds of wait staff have been employed, and steer cautiously among the excited crowds in dozens of venues. Bartenders and wait staff are serving thousands of litres of beer, champagne, other wines, soft drinks… And, behind the scenes, fish have been caught and cleaned, steers slaughtered, cheeses made, whisky distilled, water bottled, bread baked. Farmers, graziers, fishers, apiarists, horticulturalists and oenologists have laboured to grow the produce from which these tonnes of food and drinks have been prepared. More practices: breeding, feeding, maintaining, harvesting, selling, slaughtering, butchering, purchasing, preparing, cooking, selling, serving… Broadcast teams have come from radio, television, online services. They have set up cameras, mikes, lighting… They have prepared for calling the races, following the horses, following the fashion, following the police and security… And all of their associated practices… Police have been directing traffic, parking attendants have been squeezing cars into the limited parking. Thousands of people have come to Flemington on public transport: trains, buses, trams. They are guided along paths and across roads, streaming into the Racecourse, and finding the bases from which they will make their forays out to watch the races, view the fashion, find food and drinks, and watch the world go by. Still more practices…

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And then, all at once, while some watch the race at Flemington Racecourse, others in homes and offices and bars and clubs around Australia, as well as around the world in embassies, offices, labs, homes and bars, smaller crowds gather to watch the event on television, and to assert our shared Australian-ness in the annual ritual of watching a horse-race that will be over in about three and a half minutes. Melbourne Cup Day reins in vast constellations of practices, and harnesses them together in a vast web that stretches around the world, and through weeks and months and years of preparation. Millions of people play parts in preparing for it, and millions directly participate in it. Vast sums of money are spent on horses, fashion, food, transport, marquees, staff… As I sit here in my study, I endeavour to imagine the innumerable practices that have articulated with one another to produce this crescendo. And then I recognise that innumerable other practices were enacted with the aim, thwarted, of bringing a horse to the race, or a person, or a frock, or a tray of canapés, or a broadcast unit, or a pair of secateurs. Many of those practices—like the riding of the jockeys on the horses that didn’t win prior races—also played crucial parts in bringing the great day to fruition. Innumerable people were recruited to this constellation of practices by their intention to participate in the event by contributing their knowledge and skills and commitments to the practices that make their part in the event possible. And each of those practices had its own practice architectures enabling and constraining it; some supported and others thwarted those practices, permitting or preventing those recruits’ participation. The articulation needed for the event to happen is intricate and vast; it happens in local sites that reach out, connect, and spread to accomplish its immense web. We have described the interdependence of practices in terms of ecologies of practices (Kemmis et al., 2014), in which the accomplishments of one practice are necessary for the accomplishment of another practice. Someone has to provide the feathers the milliners need to make their feathered hats, for example, then someone else has to buy the hat to match the outfit to wear on the great day. It is a marvel to think of salmon migrating thousands of kilometres from high in the freshwater streams of their birth, where they may stay for a year, out into the saltwater oceans where they hunt and feed and grow, and then, between eighteen months and eight years later (depending on the species), using the Earth’s magnetic field as a compass, they return to their natal river, identifying it by its distinctive smell, follow it upstream, leaping through cascades, escaping bears, to mate in their natal streams, spawn, and die, producing a new generation of salmon to head downriver to the oceans, and repeat the cycle. How amazing is evolution, and ecology, to have brought into being and to reproduce and coordinate this vast migration. I marvel as much, at the vast, diffuse, amazingly diverse array of practices that are orchestrated in relation to one another to produce the horses and the jockeys and the crowd at Flemington Racecourse for the running of the Melbourne Cup. To produce it, a huge array of practices must be orchestrated and coordinated to culminate in the event that unfolds each first Tuesday in November, at Flemington. And after it flames forth in all its glory, like a huge collective exhalation of breath, the participants disperse to where they came from, many renewed in the intention to do it all again next year.

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Understanding how such an event orchestrates itself, recruiting thousands, millions, of participants who make it possible through such a vast array of diverse and inter-articulated practices, helps us better to understand other events that happen at large and global scales, like wars, foreign relations, the operation of markets, air travel, and the transport and agriculture that produce the carbon emissions that have caused global warming and climate change. And the Melbourne Cup comes to a climax at 3.00 p.m. on the first Tuesday in November. It’s 2.10 p.m. now: time for me to leave the computer, go through to the living room, turn on the television, settle in on one of the blue couches, and––alone in body, but at one with Australia in spirit—watch the broadcast leading up to the great race, and then the race itself. See you later!

5.5.1 Postscript It turned out that the British horse Cross Counter, carrying 51 kg, won the Cup in 3 min 21.17 s from Marmelo, also British, carrying 55 kg, a length behind, and the British Prince of Arran, carrying 53 kg, three lengths behind. The next horse, Finche (54 kg) was also British; the fifth, from Ireland, was Rostopovich (51 kg), before the leading Australian horse Youngstar (51 kg), placed sixth. Cross Counter is owned by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, and ruler of the Emirate of Dubai. Cross Counter was trained by Charlie Appleby of the Godolphin stable at Moulton Paddocks stable in Newmarket, Suffolk; and was ridden by jockey Kerrin McEvoy (to give him his third Melbourne Cup-winning ride). After fears that the track would be too hard for some horses a couple of days ago, a deluge of rain came to Melbourne from the west early this morning, so the track was Soft 6. The deluge caused chaos and delays on public transport in the morning, and fears for the safety of horses and riders in the first races of the day. By the time for Race Seven, the Lexus Melbourne Cup, though, the track had drained, the sun shone gloriously, and some found the afternoon disagreeably warm.

References Brown, P. (1971/2014). The world of late antiquity: AD 150–750, with an introduction by C. Kelly. London: The Folio Society. Edwards-Groves, C., & Davidson, C. (2017). Becoming a meaning maker: Talk and interaction in the dialogic classroom. Sydney: Primary English Teachers’ Association. Eliot, T. S. (1959). ‘Little Gidding’. In Four Quartets. London: Faber & Faber. Finkelberg, A. (2017). Heraclitus and Thales’ conceptual scheme: A historical study. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill. Gibbon, E. (1776–1788/1993–1994). In H. Trevor-Roper (Ed.), The decline and fall of the Roman Empire (six. vols.). New York: Everyman’s Library.

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Habermas, J. (1987). Theory of communicative action, volume II: Lifeworld and system: A critique of functionalist reason (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Boston: Beacon. Haug, F. (1987). Female sexualisation: A collective work of memory (E. Carter, Trans.). London: Verso. Hodder, I. (2012). Entangled: An archaeology of the relationships between humans and things. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley. Jarzabkowski, P., Bednarek, R., & Spee, E. (2015). Making a market for acts of god. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joyce, J. (1914/1992). Ulysses. New York: Random House. Kemmis, S., & Edwards-Groves, C. (2017). Understanding education: History, politics and practice. Singapore: Springer. Kemmis, S. & McTaggart, R. (2005) (3rd Ed.). Participatory action research: Communicative action and the public sphere (Chapter 23). In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 559–604). Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE. Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R., & Nixon, R. (2014a). The action research planner: Doing critical participatory action research. Singapore: Springer. Kemmis, S., & Mutton, R. (2012). Education for sustainability (EfS): Practice and practice architectures. Environmental Education Research, 18(2), 187–207. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622. 2011.596929. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014b). Changing practices, changing education. Singapore: Springer. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Le Goff, J. (1964/2011). Medieval civilisation: 400–1500. London: The Folio Society. Mahon, K., Francisco, S. & Lloyd, A. (2018). Practice architectures and being stirred into the practices of a research group (Chapter 12). In C. Edwards-Groves, P. Grootenboer & J. Wilkinson (Eds.), Education in an era of schooling: Critical perspectives of educational practice and action research: A Festschrift for Stephen Kemmis (pp. 167–182). Singapore: Springer. Nicolini, D. (2017) Is small the only beautiful? Making sense of ‘large phenomena’ from a practicebased perspective (Chapter 7). In A. Hui, T. Schatzki & E. Shove (Eds.), The nexus of practices: Connections, constellations, practitioners (pp. 98–113). London: Routledge. Rönnerman, K. & Kemmis, S. (2016) Stirring doctoral candidates into academic practices: A doctoral course and its practice architectures. Education Inquiry, 7(2), 93–114. http://www.educationinquiry.net/index.php/edui/article/view/27558. Schatzki, T. R. (2002). The site of the social: A philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Schatzki, T. R. (2003). A new societiest social ontology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 33(2), 174–202. Schatzki, T. R. (2005). The sites of organizations. Organization Studies, 26(3), 465–484. Schatzki, T. R. (2010). The timespace of human activity: On performance, society, and history as indeterminate teleological events. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington. Schatzki, T. R. (2012). A primer on practices (Chapter 2). In J. Higgs, R. Barnett, S. Billett, M. Hutchings & F. Trede (Eds.), Practice based education: Perspectives and strategies (pp. 13–26). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Shove, E., Pantzar, M., & Watson, M. (2012). The dynamics of social practice: Everyday life and how it changes. London: SAGE.

Chapter 6

Living in Practices: Being in Earth’s Community of Life

Abstract This chapter (Sects. 6.1–6.4) aims to suggest some of the ways in which our practices are located in ‘Big History’: in the happening of the Cosmos, and the community of life on Earth. Sections 6.1 and 6.2 are intended to suggest something of how we are connected to the seasons and the community of life on planet Earth through our practices: we live our lives in practices, and practices are the means by which we enhance or erode the community of life on the planet. Section 6.3 brings us back to concerns from earlier in the book, inviting us to consider whether humankind has by now accumulated sufficient knowledge for us, collectively, to understand our place in Nature and in History: what the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel thought was Absolute Knowledge. It recalls Sect. 3.3, ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ which introduced the semantic dimension of intersubjective space. Section 6.4, the poem ‘Bees and Being,’ implies that we have come into Being in space and time, and that, at the end of our own lives, we return in another form to the continuing happening of space and time, the great happening of the Cosmos.

