PROJECT OVERVIEW:
PRAXIS OF CHANGE
The Praxis Of Change research project explores the perennial and ubiquitous nature of change with the aim of amplifying praxis dedicated to understanding, navigating, and shaping change in the 21st century and beyond.
Global challenges and opportunities cannot be addressed by dominant paradigm, command and control approaches to understanding, navigating and shaping change, therefore, through post-anthropocentric sociomaterial practices for embracing, embodying, and emboldening change within the biosphere, society, and the everyday, the purpose of this project is to radically reimagine pathways toward symbiotic futures.
Global challenges and opportunities cannot be addressed by dominant paradigm, command and control approaches to understanding, navigating and shaping change, therefore, through post-anthropocentric sociomaterial practices for embracing, embodying, and emboldening change within the biosphere, society, and the everyday, the purpose of this project is to radically reimagine pathways toward symbiotic futures.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
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1. How can processes of perennial & ubiquitous change be understood, navigated, shaped, & radically reimagined for the 21st century & beyond?
2. How might post-anthropocentric social practice theory disrupt status quo approaches to understanding, navigating, & shaping perennial & ubiquitous change; shifting from command and control to symbiotic praxis? 3. What kinds of praxis (i.e. transformative theories & practices) do scholar-practitioners engage in when reimagining & contributing toward understanding, navigating, & shaping perennial & ubiquitous change? |
POST-ANTHROPOCENTRIC SOCIAL PRACTICES CAN BE UNDERSTOOD AS:
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- Societally habitual activities that are routinely enacted as meaningful aspects of everyday living, i.e. working, leisure, learning, food production, energy use etc. (Holtz, 2014)
- Social practices can be understood as “the site of the social” (Shove & Walker, 2014) - Social practices comprise the skills, materials, and meanings associated with a given activity by people who are seen as carriers of social practices (Shove et al., 2012) - “...Human beings are agentive actors who co‐create their worlds and their futures” through a “dynamic flow of social practices” (Stetsenko, 2015) - Social practices are sociomaterial integrating bodily, mental, emotional, spiritual, material artifacts, and skills that are routinely enacted as meaningful aspects of everyday living (Holtz, 2014) |
- The elements of social practices are interconnected and cannot be reduced to any one element alone; rather, the elements together interdependently compose social practices across society and in the everyday (Reckwitz, 2002)
- Social practice theory de-centers individual behavior (good or bad) as the primary driver of societal change and instead conceives of people as participants in emergent and entangled posthuman socio-material social practices (Hui et al., 2016) - Through social practice theory social worlds are understood as “complex, emergent properties of repeated patterns of social interaction and the performance of social practices” (Maggs & Robinson, 2020) |