Looking at Geoff's recent post which asks Jay a question about Latour
reminded me that posts on this list have convinced me I want to look at
Latour--and that the last time I concluded that was after reading the post
Geoff refers to. Going back to that post jogged my memory concerning a
similar resolution about reading more deeply in Bourdieu. I feel that there
is a complex of very interesting ideas and surrounding what have been
called theories of practice and that my self-education has been fun, but
spotty and built around the particular problems I encounter. No doubt such
an approach has its virtues but I am feeling the need to acquire some
broader overview.
Is there anything out there that treats theories of practice as a class,
contrasts this class with other approaches to making sense of our lives,
and discusses the tools and uses of tools of various schools? That track
historical relationships?
I doubt that anyone will be so brave (or see the world as I do _and_ be so
brave) as to cover the whole waterfront. I think I see level of commonality
between, for example, not only Dewey & Mead, Vygotsky & activity theory,
distributed cognition, and anthropological approaches which seem to be the
home of various list members but also Heidegger, Wittgenstein, gestalt,
Foucault, Bourdieu, ethnomethodology, some classical sociology, philosophy
of science (Latour falls in here), some technology studies, and semotics.
Most of this is simply my trying to make sense of an array of approaches
that seem to overlap in valuable ways but which array different tools to
different ends. I won't have to agree with a particular construction of
their relationship to get a leg up on my own grasp of their relationships.
In part, though, my attention is focused by an spring seminar I am offering
in theories of practice (and practices of theorizing). My reader is already
unwieldy and a construction of the relationships between ideas other than
my own would be valuable to my students.
Books? Articles? Parts of the puzzle? Or perhaps I am just off course
here.........?
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John St. Julien (stjulien who-is-at uiuc.edu)
Rm 388 Education, MC 708
1310 S Sixth St.
Department of Curriculum & Instruction,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Champaign, IL 61820
(217) 333-2319
http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/stjulien