6.1 Wheels Within Wheels: A Daily Harvest of Oranges; Following the Seasons Spring is advancing. In the back garden, the orange tree is a profusion of orange blossoms. The strong, sweet fragrance drifts through the garden; I wonder if it makes the bees drunk. At this time of the year, covered in blossoms, it promises a harvest in next year’s distant Winter. Now, I see just one orange remaining on the tree, right up the top there, near the crown. Is it still attached, or is caught among the branches? That tree is a singular, important part of my life, the cycle of my year. Happily, it is doing well; the grey water from the washing machine pumps into its garden bed, and the tree seems to thrive on it (Fig. 6.1). These navel oranges seem ripe in late Autumn, but they are not at their sweetest until they have endured one or two frosts—typically, after Winter has begun. Then I begin the slow, one-day-at-a-time harvest that winds its way till Winter ends. Each morning before breakfast, frequently before dawn, I climb my ladder— sometimes in frost when the oranges feel frozen, sometimes in light rain. I skip days © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 S. Kemmis, A Practice Sensibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9539-1_6

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Fig. 6.1 Orange blossoms on the tree in my back garden (Photo supplied S. Kemmis)

when the rain is steady. I pick a few, sometimes five, oranges; more if I have guests. I take a reusable plastic bag to hang from the top of the ladder, and put the oranges in it. I also take my phone, in my pocket, in case I fall. At the beginning of the season, I choose the largest oranges, usually, but not always, to be found on the western side of the tree, which gets the most sun. Most days, I move the ladder to a new spot around or under the tree to pick from branches where the oranges are easiest to reach—although I leave most of the ones that can be picked from ground level for guests and visiting grandchildren. As the Winter advances, the oranges get more challenging to reach, further up the tree. I clamber higher up the ladder, and twist my body through the lower branches to reach them. Occasionally, I scratch my hands or head on dead and broken twigs, and sometimes, through the morning, discover that for some hours, I have been wearing snapped twigs in my hair, or my clothing. Climbing down the ladder, I take my bag of oranges into the house. I put the juicer on the island bench: a cheap, easy-to-clean, electric model with a top-mounted juicer that rotates when half an orange is pressed down on it. I then press two glasses of couldn’t-be-fresher, living orange juice. If the oranges are large, three oranges make two glasses. If the oranges are smaller, it might take five oranges. I drink the first glass in five or six swallows: the first drink of the day. The second lasts through breakfast, and I take my six tablets for the day with the last of it. Then I rinse the

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glass, and fill it with the first 300 ml of the two litres of water I will drink through the day. So goes the pattern of early mornings through the orange season at my house. Towards the end of Winter, I can no longer reach the highest oranges. The harvest that has lasted from late June/early July through until late September is over, at least for me. The possums still take a share, and now they have their pick. And then, with Spring, what Thomas (1952) called “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower” pushes up into the canopy of the tree, and the white orange buds appear, and the last of the season’s oranges tumble from the tree-top. Usually, these last oranges have been half-devoured by the possums; most of the others split when they hit the ground. For days I leave them there, where some bloom grey–green mould, until they are laid to rest in the Wagga Wagga City Council green organic-waste collection bin (Fig. 6.2). In the meantime, above the decay of fallen oranges on the ground, the tree is abuzz with buds blossoming and bursting, and bees plundering nectar, and this corner of the garden is a-swoon with sweet orange scent. Wheel within a wheel, the daily cycle of picking and juicing oranges on Winter mornings has come to an end as the larger wheel becomes visible. The abundance of blossoms promises a new, still-distant Winter harvest to come. In the meantime, as Fig. 6.2 Fallen oranges in Spring (Photo supplied S. Kemmis)

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Spring advances, the blossoms will be transfigured into small, hard, green oranges that slowly grow and fill through the Summer, fed not by a fresh mountain spring but by the grey water from my laundry. They will ripen slowly, then turn to gold in harmony with the color-shift of Autumn, and then sweeten after the first frosts of Winter. So turns the cycle of the seasons. The Winter sun retreats northwards as we in the Southern Hemisphere tilt away from it in our Earthly orbit, so more of the orange tree spends longer in the shadow of the house, until, after the Southern Winter Solstice, the Sun once again advances slowly southwards, bringing warmer temperatures, Spring, more sun on the orange tree, and the annual outburst of orange blossom. Then comes the slow Summer growth, threatened by the burning days of high summer, and the evaporation of subsoil moisture, then the golden globes of Autumn, ripening for Winter harvest. And so, despite my rather urban life, I am an active participant in the ancient seasonal cycles of the Earth, and in the ancient cycles of agriculture that have shaped life on this continent for fifty thousand years or more, as Pascoe (2014, Ch. 1) shows, based on archaeologists’ dating of ancient Aboriginal people’s grinding stones in North Western Australia. And I am a participant in the more recent cycles of agricultural production that began with European settlement of Australia in 1788, that wrecked Aboriginal agriculture and the friable soils of this country. According to Hanna (2016), Captain Arthur Phillip, the leader of that 1788 expedition to settle this land, brought both orange seeds and plants to Sydney, collected en route to Terra Australis from Rio de Janeiro. Some were planted by the Colony’s Chaplain, Reverend Richard Johnson, who harvested the first oranges grown in the Colony from his trees in Canterbury Vale in Sydney. And now I am the beneficiary of an orange tree planted years ago in this garden, by the parents of my next-door neighbour, who once lived in this house. As each year passes, I grow more conscious that these daily and annual cycles are loops in a spiralling skein of years—cycles that threaten to spiral out of control with climate change and global warming. Climatologists warn of the gathering droughts that will afflict this part of Australia more frequently, increasing the reliance of my orange tree on my laundry grey water. And I become more sharply aware of how it is my practices of harvesting oranges that locate me in the annual cycles of the orange tree, and of the seasons, and of the Earth’s spinning on its tilted axis to produce the succession of Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. And I grow more conscious of the spiral of my own life’s journey, evident in more changes than the whitening and thinning of my hair. For how much longer will I climb the ladder each Winter’s day, harvesting fresh oranges? If I had not already chosen the place where my ashes will be interred, I might have chosen to have them scattered there, under the orange tree. I’m unsure whether the tree would or would not welcome that. I’ll ask a gardener.

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6.2 Communing with Nature: An Unexpected Connection Between Grey Shrike-Thrushes, Australian Magpies and Steers1 One of the delights of my life is that I’m regularly visited by a male and a female Grey Shrike-Thrush. Some years back, I heard its distinctive call, and whistled my rough imitation in reply. Curious, the bird came closer, looking for the stranger in his territory. So began our years-long conversation. After a few visits, I threw him a small ball of beef mince. He hopped down, inspected the ball, ate a bite, and darted off with the rest. Nowadays, one at a time, the male and the female come to the top of the pergola next to my back door, flit about to catch my attention, until, obediently, I go to the fridge for the mince, then quietly slide open the glass back door. ‘Good morning, little bird!’ I say. They are shy and cautious, but when I toss a ball of mince to the ground, they fly down to eat it—if the sparrows or the blackbirds don’t mob them and steal it first (Fig. 6.3). I have fed a Grey Shrike-Thrush twice this morning. Or was I visited once by the male and once by the female? He is slightly larger. But the Shrike-Thrush is not a large bird. Apparently, the average weight of a Shrike-Thrush is 63 g. I give them a small ball of beef mince, about half the size of the top joint of my little finger.

Fig. 6.3 Grey Shrike-Thrush (Colluricincla harmonica) (Photo by Patrick Kavanagh, https://flic. kr/p/UgoRVG, CC BY 2.0) 1 First

drafted on a day of revelation after feeding a pair of Grey Shrike-Thrushes who regularly visit my back door.

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This morning, I heard—and saw—the father Australian Magpie carolling at the very top of the Norfolk Island Pine a few houses along, but neither he nor his mate have visited this morning. She came to the pergola near the back door last night. I thought she was looking a bit thin. I was away for three days last week, and I didn’t see her for a day or two after that. Maybe they’ve been missing my contributions to their diet. I am not anxious about them becoming dependent on me for food, though. Jones (2018), Deputy Director of the Environmental Futures Institute, Griffith University, wrote a piece for the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) News in which he said that urban birds fed by people ordinarily get most of their food from the environment, not people.2 That sounds right to me. When I walk around the block here, I see ‘my’ Magpies strutting about, hunting, and catching various kinds of insects. They are doing what Magpies do: filling their time foraging, and minding their territory. Soon they will be working very hard, feeding new hatchlings and defending their territory even more stoutly. In due course, they will bring their newly fledged offspring to me, to learn to feed from humans. They grow quickly with my beef mince supplementing their diet. Usually, there are two young—this year three. The father drives the juveniles off in autumn or early winter, once again leaving just this original breeding pair inhabiting this territory, in which I am such a valuable resource. Apparently, the average weight of a Magpie is 220–360 g. Each visit, I give them each a ball of beef mince a bit smaller than the top of my thumb (Fig. 6.4).

Fig. 6.4 Australian Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen) (Photo by Peter Kerrawn, https://flic.kr/p/ SWFByp, CC BY 2.0)

2 He

does not recommend feeding birds mince, I was sorry to learn.

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Once every two weeks or so, my shopping list includes ‘Maggie mince’. I buy it at the supermarket: regular (not premium) beef mince, in a 500 g pack, for $7.00. If I buy a pack every fortnight, I buy about 13 kg of beef mince a year for the birds. From Google and the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry (n.d.), I learned that a 1,000 lb steer on the hoof yields about 610 lb of meat, of which about 430 lb (195 kg) is retail cuts of meat. That means if I fed these birds at the same rate all year ’round (which is not quite right, because they eat more in the Spring when they’re feeding young), then I use the equivalent weight of the retail meat from one steer in a smidgeon over 15 years. And 15 years is about how long I’ve been feeding this pair of Australian Magpies—let alone the other Magpie pair that also used to visit some years back, and the Kookaburras that came for a few years, and the gang of Pied Currawongs that sneaks into my garden to swipe the food from the other birds when the weather gets too cold in the Snowy Mountains nearby. So here’s the thing: my practice of feeding the Grey Shrike-Thrush pair, and the Australian Magpie family, and the other birds I’ve been feeding over the last fifteen years, has so far cost the life of one steer. It is a bit of a revelation. My practice of feeding the birds isn’t as harmless an occupation as I thought. Far from being St Francis of Assisi, it turns out that I am a top-end predator, feeding not only myself but also my accomplices, the birds. Or are they the top-end predators and am I the accomplice? They couldn’t manage to take out a steer on their own, but they manage to get me to provide them with its protein. Who has trained whom here? Practices are like that. We live in practices, and we inexorably interact with the world as we do so, creating, making, mending, meddling, and destroying as we go. Every action is an interaction: something in the world is changed in some way by what we do—whether what we change is a conversation, a physical thing, or a relationship, or all three. My feeding of the birds, and my eating meat, and yours (if you do), pulls one beast after another into life, into the paddock, and into the saleyards and slaughterhouses and supermarkets. Feeding the birds is part of the cycle of life and death, although I mostly saw only its charming, life-giving, life-affirming side. What am I to do now? Change my practice?

6.3 In the End Is the Word? Is Humankind Evolving Towards Absolute Knowledge? “In the beginning was the Word”. And humanity has been expanding its knowledge ever since, from the hominins to Homo sapiens. The notion that human knowledge expands and evolves, overturning some previous beliefs while others persist, was already familiar in the time of ancient Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, from about 500 BC to around 300 AD. Much later, in the nineteenth century, the idea of the evolution of knowledge came to a kind of zenith in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (b.1770–d.1831) notion of ‘Absolute Knowledge’,

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explicated in his (1807) The Phenomenology of Mind. In the twentieth century, Stephen Toulmin gave the idea of the evolution of knowledge a new momentum in his (1972) Human Understanding, Vol. I: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts—it spawned a perspective in the philosophy of science known as ‘evolutionary epistemology’. (It provided a key frame for the argument of my [1976] doctoral dissertation Evaluation and the Evolution of Knowledge about Educational Programmes.) The idea of the evolution of knowledge has a fresh relevance today when we contemplate the future of humankind, the community of life on Earth, and Planet Earth itself. Indeed, the evolution of knowledge has arrived at a point when we can contemplate the Cosmos from its beginnings to the present. Some argue that we humans are the planet’s consciousness of itself. For instance, in his 1980 television series and book Cosmos: A personal voyage, the astronomer and science writer Sagan (1980) wrote: … we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: star-stuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring (p. 345; emphasis in original).

