Upcoming events

From routine to repetition. Theoretical and methodological reflections on practice theory.

Date:  10.11.2016
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Venue:  Silverstone room
Speaker: Dr Hilmar Schaefer, Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany

The paper centres on the notion of repetition and takes it as the key concept of practice theory. The first part of the paper addresses a widespread bias towards stability and reproduction of the social in practice theory, points towards the need to take account of the dynamics of the social and develops an understanding of repetition, which draws on the poststructuralist positions of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. The second part of the paper outlines three related dimensions of repetition. First, practices repeat themselves. A matrix of practices already exist before a subject comes into being and is continuously shaped in the process of taking up pre-existing practices. Second, practices are repeated by subjects. This dimension refers to the performances of competent bodies and points to the fact that practices need bodies in order to persist in time and space. Third, taking Derrida’s reflection on iterability into consideration, practices are also repeatable. While being in principle comprehensible to others, they are also at the same time susceptible to divergent interpretations, misunderstanding or change of meaning. This stresses the dynamics of repetition and the possibility of change. By thinking of practices in terms of repetitions that link different sites and instances, the methodology of practice theory is to follow the fragile relations which make up the (in)stability of the social, enabling it to grasp the specific contributions of bodies and material artefacts. This opens up sociological theory for analyses into the relationality and heterogeneity of the social as I intend to show in the conclusion of the paper. 

Working to consume: consumers as the missing link in the division of labour

Date: 22.11.2016 
Time:  3:00-4:30 pm
Venue: Silverstone room
Speaker:  Prof Miriam Glucksmann, Professor, University of Essex.
Respondent: Prof Judy Wacjman, Professor, LSE

The labour associated with consumption is not new, but has been rapidly expanding in recent years as a consequence of both socio-economic change and technical innovation. Few goods or services are delivered ‘complete’ to consumers in the sense of being ready for use without further activity, yet the role of consumers in completing a system of provision is rarely acknowledged in theories of either work or consumption. This session argues that the work of consumers is a significant and constantly developing field of work, and proposes a conceptual framework for understanding ‘consumption work’ as part of the division of labour. Recognition of the interdependence between the work undertaken prior to and after the purchase of goods and services problematises any assumption that all post-purchase activity comprises consumption and calls for a conception of the division of labour that extends from the market and world of paid employment to encompass also the usually unpaid labour of the end user. I draw on current international comparative research (the work of food preparation, the household recycling of waste, and installation of domestic broadband) to explore the varieties of consumption work, their shaping by prevailing systems of provision, and their place within the division of labour.

Past events

Bend It Like Sardex: New Perspectives on Sustainable Development

Date: 28th April 2016
Time: 4-5:30 pm
Venue: NAB 2.08
Speaker: Dr Paolo Dini, Associate Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications

Sustainable development depends on a virtuous interaction between economic growth, strong democratic institutions, and technological innovation. These areas of agency depend to different extents on local and global interactions, and evolve at different time scales. In all cases the narrative of development has been dictated by the West for so long that “other" peoples who have followed alternative histories have little choice but to adapt and learn to speak it. The implication is that development carries with it a huge aggregation of power. One of the main challenges in development, therefore, lies in the difficulty to create a safe harbour from global credit shocks and different forms of speculation. Sardex, a B2B, complementary and electronic mutual credit system set up in Sardinia in 2010, has found a way to reinterpret locally the social construction that trumps all others: the creation of money. In other words, Sardex has been able to build such a sea-wall by creating a non-convertible mutual credit system in which the money-creation power is distributed to the circuit members. In this talk I will briefly describe how Sardex works and will analyse it from the sociological monetary theory perspective. In the space of electronic media, the trillions of dollars of daily global forex activity propagating through the global networks are to digital financial data like knowledge is to information, just a higher semantic layer that correlates with macroeconomic indicators. But as the scale of the system decreases the sociological dimension becomes increasingly important and the individual ever more visible. The challenges faced by Sardex, therefore, are huge. Not only does it need the bear the weight of the capitalist storm, but it must build strength internally by connecting the kernel of power in capitalism, one of whose ends they now hold, with institutional learning, good governance, and technological innovation.

Could Problems Take the Place of Knowledge in Digital Societies?

 Date:  Tuesday 15 March 2016
Time:  4-5.30pm
Venue:  The Silverstone Room, Floor 7, Tower 3, LSE
Speaker:  Noortje Marres, Associate Professor and Research Director at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick

  In this talk, Noortje Marres will explore the claim that social inquiry has become problematic in digital societies. Digital ways of knowing society have been widely questioned in recent years, from critiques of online surveillance to the ever growing lists of tools and apps that have been withdrawn because of privacy problems and other allegations of ethical violations (Facebook search graph, girls near me, Samaritan radar, and so on). Strikingly, however, questions of epistemology tend to remain under-explored in these controversies about digital ways of knowing society: the question of whether digital devices allow us (or them) to know society in the way they claim to tends to be overshadowed by more urgent ethical, political and moral issues. Nevertheless, investigating this knowledge dimension is useful, this paper would like to propose, because it brings into focus a much wider potential transformation of digital societies, and digital social inquiry: in these societies, interactivity between social research and social life intensifies to the point that representational assumptions are thrown into crisis, not just intellectually, but publicly.

The Mediated Construction of Reality: Remembering Schutz and Elias

21 May 2015, Andreas Hepp (ZeMKI, University of Bremen) and Nick Couldry (Media and Communications, LSE)

In this presentation Hepp and Couldry outlined the project of their current book, The Mediated Construction of Reality (Polity 2016). The book will offer a critical reevaluation and rearticulation of the social constructivist ambitions of Berger and Luckmann’s 1966 book The Social Construction of Reality while revising an interest in the work of Norbert Elias, particularly his concept of figurations. Elias, they will argue, is a particularly important theorist on whom to draw in making social constructivism ready to face the deep embedding of the social world with digital technologies. Audio.