The Nexus of Practices

This book provides a fresh set of theoretical impulses for the surge of practice-based studies currently sweeping across the social disciplines. Bringing together leading theorists of practices, it will quickly become a key reference point for future practice-focused research in the social sciences.

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The Nexus of Practices: connections, constellations, practitioners brings leading theorists of practice together to provide a fresh set of theoretical impulses for the surge of practice-focused studies currently sweeping across the social disciplines. The book addresses key issues facing practice theory, expands practice theory’s conceptual repertoire, and explores new empirical terrain. With each intellectual move, it generates further opportunities for social research.

More specifically, the book’s chapters offer new approaches to analysing connections within the nexus of practices, to exploring the dynamics and implications of the constellations that practices form, and to understanding people as practitioners that carry on practices. Topics examined include social change, language, power, affect, reflection, large social phenomena, and connectivity over time and space. Contributors thereby counter claims that practice theory cannot handle large phenomena and that it ignores people. The contributions also develop practice theoretical ideas in dialogue with other forms of social theory and in ways illustrated and informed by empirical cases and examples.

The Nexus of Practices will quickly become an important point of reference for future practice-focused research in the social sciences.