Contemporary thinkers about religion and spirituality similarly speak of ‘Big History’: the story of the Cosmos from the Big Bang to the present. Sanguin (2007), for example, is one who also argues that Planet Earth has become conscious of itself with the evolution and development of human consciousness. We humans, who have ‘mastered’ the planet as we have lived with it, and as we have pillaged and plundered it, have now arrived at a form of individual consciousness fed by science, which is part of our collective knowledge and consciousness, from which we can see what we have done to the planet and the community of life through human history, most particularly as a consequence of industrialisation in the last few centuries. We humans have arrived at this collective consciousness at the very time that we also recognise that the planet is in profound trouble as a consequence of our collective human action: human-induced climate change, global warming, mass extinctions, severe loss of biodiversity, sea level rise, the beginnings of climate migration and the conflicts it has already begun to engender, as, for example, when communities in the Sahel region in Africa have been forced to migrate by drought and starvation; particularly in Northern Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Mali (European Council on Foreign Relations, n.d.). The notion that collective human consciousness is the planet becoming conscious of itself encourages us to believe that our collective consciousness makes us capable, not only of apprehending our current crises, but also responding appropriately to avert them. But it turns out that there is a gap between our collective consciousness and our capacity for, and commitment to, collective action to avert or address the crisis. It seems that the knowledge we have as individuals does not convert so easily into collective action. Something is missing in the chain of connections between knowledge and action.

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Part of what is missing is that we fail to appreciate that, and how, our individual knowledge is also social—drawn from the intersubjective spaces we share with others, and acted upon into those intersubjective spaces. Another part is understanding that, and how, collective knowledge is also political, and, as in the case of knowledge about climate change, politically charged. Still another part is appreciating how knowledge and practice are intertwined. As I have quoted elsewhere in this volume: “all of what is conventionally called ‘knowledge’ arises from, recalls, anticipates, and returns to its use in practices” (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 58) and “what we learn arises from, represents, recalls, anticipates and returns to its use in practice” (Kemmis & Edwards-Groves, 2018, p. 120). We also need to understand that, and how, our present practices, like automobility, for example, are held in place not just by our knowledge about cars and driving but also by practice architectures that make driving possible. To change our practices is not just a matter of changing our knowledge, important though that maybe, but also a matter of changing the practice architectures that support a practice like automobility: practice architectures like roads, road maintenance crews, oil wells, petroleum refineries, service stations, car manufacturers and sales outlets, driving schools and the rest. Returning to the question of the evolution of knowledge, however, we should recall that, in the mid-twentieth century, there was great optimism about science, despite the ravages of two world wars, the Great Depression, and hundreds of other crises and conflicts bedevilling the world. Scientists believed profoundly in progress, and that the secrets being revealed through science would give us the means to bring into being a world much “nearer to the heart’s desire”, as the eleventh-century Persian astronomer and poet Omar Khayyam (b.1048–d.1131; FitzGerald 1889/1965, p. 146) put it: Ah Love! could you and I with Fate conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would we not shatter it to bits – and then Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!

In the mid-twentieth century, the transnational march of science seemed to promise a universal knowledge and a unitary view of what policy and technology would be needed to create a world in which everyone, around the planet, could live interesting and satisfying lives, in which justice could thrive, and in which we might be relieved of the sufferings caused by disease, starvation, poverty and war. As a young social scientist, I shared that optimism and enthusiasm for making the new discoveries that would help bring into being that new and better world. It turned out, however, that this world was one imagined by a particular class of highly educated (mostly but not only) white men, who were more than a little idealistic about the extent to which the emerging scientific view of the world was in fact unitary, or universally true. While there was a powerful shared optimism in the vision, division and conflict over knowledge, policy and technology nevertheless persisted. And then, towards the end of the twentieth century, the rise of post-structuralism and various postmodernisms had shattered the vision of a unified science. In his

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postscript ‘What is postmodernism?’ to his (1984) book The Postmodern Condition: A report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard defines postmodernism in terms of an increasing incredulity towards the “grand narratives” of progress and emancipation, and famously pronounces that “Most people have lost the nostalgia for [this] lost narrative” (p. 41). Others, of course, took a different view: Habermas (1987), for example, in his book of that name, took the view that The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, with its fallibilistic pragmatism, still offered hope for the Enlightenment project. I shared—and continue to share—that hope (for example, Kemmis, 1995, 1998). Climate science, for example, continues to explore gaps and contradictions in our knowledge of the state of the planet’s climate, but it has produced a broad picture of human-induced climate change and global warming that attracts the assent of almost all the world’s climate scientists, although it has failed to persuade some politicians (mostly those beholden to the interests of the fossil fuel industry). Medical science similarly continues to produce extraordinary breakthroughs—in immunotherapies for HIV-AIDS and some cancers, for example—that sustain the notion that science is moving forward towards more unified understandings of the workings of the body in relation to various forms of disease. And astrophysics similarly continues to give rise to breathtaking new and more coherent understandings about the nature of the Cosmos and the forces that hold it together—and apart. I did not mention the humanities and the social and behavioural sciences in that shortlist. In these fields, difference and diversity of perspectives persist, partly in response to the nature of the matters being investigated. But a greater understanding of the diversity of human interests and perspectives nevertheless means that some convergences have also begun to emerge. As historians, anthropologists and sociologists have become more attuned to the distinctive perspectives of Indigenous peoples, for example, it became possible to arrive at more encompassing understandings of the nature and consequences of Indigenous peoples’ experiences of dispossession and colonisation. And thus they could acknowledge, in relation to one another, the experiences and the consequences enjoyed by the colonists and endured by the colonised. I hasten to add, of course, that this acknowledgement in the disciplines of history, anthropology and sociology has not yet yielded sufficient practical demonstrations of truth and reconciliation in national and local politics and policy, in forms that adequately recognise the experience or compensate the immense loss endured by the Indigenous peoples who suffered that dispossession. Similar, more dialectical, and in this sense ‘convergent’, views have emerged in a variety of fields, leading to a greater, more relational, understanding of the workings of power across divides like those of class, gender, race, ethnicity, post-coloniality, sexual orientation, and (dis)ability. There is far more widespread recognition that the experiences of Ego and Alter, Self and Other, cannot be understood except in relation to each other, as we saw in discussions of Foucault’s capillary view of power (Sect. 3.11, ‘Power I: Power is enacted in practices’), and his view of power as productive. The perspectives and practices of both superordinate and subordinate are produced in the dynamics of their relationship, not just those of the subaltern. And I think this dialectic has been popularly recognised in a great variety of social

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movements, since the French Revolution of 1789–1799, through the suffragettes and the civil rights movement, to the Black Power movement, second wave feminism, #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. So perhaps there are forms of relational thinking3 and theorising (including dialectical thinking and theorising) in the human and social sciences and the humanities, that are capable of encompassing diverse perspectives on the human and social world, and on history and philosophy, that will in some ways approach the kind of convergences possible through, say, the theory of relativity in the natural sciences, or ecology in the biological sciences that understands the interconnectedness of all living things. Ecology has taken such a relational perspective, by the way, at least since Alexander von Humboldt (b.1769–d.1859), Prussian polymath and visionary, invented the concept of the web of life at the end of the eighteenth century (Wulf, 2015). And this leads us back to Humboldt’s contemporary, G. W. F. Hegel, the great dialectical thinker. Hegel’s notion of Absolute Knowledge is difficult. He gradually assembles it through the long argument of The Phenomenology of Mind, concluding in the final section, ‘Absolute Knowledge’ (1807, pp. 787–808). The notion of Absolute Knowledge encompasses both a process of expansion and development of knowledge over time, and also a kind of end point at which humankind might achieve Absolute Knowledge, perhaps collectively rather than in the mind of a single person. It is well to remember that, if Absolute Knowledge is ever achieved, it will have been approached by a long journey of many, many steps. But Hegel wanted to show some of the reflexive moments that would need to be achieved to attain Absolute Knowledge. These are difficult to express in simple, contemporary, non-technical language, but I will try to list some of the things that Hegel thought humankind would need to achieve (many of which we already have some grasp of today) in order to attain Absolute Knowledge: • A knowledge of the internal distinction between myself, I, as a person who thinks, and the me who knows that I think. • A knowledge of the distinction between myself and the world, together with the knowledge that I am an object in the world, and thus part of all existence. • A knowledge of the distinction between myself as the one who thinks, and the language I ‘think with’, in “notions” (the content of knowledge), as well as a knowledge that notions are also ‘things’ that exist in some sense ‘externally’, in the world. • A knowledge of the distinction between our subjective consciousness and the things in the world that we can be conscious of—including the world as a whole— as well as the knowledge that I am a thing in the world, and that my subjective consciousness is also a thing in the world. • A knowledge that all forms of knowledge, and all substantive contents of knowledge, exist in time and space—in History (in the whole of time) and in Nature (all the things that make up the Cosmos), and that all particular knowledge is located 3 The

form of relational thinking I have here in mind analyses a subject matter relationally, rather than the kind that encompasses different perspectives on a subject matter.

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at a particular moment in History and a particular location in Nature and Time and Space. • A knowledge that some earlier forms of knowledge persist, while others are abandoned or overthrown, and that newer forms of knowledge emerge, some of which are more cognisant than others of their particular location in time and space, History and Nature, and more cognisant of their relation to other (for example, earlier or different) forms and contents of knowledge. • A knowledge of ‘Philosophical Science’ as a collective human endeavour of selfcomprehension of the evolution of knowledge of the world and of ourselves, as revealed in Nature and History. • ‘Absolute Knowledge’, which is the simultaneous attainment of all of the other items in this list. Hegel expounded this view of where science might be taking us at the very beginning of the nineteenth century.4 The traces of Hegel’s view of the—perhaps inexorable—progress of knowledge remained visible more than a century later, for example in the synthesising aspirations of the Vienna Circle5 of logical positivists, in the 1920s and ’30s, and their International Society for the Unification of Knowledge which aimed to encompass philosophy and all of the natural sciences (Murzi, n.d.). As mentioned earlier, that aspiration survived until about the third quarter of the twentieth century, although the expectation that all of science could be expressed in a single theoretical language had, by then, largely been abandoned. Indeed, in the philosophy of science in the 1960s and ’70s, there was a lively debate about the nature and even the possibility of progress in science (see, for example, Feyerabend, 1970; Kuhn, 1970; Popper, 1963; Toulmin, 1972). As also mentioned, in the 1960s–’80s, this recognition of the implausibility of achieving a unified ‘theory of everything’ quite rapidly morphed into its contrary, in various postmodernisms that had lost even “the nostalgia for the lost narrative” (Lyotard, 1984, p. 41), nurturing instead a burgeoning conviction that theories would forever be diverse, adapted to their own substances and fields of study, and generally incommensurable with one another, and, in the case of many, simply mutually incomprehensible. From the perspective of the present, when science is so central to our collective self-understanding of the crises that confront the community of life on Earth, that state of irreconcilable diversity in science seems less convincing than it did two or three decades ago, when the idea of difference danced deliriously on the grave of the idea of a Unified Science. Nowadays, we are turning our minds to some very big problems for the planet, for the community of life, and for humanity. Many scholars and scientists are harnessing their diverse intellectual and theoretical resources to this shared task. We are far from achieving anything like cross-disciplinary coherence or consistency in theory or research practice, but many scientists are preoccupied with different aspects of some shared ‘wicked’ problems. We may not have strong evidence 4 Hegel,

who held a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Jena, completed the text a day or two before the 14 October 1806, Battle of Jena. Napoleon’s victory over the Prussians that day led to the transformation of Germany and the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 5 Including such luminaries as Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Gödel, Otto Neurath, and Moritz Schlick.

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yet of a convergence in the language of theory, but there are some convergences on a number of important practical problems that humankind urgently needs to address, partly through bringing together diverse perspectives from different sciences and specialisms (see, for example, Somerville, 2017). The great theoretical questions of what was once called ‘Pure Science’ continue to recruit researchers to their enterprise; at the same time, many great practical problems are currently attracting the attention of many researchers from very different disciplines, in a flurry of what was once described as ‘Applied Science’. The diverse resources of these various disciplines are throwing new light on different dimensions of the crises we face, and suggesting new, possible solutions. Some practice theorists like Shove and Spurling (2013), for example, are prominent in bringing their social theories—theories of practice—to bear on contemporary issues of sustainability which are otherwise addressed in the natural and biological sciences. So perhaps there is a sense in which we will need to think our way out of the crises humankind has wrought on the planet and its community of life as part of the process of actually finding our way out of the crises. Perhaps, we will need more consciously to orient our collective endeavours across fields and disciplines, in order to resolve the most pressing problems humanity has ever had to face. Perhaps this represents a continuation of a collective striving for Absolute Knowledge, in some form or forms. At the same time, in the wider world, we observe such social crises as political polarisation in much of the West, the fragmentation of the ever-fragile rules-based world order, and the rise of new forms of global capitalism that amplify disadvantage and suffering, widening the gaps between the haves and have-nots around the globe. Seen from the point of view of the need to think our way out of our current crises, these social crises we observe are not so much evidence of incommensurability of theories, but rather an irreconcilable difference between self-interests. Yet many believe that a coordinated scientific effort, on a grand scale, will be needed to confront and to overcome the crises that are already upon us. I do not think we will return to the aspiration of finding or producing a unified science of the kind that the Vienna Circle envisaged. But, under the sword of Damocles, I think we will find ways to cooperate across disciplines and fields to arrive at shared understandings that will allow us collectively to address the crises we face. We will learn, once more, that science is best when done collaboratively, collectively, and for the good of humankind and the community of life on Planet Earth. We need such a collective endeavour if we are to attain a fuller, richer self-consciousness of who we are in Nature and History, along with a fuller, richer consciousness of the Nature and History that have produced us, individually and collectively. The ‘sociomaterial’ aspirations of contemporary practice theory offer one way of becoming more acutely conscious of the intertwinement, the entanglement, of Nature and History (to explore the diversity of practice theory approaches, see Hui, Schatzki, & Shove, 2017; Nicolini, 2012; and Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, & von Savigny, 2001). Practice theory can acknowledge how Nature has been revealed, for example, through the branch of practice theory that specialises in exploring the practice of science: science and technology studies (for example, Latour, 2005). Other branches

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of practice theory (for example, Schatzki, 2002, 2010; Shove, Pantzar, & Watson, 2012) study how human action in History is part of the contemporary social life of humans on the planet. And some see this moment in history as the new and very dangerous Anthropocene era in which humans are profoundly endangering the community of life on Earth, the community of life in our particular corner of the Cosmos. As Sagan (quoted earlier; 1980, p. 345) wrote, “we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness”, “star-stuff pondering the stars”. Collectively, humankind has not achieved Absolute Knowledge, nor even an equally shared awareness of the looming environmental catastrophe that needs to be averted. Moreover, given the very different self-interests of people in the developed and developing worlds, and in the very varied circumstances in which different local groups find themselves around the planet, no shared and coordinated commitment to act has yet emerged, although the Paris Agreement (United Nations Climate Change, n.d.) and its predecessors and successors try to harness the nations of the world in a common effort to limit global warming to 2 °C, or, preferably, 1.5 °C. Despite the evidence of human-induced global warming and climate change, in 2018 US President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Accord; as I write, some other nations, Australia among them, are at risk of withdrawing. We have the knowledge to guide our actions nationally and internationally, yet, despite forthright progress by leading nations, knowledge to address climate change is not swiftly and smoothly being converted into entirely unified international action to mitigate global warming and climate change and their consequences. In the end, we will rely on words to convince the world’s leaders and governments to take determined, coordinated international action: communication and conversations capable of convincing everyone of our shared fate on Planet Earth. But, in addition to these words, the World itself is also speaking to us in a new language of wild, extreme weather, rising sea levels, longer droughts, starvation, global warming and the displacement of species. We would be wise to heed its warnings. So: on this view, in the End will be the Word—whether we succeed in averting, or succumb to, the crisis that confronts us. If we succumb, it seems likely that we will take many other species with us. It will be in talk, even if not in talk alone, that world leaders and governments will be convinced to take coordinated action, and, if we are not convinced, it will be talk we hear in the recriminations that will follow. And then, some time after the catastrophe engulfs us, the last human voice will fall silent, and Homo sapiens and its languages will be no more. Earlier in this book,6 I discussed the Prologue to The Gospel According to John, and its stately opening, “In the beginning was the Word…”. The Word—the Logos— referred to in that place was Jesus, the incarnation of God: “the Word made Flesh”. But it was not only Jesus who was incarnated. As verse 3 of the Prologue says: “3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being”. Here, the author of John’s Gospel intuits that the whole Cosmos, everything that has

6 Section

3.3, ‘In the beginning was the Word’.

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ever been since the Big Bang, is incarnated, “made Flesh”; everything that exists has come to be. If the voice of Homo sapiens falls silent, along with other species driven to extinction by us,7 the planet and the Cosmos will continue in their path, and life on Earth will evolve in some new forms different from the forms now present on the Earth. The Earth will survive us. And then there will be a cosmic version of the old conundrum ‘If a tree falls in the forest and there is no-one around to hear it, does it make a sound?’ Without us to be inspired by its awe, wonder, mystery and majesty, will the Cosmos survive? And the answer is surely ‘Yes’. Hegel thought that Absolute Knowledge was a kind of vanishing point of human knowledge, a great reflexive moment in which we would understand, in one encompassing leap, ourselves, the World (the Cosmos), Nature, and History. Now, however, in what feels like a gigantic Cosmic joke, it seems that whatever knowledge we have achieved on the way to Absolute Knowledge may perish along with the one (as far as we know) species that has attained it. If we cannot avert the impending environmental crisis, it seems likely that there will be no-one left to know the World, no “local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness”, no “star-stuff pondering the stars”. It will not be ‘In the end was the Word’; it will be ‘In our end was the Word’. And the end of the Word—language. Perhaps that is the historical moment Homo sapiens has reached now: the moment in which, on the one hand, we have collectively achieved something more or less distantly approaching Absolute Knowledge, while, on the other, we have also just about destroyed the physical and ecological conditions under which Homo sapiens can survive. With what must be the supreme irony, perhaps the vanishing point of the journey towards Absolute Knowledge will turn out to be the point at which our species vanishes, along with many others.8 And yet, there may be another way to look at the problem. In this book, I have argued that our knowledge does not exist apart from the world, remote, in a distant, contemplative relation of subject to object. If, as I said earlier, “what we learn [our 7 As

this book was nearing completion, the United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES, May 7, 2019) put out a media release detailing the results of a survey of about 15,000 scientific papers on biodiversity across the planet. It revealed that more than a million species are at risk of extinction. 8 As I wrote this, thinking about the human world coming from a mute world into language, and perhaps ending with the end of humans and language, I recalled a passage from Martin Gardner’s introduction to his (1962) The Annotated Snark, a commentary on Lewis Carroll’s (Charles Dodson’s) (1876) wonderful nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark. At the core of the poem is the danger that if one thinks one has found a Snark, but it turns out to be a Boojum, one will “softly and suddenly vanish away”. Gardiner proffers a tongue-in-cheek existentialist interpretation of the poem as an allegory about humanity’s fear of death, which, at the time of Gardiner’s writing, was an anxiety provoked by the ever-present threat of nuclear war. In the course of the interpretation, Gardiner offers this wonderful piece of literary interpretation: “Consider for a moment that remarkable four-letter word bomb. It begins and ends with b. The second b is silent: the final silence. B for birth, non-b for Nothing. Between the two b’s (to be or not to be) is Om, Hindu symbol for the nature of Brahman, the Absolute, the god behind the lesser gods whose tasks are to create, preserve and destroy all that is” (p. 29; emphases in the original). Is our trajectory, begun long after the Big Bang (more b’s), the arc of existence that travels from Being to non-Being?

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knowledge] arises from, represents, recalls, anticipates, and returns to its use in practice” (Kemmis & Edwards-Groves, 2018, p. 120), then our knowledge is not separate from the world, it is intimately entwined with it. Hegel himself recognised that Absolute Knowledge does not stand apart from the world; it is entangled in the World and in History. The argument of this book has been that the way in which knowledge is entangled with the World and with History is in practices. If it is to survive, Homo sapiens will do so not through knowledge alone, but by learning how to be, and to be differently entangled with the World, in Nature and in History, which is to say, humanity will survive through changed practices and changed conditions for our practices—changed practice architectures. The hope that humanity can survive depends upon the evolution of the practices by which we live and the practice architectures that make these practices possible. The World is changing now, and the conditions for our practices are changing as part of those changes. For example, contemporary ocean fishing practices are now radically depleting the world’s fish stocks, but despite the self-interests of those who run the fishing industry, we may yet learn to change our fishing practices in order to preserve fish populations, and pull them back from the edge of extinction. Likewise, we are changing our practices of power generation, and the practice architectures that support them, moving from coal-fired power plants to wind- and solar-powered plants, for example. Likewise, we are moving—very slowly—from vehicles powered by fossil fuels to cars powered by electricity or hydrogen, for example. It turns out that humankind is not only on the journey that may, perhaps, end in Absolute Knowledge, but it is also on the journey towards what might be called ‘Absolute Practices’. Here, ‘Absolute Practices’ (our current practices as a species) are the ones whose attainment has brought us sufficiently close to our own destruction to teach us that we need to make radical changes to our current practices, and to the practice architectures that support them, immediately, if we are to avoid our own demise. Our current practices may be ‘Absolute’ in the sense that they may take us to the very edge of sustainability, heading towards a point beyond which humankind will no longer be able to be entangled with the planet in ways that permit us to survive, let alone to thrive. They may be ‘Absolute’ in the sense that they are taking us to a limit beyond which we cannot go, just as further global warming of 1.5 °C is a limit beyond which we cannot go without badly disrupting the biological and physical systems that support the community of life on Earth in its current forms. The central thesis of this book has been that we live our lives in practices. Perhaps this thesis has a corollary: that we live and die by our practices. We must change our practices on a global scale if we are to avert the looming crises of global warming, climate change, loss of biodiversity, more extreme weather events, and the rest. Words (as in ‘In the beginning was the Word’) might help inform and persuade our politicians and our fellow citizens about the urgent need for massive change in our current cultural, economic, environmental, social and political practices, but what is still more compelling is the example of changed practices and changed practice architectures that allow us to see how to avert the crisis by doing things differently, using different technologies. As I have noted, practice researchers like Elizabeth Shove and Nicola Spurling (2013) and their colleagues are showing us how. Those

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changed practices and changed technologies are already multiplying and diffusing around the world: changed sources of energy, changed modes of transportation, changed ways of eating and living… The change in world practices is underway. The urgent task now is not only to spread knowledge about sustainability and sustainable practices around the globe, but to spread the practices and practice architectures of sustainable living around the globe. And those practices and practice architectures are being created, forming and evolving at an increasing pace. There is still a good chance that humanity can be pulled back from the brink, back from the vanishing point for Homo sapiens and many other species. Knowledge about the crisis and alternative possibilities may help us and the planet, but it is not enough; we need to live differently, to live our lives through many other, alternative practices. At the moment before our Being meets the empty silence of Non-Being, for us as individual persons, for humankind as a whole, and for the community of life on Earth, in the end, the end is Practices—the action in history that entangles us with the World, with World History, with life on Earth, and with the Cosmos. At this moment, new practices promise us new knowledge (the Word), and (once more) a new beginning for humankind in the community of life on Earth.

6.4 Bees and Being (a Poem)9 Warm sun bathes me fetching washing from the line in Rozzie’s garden. The air is humming: bees are plundering the massed pink flowers on ti-trees next to me. A prick of grief: now she is gone, I cannot share this picture with her. And yet some flicker, some bright flash of you, enflames the garden still: blue sky and golden air; the trees’ munificence; 9 Written

on Sunday, 11 November 2018: Armistice Day, also known as Remembrance Day.

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the bees’ resolve, their diligence, their resonance; beneficence of warm sun bathing me.

References European Council on Foreign Relations. (n.d.). Climate-driven migration in Africa. https://www. ecfr.eu/article/commentary_climate_driven_migration_in_africa. Feyerabend, P. (1970). Against method: Outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge. In M. Radner & S. Winokur (Eds.), Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science (Vol. IV, pp. 17–130). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. FitzGerald, E. (1889/1965). Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (5th ed.). London: Collins. Gardiner, M. (1963). The Annotated Snark: The Hunting of the Snark: Lewis Carroll. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Hanna, K. (2016). Oranges. In The dictionary of Sydney. https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/ oranges. Hegel, G. W. F. (1807/1967). The phenomenology of mind (trans.: J. B. Baillie, Intro.: G. Lichtheim). New York: Harper & Row. Hui, A., Schatzki, T., & Shove, E. (Eds.). (2017). The Nexus of practices: Connections, constellations, practitioners. London: Routledge. Jones, D. (2018, March 16). Yes, it’s OK to feed wild birds in your garden—As long as it’s the right food. ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) News. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-0316/…wild-birds-ok-to-feed-in-your-garden/9556066. Kemmis, S. (1976). Evaluation and the evolution of knowledge about educational programs. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kemmis, S. (1995). Emancipatory aspirations in a postmodern era. Curriculum Studies, 3(2), 133–167. Kemmis, S. (1998). System and lifeworld, and the conditions of learning in late modernity. Curriculum Studies, 6(3), 269–305. Kemmis, S., & Edwards-Groves, C. (2018). Understanding education: History, politics, practice. Singapore: Springer. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing practices, changing education. Singapore: Springer. Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (trans.: G. Bennington and B. Massumi). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Murzi, M. (n.d.). The Vienna Circle. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.iep.utm. edu/viennacr/. Nicolini, D. (2012). Practice, work and organisation: An introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry. (n.d.). How much meat (Information brochure). Retrieved September 4, 2018, from https://www.oda.state.ok.us/food/fs-cowweight. pdf.

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Pascoe, B. (2014). Dark Emu. Broome: Magabala Books. Popper, K. (1963). Conjectures and refutations; The growth of scientific knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sagan, C. (1980). Cosmos: A personal journey. New York: Random House. Sanguin, B. (2007). Darwin, divinity and the dance of the cosmos: An ecological Christianity. Kelowna, British Columbia: CopperHouse. Schatzki, T. R. (2002). The site of the social: A philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Schatzki, T. R. (2010). The timespace of human activity: On performance, society, and history as indeterminate teleological events. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Schatzki, T. R., Knorr-Cetina, K., & von Savigny, E. (Eds.). (2001). The practice turn in contemporary theory. London: Routledge. Shove, E., Pantzar, M., & Watson, M. (2012). The dynamics of social practice: Everyday life and how it changes. London: SAGE. Shove, E., & Spurling, N. (Eds.). (2013). Sustainable practices: Social theory and climate change. London: Routledge. Somerville, M. (2017). The Anthropocene’s call to educational research (Chapter 2). In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 17–28). Singapore: Springer. Thomas, D. (1952). Collected poems 1934–1952. London: J.M. Dent & Sons. Toulmin, S. (1972). Human understanding: The collective use and evolution of concepts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. United Nations. (2019, May 7). Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Media release: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’: Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’. https://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-GlobalAssessment. United Nations Climate Change. (n.d.). What is the Paris Agreement? https://unfccc.int/processand-meetings/the-paris-agreement/what-is-the-paris-agreement. Wulf, A. (2015). The invention of nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s new world. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Author Index

A Aglioti, S.M., 120 Althusser, L., 68 Aristotle, 40

B Bartlett, R.C., 94, 96 Bednarek, R., 140 Bernstein, Richard J., 27, 95 Borges, Jorge Luis, 3, 4 Borreli, L., 121 Bourdieu, Pierre, 68, 72, 80, 81, 124 Bowlby, J., 61 Bristol, L., 4, 9, 13, 14, 67, 68 Brown, Peter, 138 Bruner, Jerome, 3

C Capella, Anthony, 44–48, 59 Cesari, P., 120 Collins, S.D., 94, 96 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 77

D Davidson, C., 26, 28, 142 Donne, John, 11 Dunne, J., 40

E Edwards-Groves, Christine, 4, 9, 13, 14, 26, 28, 41, 67, 68, 95, 97, 101, 118, 120, 122, 125, 138, 142, 157, 164 Eliot, T.S., 142 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 S. Kemmis, A Practice Sensibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9539-1

European Council on Foreign Relations, 156

F Fassler, Joe, 45 Feyerabend, P., 160 Finkelberg, A., 142 FitzGerald, E., 157 Foucault, Michel, 4, 64, 65, 67, 68, 81–84, 111, 158 Francisco, S., 4, 16, 23, 109 Freire, Paolo, 98

G Gardiner, M., 163 Gibbon, Edward, 138 Giddens, A., 68 Gramsci, A., 68 Grootenboer, P., 4, 9, 13, 14, 67, 68, 122 Grosz, Elizabeth, 120, 123, 125

H Habermas, Jürgen, 40–42, 63, 94, 107, 134, 158 Hadot, Pierre, 94, 97, 98 Hanna, K., 152 Hardy, I., 4, 13, 14, 67, 68, 122 Haug, Frigga, 136 Hegel, G.W.F., 5, 28, 149, 155, 159, 160, 163, 164 Hodder, Ian, 34, 41, 143 Hopwood, Nick, 35, 120, 123, 125 Hui, A., 161 169

170 J Jarzabkowski, P., 140 Jones, Darryl, 154 Joyce, James, 132

K Kemmis, Stephen, 1, 4, 7, 13, 14, 16, 23, 26, 28, 31, 40, 58, 63, 67–69, 90, 93, 95–97, 101, 107, 109, 118–120, 122, 124, 125, 127, 134, 138, 139, 141, 142, 146, 149–151, 157, 158, 164 Knorr-Cetina, K., 161 Kristeva, Julia, 47 Kuhl, P.K., 61 Kuhn, Thomas S., 160

L Lagercrantz, H., 61 Larrain, Jacques, 66–68, 84, 97 Latour, Bruno, 161 Lave, J., 37, 44, 123, 140, 142 Lloyd, A., 4, 109, 122 Lyotard, J.-F., 158, 160

M MacIntyre, Alasdair, 27, 59, 95, 109, 110, 112–114 Mahon, Kathleen, 4, 15, 16, 23, 77, 80, 109 Marx, Karl, 20, 25, 27, 28, 40, 66, 68, 99 McPhee, John, 56, 57 McTaggart, R., 13, 107, 134 Moon, C., 61 Murzi, M., 160 Mutton, R., 141, 142

N National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, 38 Nicolini, Davide, 139–141, 161 Nixon, R., 13, 107, 134

Author Index Pascoe, B., 152 Passeron, Jean-Claude, 80, 81 Pavic, Milorad, 58 Polanyi, Michael, 42 Popper, K., 160

R Romani, M., 120 Rönnerman, K., 124, 139 Ryle, Gilbert, 42, 118, 123

S Sagan, C., 156, 162 Sanguin, B., 156 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 77 Schatzki, T.R., 3, 5, 8, 9, 12, 15, 22, 25, 31, 35, 36, 51, 54, 64, 67, 80, 85, 87, 101, 119, 124, 131–133, 143, 144, 161, 162 Shove, Elizabeth, 34, 64, 127, 143, 161, 162, 164 Smith, T.J., 40, 95 Somerville, M., 99, 161 Spee, E., 140 Spurling, Nicol, 34, 161, 164 Stake, Robert E., 48 Swift, Jonathon, 44

T Thomas, D., 151 Tizard, B., 61 Toulmin, S., 156, 160

U United Nations, 89 United Nations Climate Change, 162 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 89 Urgesi, C., 120

O Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, 155

V von Savigny, E., 161

P Packer, M., 123 Pantzar, M., 64, 127, 143, 162

W Watson, M., 64, 127, 143, 162 Wenger, E., 37, 44, 123, 140, 142

Author Index Wilkinson, J., 4, 9, 13, 14, 67, 68, 101, 109, 118, 119, 122, 146, 157 Williams, Raymond, 34 Wittgenstein, L., 5, 37, 42, 43, 118, 121–123 World Wildlife Fund, 35 Wulf, A., 159

171 Y Yeats, W.B., 40 Young, I.M., 106

Subject Index

A Aboriginal agriculture, 152 Absolute Knowledge, 5, 155, 159–164 Absolute Practices, 164 Academic autonomy, 111 Academic freedom, 113 Academic managers, 113 Academic practices, 109, 110, 114 Academic production, 112 Academic virtues, 113 Academic work, 110, 112, 113, 137 Accomplishment of a linguistic community, the, 41 Accomplishments of one practice, 146 Acquisitiveness of the institution, The, 110, 112 Action, 67, 95 Action in history, 36, 37, 165 Action research, 139 Action that makes history, 95 Activity and work, 21, 35, 54, 83, 85, 99 Activity time-space, 8, 10, 22, 24, 124, 143 Adapt, 119 Agency, 5, 36, 37, 68, 69, 93, 99 Agents, 68, 125 Alter, 61 Always-already-ness, 35, 37 Analysis, 23 Analysis of (sayings, doings and relatings concerning) the practice of lecturing, 70 Annotated Snark, The, 163 Anthropocene, 99 Anthropocene era, 162 Apologies, 40 Arête, 96 Aristotle, 94, 96, 138 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 S. Kemmis, A Practice Sensibility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9539-1

Arrangements, 13, 15, 21, 24, 67, 101 Array of diverse and inter-articulated practices, 147 Array of practices, 86, 146 Atomistic individuals, 61 A tradition is an argument extended through time, 59 Attachment, 62 Attachment bonds, 19 Australia Day, 101, 103–106, 108, 109 Australia Day debate, 108 Australian Magpie, 130, 143, 153–155 Author, 42, 45, 58, 59 Authoritarian personality, 36, 84 Autobiographical methods, 136 Autobiographies, 135 Autonomous agent, 99 Autonomous professional academics, 112 Autonomous professionals, 111 Averroes, 138

B Baby Miles, 7, 15 Bad faith, 77 Bearers of practices, 68 Becoming, 37 Bedtime reading, 14, 15, 17 Bedtime story, 17 Beef mince, 153–155 Bees, 137, 149, 151, 165 Being, 5, 39, 49–51, 60, 149, 163, 165 Being an entertainer, 73 Being initiated into practices, 122, 123 Being in the world, 132 Being stirred into practices, 122, 123 Belong, 62 173

174 Belonging, 53, 61, 62 Bible, 38 Big History, 156 Biological being, 32, 33, 53 Biological birth, 61 Biological identity, 32 Blue couch, 142, 143, 147 Bodies, 32 Bomb, 163 Bonds of attachment, 61 Brain activity, 120, 121 Brian Simon, 56 Bundled, 17 Bundling of practices with arrangements, 5

C Capillary action of power, 84 Capillary notion of power, 81 Capillary operation of power, 65, 66 Capillary view of power, 68, 158 Case study, 48 Changed practices, 144 Changing practices, 15 Change the date, 101 Channel, 87 Channelling, 13, 21 Christianity, 38 Citizens, 63 Classrooms, 79 Climate change, 86, 98, 147, 152, 156–158, 162, 164 Climate science, 158 Coffee, 44–48, 127–133, 142, 143 Coffee-making ritual, 131 Coffee with friends, 132 Collective action, 156 Collective consciousness, 156 Collective human consciousness, 156 Collective knowledge, 157 Collective memory, 137 Collective narration of the practice, 125 Collective practice, 140 Collective work of memory, 136 Collegial university, 113 Coming to know how to go on, 37, 119, 123, 124, 142 Coming to know how to go on in a practice, 124 Command and control university, 112 Commitment to a life of the mind enacted in communities based on reason, 113 Communication, 40, 42

Subject Index Communicative action, 107–109, 124, 134 Communicative power, 62 Communicative practices, 40 Communicative space, 14, 133 Communing with nature, 153 Communities of our disciplines, 135 Communities of practice, 44 Community engagement, 110 Community of life, 156, 161 Community of life (on Earth), v, 2, 5, 12, 32, 34, 35, 53, 63, 64, 85, 89, 90, 97, 99, 156, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165 Community of practice, 83, 140 Community service, 112 Compliance, 65, 78 Concept of Ideology, The, 68 Conceptions and practices of university, 112 Conditions, 13, 15, 19, 27, 67, 84 Conditions of possibility, 70, 133 Conditions of possibility of practices, 90 Conditions—that make practices possible, The, 82 Conflict over knowledge, 157 Connection between ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’, 79 Connections between knowledge and action, 156 Constellation of new and sustainable practices, 99 Constellation of practices, 80, 87, 135, 145, 146 Contemplation, 94 Contest, 112 Contestation, 5, 78, 82, 93, 101–105, 107, 109, 112 Contestation between academic and administrative practices, 114 Contestation in practices, 102 Contestation in or over ideas, 102 Contestation over practices, 102 Contest between academic practices and the practices of management of academics, 113 Contested, 98, 101, 109 Contested discourses about ‘lecturing’ versus ‘teaching’, 78 Contests, 78, 107 Control, 70, 71, 78, 112 Conversation, 42, 58 Conversation about social theory and practice, 59 Co-produce, 28, 69 Co-produced, 67

Subject Index Co-reproduced, 67 Cosmic joke, 163 Cosmos, v, 2, 5, 32, 33, 35, 36, 39, 54, 63, 85, 86, 89, 93, 102, 132, 133, 143, 156, 158, 159, 162, 163, 165 Cosmos:A personal voyage, 158 Cosmos grown to self-awareness, 156, 162, 163 Critical, 95 Critical practice theorist, 109 Critical question, 83 Critical praxis, 95–97, 96 Critical theory, 83 Critical theory of practice, 106 Critical use of the theory of practice architectures, 82 Critical view of the theory of practice architectures, 84 Critically, 137 Cultural-discursive, 13, 19, 27, 28 Cultural-discursive arrangements, 13–15, 17, 18, 21, 24, 48, 55, 70, 78, 82, 99, 131 Cultural-discursive dimension, 4 Cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements, 28, 67, 87 Cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political conditions, 84 Cultural, material and social conditions, 67 Cultural, material and social-political conditions, 34 Cultural revolution, 98 Curricula of knowledge, 97 Curricula of practices, 97 Cycle, 136, 142–144, 146, 152 Cycle of life and death, 155 Cycle of my year, 149 Cycle of picking and juicing oranges, 151 Cycle of the seasons, 152 Cycles of agriculture, 152 D Daily and annual cycles, 152 David Boud, 113 Definition of teaching, 118, 119 Determined, 26 Development is principally through our practices, 38 Dialectic, 37, 39, 105 Dialectical, 47, 158 Dialectical interrelationship between practices and arrangements, 27

175 Dialectical process of our self-formation, 36 Dialectical relationship, 27 Dialectical thinker, 159 Dialectical thinking and theorising, 159 Dialogical forms of communication, 78 Dialogical relationship, 75, 78 Dialogic pedagogies, 26, 142 Dialogic pedagogy Dialogue, 81 Dictionary of the Khazar, 58 Different and competing underlying practice architectures, 105 Different or contradictory practice architectures, 102 Dimensions of intersubjective space, 88 Disadvantage, 62 Discipline, 65, 68, 82, 83 Discipline and Punish, 64, 65, 68, 81, 83 Discipline of action, 98 Discipline of assent (or attention), 97 Discipline of desire, 97 Disciplined, 111 Disciplines, 161 Discourse, 24 Discourse of education, 79 Discourse of habitus, 72 Discourse of ‘lecturing’, 79 Discourse of ‘performance’, 71, 72 Discourse of performing, 73 Discourse of power, 72, 73, 81 Discourse of ‘teaching’, 72, 79 Disposition, 21, 36, 96, 94, 95, 124 Disposition of phron¯esis, 96 Disposition of techn¯e, 96 Distinction between knowing how and knowing that, 118 Doings, 13–15, 18, 20–24, 27, 28, 50, 51, 54, 68–70, 69, 78, 99 Domestic violence, 67 Domination, 106 Doubleness of discipline, 82 Drafting, 56 Draft No. 4:On the writing process, 56 Dress-making, 145

E Earth, 51 Earth as a community of life, 60 Earth has become conscious of itself, 156 Earth’s community of life, 149 Ecologies, 5, 141 Ecologies of practices, 9, 142, 146

176 Ecology, 136, 146, 159 Ecology of interconnected practices, 10 Education, 97, 140 Educational practices, 1 Educational research, 97 Educational theory and practice, 59 Ego, 61 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The, 28 Emancipatory action, 94 Emancipatory perspective, 95 Embodied, 55 Embodied beings, 14, 15, 20, 35, 41, 52, 54, 59, 68, 69, 85 Embodied persons, 19, 51, 53, 57, 63, 141 Energy use, 89 Engels, 68 Enlightened, 39 Enlightenment, 39 Enmesh, 21, 22, 34, 54, 99 Enmeshing, 8 Entangle, 54 Entangled, 33, 34, 55, 56, 59, 86, 143, 164 Entanglement, 41, 51, 61 Entanglement, of Nature and History, 161 Entangles, 165 Epist¯em¯e, 95 Epistemologically, 20 Epistemological view of practice, 20 ErinEarth, v, 60, 61 Evaluation and the Evolution of Knowledge about Educational Programmes, 158 Everyday life, 1 Everyday-ness, of learning, The, 118 Everyday practice, 9, 69 Evolution, 137, 141, 146 Evolution of knowledge, 155–157 Evolution of life on Earth, 101 Evolution of the practices, 164 Evolutionary epistemology, 156 Evolve, 163 Evolving, 165 Exclusion, 35, 62 Exclusive, 83, 84 External goods, 110 Extinction, 89, 163

F False consciousness, 66, 68, 69 Familiar experience, 120 Family, 11 Family building, 19

Subject Index Feeding of the birds, 155 Female sexualisation, 136 Feminist critique, 83 Feuerbach, 28 First World War, 86 Flow, 4, 77, 88, 89, 120 Flow of being, 88 Flow of happening, 89 Flow of my practices produces learning, 120 Flow of their practices, 99 Flows of those neurotransmitter hormones, 121 Formation of identities and subjectivities, 84 Formation of self-interests, 84 Forms of action, 94 Four kinds of action, 95 Friendship, 62

G Gardening, 145 General understandings, 140 Generational awareness, 12 Generational sensibility of PEP, 140 Generations, 62 Geographical communities, 135 German Ideology, The, 68 Girls at some Australian schools being required to wear dresses as part of their school uniform, 106 Girls’ uniforms debate, 107 Global capitalism, 161 Global reinsurance markets, 140 Global warming, 86, 98, 147, 152, 156, 158, 162, 164 God, 38, 39 Good academic, 111 Good for each person, The, 97 Good for humankind, The, 12, 63, 93, 96–98 Good for the community of life on Earth, The, 12, 93 Good for the person, the, 12, 93 Good of humankind, The, 12, 98, 161 Good of the planet, 12 Good of the whole community of life on the planet, The, 99 Goods internal to academic practices, 113 Gospel According to John, 162 Gospel of John, 38, 39 Gospel of St John, 38 Grand narratives, 158 Greek antiquity, 138 Grey Shrike-Thrush, 153, 155

Subject Index H Habitus, 21, 72, 78, 124, 132 Habitus in the coffee-making journey, 131 Habitus of the teacher, 79 Hand-clapping rhyme, 121 Handwriting, 54 Hang together, 13, 56 Hanging together, 13, 20 Hannu Heikkinen, 3 Happening, 37, 51, 52, 64, 66, 80, 85, 86–89, 93, 94, 98, 141 Happening-ness, 21, 37, 40, 101, 144 Happening-ness of practices, 4 Happening of the organisation, 88 Happens, 3, 12, 20–22, 51, 80, 85, 87–89, 131 Harvest, 149, 151, 152 Hegelian–Marxian sense, 96 Hegelian–Marxian tradition, 95 Hegemonic, 68 Heidegger, 5 Hellenistic philosophical tradition, 38 Heraclitus, 142 Here, 48 Hesitations about the concept of ‘intersubjectivity, 35 Hierarchical authority of the university, 80 Hierarchies, 37, 62, 111 History, 26, 28, 33, 35, 37, 40, 48, 53, 61, 62, 68, 84, 96, 99, 109, 133, 132, 134, 135, 138, 143, 158, 159, 161, 163–165, 165 History making action, 12, 69 History of late antiquity, 138 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The, 138 Hominins, 155 Homo sapiens, 34, 53, 89, 155, 162–165 Horizontal dimension of social space, 62 Horse farms, 144 Houyhnhnms, 44 How learning happens in the context of practices, 118 How practices adapt and change and evolve in response to changing conditions, 19 How practices bundle with arrangements, 133 How to go on in the practice, 119 How to participate in, 37 Human action in history, 13, 162 Human coexistence, 64, 102, 109 Human community, the, 63

177 Human history, 156 Humankind, 155 Human social practices, 1 Human Understanding, Vol. I:he Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts, 156 Hunting of the Snark, The, 163

I Identities as being shaped through their practices, 84 Identity, 20, 31, 37, 53, 61, 65 Ideologies are secured through practices, 84 Ideology, 66, 68, 69, 97 Ideology came to be understood as practice, 68 Ideology is secured through practices, 68 Image of ourselves as biological entities, 31 In the beginning was the Word, 155, 162, 164 In the end is the word, 155, 163 In the End will be the Word, 162 In whose interests, 83, 85 Incarnated, 38, 39, 162 Incarnation, 39, 88 Inclusion, 35, 62 Inclusive, 83, 84, 96 Indigenous Australians, 108, 109 Indigenous people, 103–105, 108, 109 Individual, 15, 65, 67 Inhabit, 125 Inhabiting Practices, 124, 142 Initiated into practices, 118 Initiate people into knowledge, 97 Initiates people into practices, 97 Initiate us into new practices, 37 Injustice, 62, 106 Institution, 109–113 Institutionalisation, 104, 105 Institution of the university, 80, 114, 83 Integrity of academic work, The, 113 Intellectual traditions, 59 Intentions, 20 Interact, 37, 85, 93 Interaction, 36, 51, 64, 68, 75, 84, 120 Interactions with the world, 32 Interdependence of practices, 146 Interest, 72, 82–84, 90 Interest-based bargaining, 107 Intergenerational injustice, 34, 98 Interlocutor, 13, 14, 19, 20, 35, 41, 43, 57, 59, 63, 68, 79, 85, 108, 141 Internal goods, 109, 110 Internal goods of practices, 109

178 International Society for the Unification of Knowledge, 160 Intersubjective, 13, 40, 44, 66, 68 Intersubjective communicative space, 134 Intersubjectively, 42 Intersubjective medium of materiality, 53 Intersubjective space, 4, 20, 21, 31, 38, 51, 88, 132, 134, 140, 141, 157 Intersubjectivity, 4, 34, 35, 37, 41, 47, 51, 61, 64, 85, 118, 123 Intertextuality, 42, 44, 47, 48, 59 Islamic scholarship, 138 It is a social achievement, 43 J Jasmine, 20, 22 Jesus, 38, 39 Jewish Wisdom tradition, 38 Judaic and Hellenic traditions, 39 Just, 83, 84 Just and democratic society, 63 Justice, 62 Juxtaposed teaching with lecturing, 72 Juxtaposition of lecturing with teaching in secondary school classrooms, 76 Juxtaposition of talk of ‘lecturing’ in the university and ‘teaching’ in the secondary school, 78 K Kaukko, Mervi, vi Klaus Witz, 121 Knew how to go on, 116 Know-how, 123, 140 Knowing, 124 Knowing-doings, 124 Knowing how, 42 Knowing how to go on, 118, 123, 124 Knowing how to go on in shopping practices, 119 Knowing-relatings, 124 Knowing-relatings (knowing how to position oneself in the social relations in a practice, 124 Knowing-sayings, 124 Knowing that, 42 Knowing that (propositional knowledge), 123, 124 Knowledge, 20, 34, 38–40, 42–44, 47, 65, 84, 98, 120, 121, 124, 142, 155–157, 163–165 Knowledge about building, 41

Subject Index Knowledge and practice, 157 Knowledge arises from, recalls, anticipates, and returns to its use in practices, 118, 157 Knowledge arises from, represents, recalls, anticipates, and returns to its use in practice, 164 Knowledge arises from the practices, 41 Knowledge in the form of flows of brain activity, 121 Knowledge is entangled with the World and with History is in practices, 164 Knowledge is intersubjective, 42 Knowledge is mediated by our practices, 120 L Land clearing for farming, 89 Landscape, 2 Language, 2, 21, 24, 35, 39–41, 43, 44, 50, 58, 61, 63, 67, 78, 82, 85, 99, 163 Language and meaning, 42 Language communities, 11 Language game, 43, 124 Language has an indissoluble relationship with practice, 43 Languages as the intersubjective accomplishments, 39 Late antiquity, 138 Learn, 44, 68, 117 Learn a narrative form, 124 Learn a pathway, 121 Learned, 114–118 Learned how to inhabit a narrative arc of that practice, 125 Learn “how to go on” in an activity or a practice, 121 Learning, 5, 36, 37, 78–80, 82, 119, 122, 123, 142 Learning and practising are dialectically related, 125 Learning “arises from, represents, recalls, anticipates, and returns to its use in practice”, 118, 119, 125, 157 Learning as an initiation into practices, 122 Learning as “an ontological transformation”, 123 Learning by imitation, 122 Learning how to be, 164 Learning is always some sort of mind-andbody story, 125 Learning is at the very heart of practices, 119 Learning is coming to know how to go on, 123

Subject Index Learning means coming to know how to go on in practices, 36 Learning occurring throughout our bodies and being, 123 Learning produces changes in the flow of my practices, 120 Lectures and tutorials, 75 Lecturer’s power-over the students, The, 81 Lectures versus tutorials versus classrooms, 78 Lecture theatres, 79 Lecture theatres versus ‘tutorial rooms’ in the university versus ‘classrooms’ in secondary schools, 78 Lecturing, 69–71, 75, 77–82 Lecturing as ‘enjoyable’, 71 Lecturing as performance, 73 Legitimacy, 62, 112 Legitimacy and authority of the university, 111 Legitimate peripheral participation, 37, 123, 140, 142 Le Goff, Jacques, 138 Lemniscate, 27, 28 Life, 38, 142 Life experiences, 84 Life-histories, 36 Life in practices, 97, 98 Life is lived in practices, 32 Life lived in practices, 34 Life of research, 143 Life on Earth, 85, 163 Lifespace, 85 Lifeworld, 40, 63 Linguistically structured lifeworld, 41 Linguistic community, 43, 48 Linguistic grounding of intersubjectivity, 40 Literacy, 19 Little Gidding, 142 Lived, in our practices, 99 Live in practices, 155 Live our lives in practices, 31 Living, 11, 33, 49, 50, 62 Living in practices, 149 Living in the world, 43 Living our lives in practices, 31 Living practices, 11 Living relationships, 99 Local actions constituting a national and international research network, 138 Logos, 38, 39, 41, 162 Logos of language, 40, 41 Loss of biodiversity, 164

179 Love, 62 Loving, 23, 25 Luci, 13, 17, 19 Ludwig Feuerbach, 27

M Magisterial discourse, 80, 81, 83 Managers of academic work, 110 Marcus Aurelius, 97, 98 Mass university, 113 Material, 21 Material arrangements, 55 Material dimension, 4 Material-economic, 13, 27, 28 Material-economic and social-political conditions, 19 Material-economic arrangements, 13–15, 17, 18, 21, 48, 54, 55, 59, 70, 79, 83, 99, 131 Materiality, 53, 54 Material objects and arrangements, 21 Material reality, 54, 56 Material space-time, 83 Material world, 35, 51, 53, 54, 63 Matrix of time and space, 51 Meaning, 43, 44, 122 Medieval Civilisation, 138 Medium of activities and work, the, 20 Medium of activity, 14 Medium of activity or work, 13 Medium of language, 13, 14, 17, 20 Medium of our bodies, the, 52 Medium of power and solidarity, the, 20 Medium of solidarity and power, 14, 17 Medium of the English language, 18 Meeting, 133–136, 139, 142 Melbourne Cup, 144–147 Memory, 143 Memory work, 136 Menswear store, 114, 118 Mentors, 140 Metaphor, 55 Miles, 8–15, 17, 19, 61 Mind, 42, 43, 55 Mind-and-body narratives, 125 Mirror, 122 Mirror neurons, 120–122 Möbius strip, 25, 27, 123 Morning coffee, 127 My practising changes the world, and the world changes my practising, 120

180 N Narrative, 2, 3, 45, 48, 125 Narrative arc, 133 Narrative arc of the coffee-making journey, 130 Narrative arc of the practice, 124 Narrative arc of this particular practice, 132 Nature, 159, 161, 163, 164 Neo-Aristotelian sense, 96 Neo-Aristotelian tradition, 95 Nested relationality, 140 Network, 135–137, 139, 141 Network of relationships, 140 New Yorker, 56 Nicomachean Ethics, 94, 96 Non-Being, 163, 165 Non-human objects, 11 Novel, 45–47 Novice and new researchers, 140 Novices, 139, 142 Nuclear war, 163

O ‘objective’ understanding of ourselves, 39 Ocean fishing practices, 164 Ontologically, 20 Ontological reality, 59 Ontological sensibility, 48 Ontological view of practices, 21 Ontology of this site, 144 Opposition, 69 Oppression, 106 Orange, 149–152 Orange juice, 150 Orange season, 151 Orange tree, 152 Orchestrates, 146, 147 Organisation, 80, 85, 87, 88, 112 Organisations as they happen, 87 Orienting function of language, 43 Other, 44

P Parental love, 61 Paris Agreement, 162 Participants’ knowledge about practices, 15 Participate in this community of life through my practices, 32 Passage, 4, 31, 33, 34, 85 Passage through time:living our lives in practices, 12, 33

Subject Index PATChat meetings are a practice architecture, 140 PATChat (Practice Architectures Theory Chat) meetings, 142 Pathways for the flow of our neural activity, 121 Patriarchal, 96 Patriarchal arrangements, 83 Patriarchy, 66, 67, 69 Patriarchy as a practice, 69 Pedagogical power, 80 Pedagogical relations, 80 Pedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP), 139, 140 Pedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP) international research network, 23, 95, 142 Pedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP) research network, 135, 139 PEP as a living, growing, evolving entity, 141 PEP is also constituted through practices, 141 PEP is a network composed in and of its own distinctive kinds of practices, 141 PEP is a unique research network, 141 PEP is such an ecology, 141 PEP meetings, 142 PEP network, 139 Performance, 67, 71, 77 Performance of lecturing, 73 Personhood, 53 Perspectives of Indigenous people, 158 Phenomenology of Mind, The, 156, 159 Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, The, 158 Philosophical Investigations, 122 Philosophical schools, 138 Philosophy of science, 160 Philosophy of the subject, the, 42 Phron¯esis, 95, 96 Phron¯esis, understood as ‘practical wisdom’, 96 Physical, 24 physical arrangements, 24 Physical (or material), 85 Physical or material space- time, 4 Physical space time, 13, 14, 17, 20, 21, 35, 38, 54, 63, 68, 69, 88, 99, 132 Physical space-time materiality, 51 Place, 51, 64 Plato, 138 Poi¯esis, 95, 96

Subject Index Possibilities, 132, 133 Postmodernisms, 160 Power, 15, 23, 24, 33, 35, 53, 61, 62, 64–66, 69–74, 76–78, 80–85, 93 Power and solidarity, 19, 99 Power as an aphrodisiac, 77 Power as productive, 158 Power hierarchies, 66 Power is enacted in practices, 64, 84, 158 Power of cooperation, 62 Power-over, 23, 25, 37, 62, 69, 71, 73, 74, 76, 78 Power produces effects, 81 Power produces practices, 83 Power-to, 62, 69, 69, 78, 81 Power-with, 62, 69, 81 Practical action, 96 Practical deliberation, 98 Practical perspective, 95 Practical problems, 161 Practical understandings, 140 Practice, 1, 3, 8, 12–15, 19–22, 25, 27, 28, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 44, 54, 59, 63, 66–68, 71–77, 82–84, 85, 89, 106, 108–110, 113, 119–123, 134, 136, 137, 141, 165 Practice architectures, 3, 13, 15, 18, 19, 22–25, 27, 28, 36, 48, 67, 69, 71–77, 82, 83, 99, 101, 102, 106, 108, 109, 113, 133, 141, 146, 157, 164 Practice architectures (cultural-discursive, material-economic and socialpolitical arrangements) that seemed to be shaping participants’ lecturing practices, 70 Practice as entity, 127 Practice as performance, 127 Practice landscape, 9, 10, 144 Practice memories, 136 Practice of bedtime reading, 15, 19 Practice of breastfeeding, 8 Practice of building, 42 Practice of clothes shopping, 118 Practice of coffee making, 132, 133, 143 Practice of conversing, 70 Practice of handwriting, 54 Practice of ideology, 66 Practice of lecturing, 70, 71, 75 Practice of loving, 23 Practice of meeting, 133, 134, 137 Practice of playing, 107 Practice of reading, 47 Practice of re-writing, 55

181 Practice of science, 161 Practice of searching for a better word, 56 Practice of shopping, 119 Practice of teaching, 82 Practice of writing, 26, 47, 55, 56, 59 Practice perspective, 12 Practices also build and shape practice architectures, 21 Practices and cycles, 142 Practices and learning, 114, 119, 142 Practices and practice architectures are mutually constitutive, 21 Practices and practice architectures of sustainable living, 165 Practices appear to be reproduced, 143 Practices appear to have a cyclic, 142 Practices are enmeshed with the world, 21 Practices as cycles, 143 Practices as of researching, meeting, travelling, discussing, debating, writing and publishing, 141 Practices as they happen, 90 Practices at a small scale, 127 Practices at different scales, 127 Practices at larger scales, 138 Practices at small scale, 90 Practices coordinated at vast scales, 86 Practices enmesh, 21 Practices enmesh us with the world, 21 Practice sensibility, v, vi, 1, 48 Practices evolve, 26 Practices exist at many scales, 20 Practices happen, 141 Practices have a cyclic character, 25 Practices have evolved, 33 Practices, like automobility, 157 Practices like teaching and learning, 101 Practices of bedtime reading, 19 Practices of breeding, 145 Practices of bullying, 37 practices of care, 11 Practices of caring for the baby, 9 Practices of collaborative researching, 141 Practices of compliance, 37 Practices of composition, 54 Practices of destruction, 86 Practices of harvesting oranges, 152 Practices of industrial production, 89 Practices of literacy, 19 Practices of loving, 24 Practices of power generation, 164 Practices of production, 86 Practices of reading and writing, 48

182 Practices of relating, 64 Practices of re-writing, 55 Practices of schooling, 97 Practices of teaching, 26 Practices of teaching religion or science, 101 Practices of transport, 89 Practices of transportation, energy use or eating, 98 Practices of war, 86 Practices of war, violence, discrimination, colonial dispossession, destruction of the community of life on Earth, 97 Practices of waste disposal, 102 Practices of writing, 54 Practices that produce and reproduce power, 66 Practices to colonise new site, 137 Practices travel from site to site, 68 Practices unfold at various scales, 5 Practices unfolding in intersubjective space, 127 Practice theorising, 140 Practice theorists, 161 Practice theory, 34, 57, 144, 161 practice to be human action in history, 28 Practice tradition, 79 Practice tradition of lecturing in the university, 80 Practice tradition of lecturing, The, 82 Practice tradition of university teaching, 82 Practice––writing, 18 Practise caring, 11 Practising and learning are dialectically related, 120 Practising is an important mode of our happening, 88 Praxis, 5, 10, 12, 27, 40, 69, 93, 95–97 Praxis as “sensuous activity”, 27 Praxis or “sensuous human activity”, 28 Predicament of the community of life on Earth, 89 Prefigure, 13–15, 21, 26 Prehistory of human beings, 43 Prism of practices, 57 Produce, 69, 84 Production, 54 Product of practices, The, 97 Productive, 83, 84 Productiveness of power, 65 Professional autonomy, 112 Professional autonomy of academic staff, 112 Professional practice, 139, 140

Subject Index Progress of knowledge, 160 Project, 13, 18, 20, 23–25, 73, 80, 87, 124, 134 Project of a practice, 124 Project of making a coffee, 131 Project of the practice, 13, 17 Promises, 40 Propositional knowledge, 42 Punishment, 64 Purpose, 87 R Racecourses, 144 Reader, 42, 45, 46, 48, 57, 58 Reading, 56 Reads before bedtime, 19 Reasonable, 82, 84 Reasons, 108 Reasons and reasonableness, 107 Recruited into practices, 64, 143 Recruited to, new practices, 11 Recruiting, 147 Recruits, 146 Reflection, 37, 96 Reflective practices, 37 Reform, 62 Regime of practice, 140 Relating, 13–15, 18, 20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 51, 55, 68–70, 99 Relational, 66 Relationality, 66 Relational thinking, 159 Relational trust, 141 Relational, understanding, 158 Relationship between readers and writers, 58 Relationship between the author and the reader, 58 Relationship between the reader, the writer, and the text, 58 Relationship of writer and reader, 57 Relationships, 35, 61 Relationships between people, 21 Religious observance, 101 Reproduce, 21, 25, 28, 65, 66, 68, 69, 78, 82–84, 133–136, 142, 146 Reproduces our practices, 137 Reproduce the work of PEP, 137 Reproduce the network, 137 Reproducing, 32, 136, 143 Reproducing and transforming PEP, 135 Reproduction, 144 Reproduction and transformation of practices, 135

Subject Index Reproduction in Education, Culture and Society, 80 Research, 110–113, 135, 137, 139, 140 Research community, 140 Researching Professional Practice, 139 Research-intensive universities, 113 Research networks, 141 Research Program of PEP, the, 135 Research work, 141 Resistance, 69 Re-using and recycling, 89 Revolutions, 62 Re-writing, 55, 57 Roman Empire, 138 Roslin Brennan Kemmis, 35

S Salmon migrating, 146 Saw the world from a coffee-making point of view, 131 Saying, 13–15, 18, 20–25, 27, 28, 51, 68–70, 78, 99 Sayings, doings and relatings, 134, 136 Scales, 13 Schatzkian practice theory, 67 Schooling, 26 Science and technology studies, 161 Season, 5, 52, 149, 150 Seasonal cycles of the Earth, 152 Secondary classrooms, 76 Self-determination, 63 Self-formation, 84, 96 Self-interest, 40, 67, 72, 84, 98, 107, 108 Selves, 39 Semantic, 21 Semantic space, 4, 13, 14, 20, 21, 35, 38, 41, 48, 63, 68, 82, 85, 88, 99, 118, 123, 132 Semantic space interlocutors, 69 Sense of power, 71 Senses, 40 Sensibility, 2 Sensuous human activity, 20 Sentient being, 32, 53 Service, 111 Shopping for clothes, 119 Shopping practices, 119 Site, 5, 13, 14, 21, 22, 36, 52, 54, 64, 66–69, 101, 119, 132, 136 Site of the Social, The, 64 Site ontological approach, 67 Situated learning, 37

183 Social and political beings, 20, 63 Social (and political) space, 85 social arrangement, 24 Social beings, 14, 15, 19, 32, 40, 41, 53, 57, 68, 85, 141 Social change and transformation, 62 Social evolution, 62 Socialities, 11 Sociality, 10, 11, 64 Social movements, 37 Social norms, 84 Social order, 62, 63, 67 Social- political arrangements, 132 Social- political dimension, 5 Social relationships, 67 Social revolution, 98 Social space, 5, 13–15, 20–22, 35, 38, 61, 64, 68, 83, 88, 99, 132 Social structure, 66–69 Social web, 63 Social world, 63 Social-political, 13 Social-political arrangements, 14, 15, 17, 18, 22, 27, 28, 48, 55, 69, 70, 78, 80, 83, 99 Sociological discourse about power, 71 Sociomaterial, 161 Sociomateriality, 54 Sociomaterial practice, 59 Solidarity, 11, 15, 23, 25, 33, 35, 53, 61–63, 66, 69, 83, 85, 87, 108, 109, 112, 136 Solidarity and power, 22, 63 Solid, enduring entity, 32 Sources, 46 Space, 51, 64 Space-time, 85 Space-time materiality, 51 Space where PEP happens, The, 141 Speech, 42 Spiral, 25, 32, 143, 144, 152 Spirituality, 156 Steer, 155 Stella, 13, 17–19 Stephen Dedalus, 132 Stoics, 97, 98 Story, 2, 45–48, 55, 56, 124, 132 Story of the practice, 124 Storytelling, 3, 18 Stream of consciousness, 31 Structuralist, 67 Structuralist theorists, 68 Structure, 66 Students, 80

184 Study learning qualitatively, 121 Subject, 66, 82 Subjective, 13, 44 ‘subjective’ understanding of ourselves, 39 Subjectivities, 84 Subjectivity, 4, 20, 35, 37 Subjectivity and intersubjectivity, 34 Subjectivity is grounded and anchored in intersubjectivity, 35 Subjectivity is principally formed (grounded, anchored) in intersubjectivity, 38 Subjectivity, our identity, is grounded and anchored in social spaces, 64 Sub-practices, 134 Subsidiary awareness of particulars, 42 Succession planning, 140 Sustainability, 161, 164, 165 Sustainable, 83, 84 Sustainable practices, 165 Sustainable urban living, v, 60 System, 63

T Tacit knowledge, 42 Talk-in-interaction, 28 Tango, 22 Teach, 118, 119 Teacher education practices, 15 Teaching, 69, 75, 78–80, 82, 110–113, 119, 123 Teaching as performing, 72 Teaching in a classroom, 83 Teaching practices, 26 Techn¯e, 95, 96 Technical action, 96 Technical perspective, 95 Technical, The, 94 Technologies of power, 65, 66 Teleoaffective structure, 124 Teleology, 8, 87 Teleology of the organisation, 88 Telos, 94, 95 Temporalities, 140 Tension between practices and institutions, 113 Termite mound, 137 Text, 42, 43, 47, 48, 54–58 Theoretical perspective, 95 Theoria, 95 Theories of practice, 161 Theory of communicative action, 109

Subject Index Theory of practice architectures, 4, 5, 13, 14, 19–22, 26–28, 57, 66–69, 101, 109, 120, 121, 123, 139–142 Theory of Practice Architectures workshop, 20 The Postmodern Condition: A report on Knowledge, 158 Theses on Feuerbach, 27, 28 Third Thesis, 28 Third Thesis on Feuerbach, 25 Thomas Aquinas, 138 Three dimensions of intersubjectivity, 85 Three dimensions of the happening of practices, 90 Three dimensions of the intersubjective space, 101 Time-space of human activity, The, 5, 51, 131, 132, 144 Tony Strong, 47 Tradition, 28, 38, 59, 63, 125 Transcending power, 40 Transcript analysis, 69 Transformation, 21, 28, 32, 62, 67, 68, 82, 86, 88, 93, 97–99, 134–137, 144 Transform the practice architectures, 98 Transform the unsustainable practices, 98 Translation, 58 Truth, 42, 65 Truth and reconciliation, 158 Tutorial, 79 Two principal traditions in the study of praxis, 95 U Ulysses, 132 Understanding, 122 Unified science, 161 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 106 United Nations Intergovernmental SciencePolicy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, 165 Universal knowledge, 157 University, 110–113, 136, 137, 139, 140 University as a community based on reason, 111 University management, 109, 112, 113 University managers, 112 Unjust, 83, 84 Unproductive, 83, 84 Unreasonable, 82, 84 Unsustainable, 83, 84 Unsustainable practices, 99

Subject Index V Variations, 25, 144 Various Flavors of Coffee, The, 44, 45 Vary, 143 Vast ecologies of practices, 144 ‘vertical’ dimension, 62 Vienna Circle, 160, 161 Violence, 62, 67 Virtue, 94, 96, 110 W Waste, 89 way of being, 10 Ways of happening, 89 Web, 11, 15, 32, 33, 61, 64, 66, 83, 85, 133, 135, 146 Web composed entirely of practices, 11 Web of human social activity, 141 Web of interdependencies of species, 99 Web of life, 159 Web of life on Earth, 89 Web of life on our planet, 89 Web of power relations, 82 Web of relationality, 140, 141 Web of relationships, 63 Webs of human social activities, 141 Webs of practices, 12 We learn new practices principally by doing them, 37

185 We live our lives in practices, vii, 1, 5, 85, 119, 164 Western civilisation, 104 What is postmodernism?, 158 Wheels within wheels, 149, 151 Wilfred Carr, 56, 58 Wittgensteinian, 36 Word, 38, 39, 41 Words we use have histories, 44 Work and activities, 63 Working conditions, 69 Workings of power, 158 Workplace practices, 123 Workplaces, 135 World of Late Antiquity, The, 138 Worldview, 66, 68, 69 World War I, 85, 86 Writer, 42 Writing, 17, 19, 46, 48, 54–59 Writing practices, 55

Y You’re My World, 23

Z Zeitgeist, 66