WPT - Workshop Practice Theory
The Lecture and Workshop Series on Practice Theory aims to develop a new perspective on media history and media analysis. It is giving primacy to “practice” while focussing on processes of media production and work. We set out exploring media practices related to “coordination”, “delegation”, “registration & identification”, both with regard to a sound empirical foundation and to theoretical reflection.
These categories are used to investigate media practices that specifically interconnect publics and infrastructures. Our Lecture and Workshop Series on Practice Theory is dedicated to “Theoretical Empiricism” and will assemble international research that addresses questions of theory and empirical research symmetrically. For this purpose, three further categories are brought into play as part of the practice turn, namely repair work and experimentation.
Selected publications
Forthcoming
The publication studies four aspects of the practice turn in media studies: Media history from a praxeological perspective, the practice turn in religion and media studies, the connecting and dividing lines of media theories concerning gender and post_colonial agencies, and a historical and theoretical examination of the current relationship of media theory and practice theory.
Schüttpelz, E., Taha, N., Stolow, J., Dommann, M., & Bergermann, U. (Eds.). (2020). Connect and Divide: The Practice Turn in Media Studies. Zürich: diaphanes.
2019
This paper explores the relationship between knowledge and practice, knowledgeable practices, knowing in practice and knowledge as a situated activity. It traces a tradition of sociological thought in practice theories that derives from studies of scientific knowledge and that challenges the conventional understanding of the ‘social’ as human-centred. The understanding of practice is grounded in an actor-network approach and in feminist Science and Technology Studies.
2018
Gießmann, S. (2018). Für eine Medienpraxistheorie der Delegation. Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, (2), 133–148.
Gießmann, S. (2018). Elemente einer Praxistheorie der Medien. Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 19, 95–109.
2017
Dang-Anh, M., Pfeifer, S., Reisner, C., & Villioth, L. (2017). Medienpraktiken – Situieren, Erforschen, Reflektieren. Eine Einleitung. Navigationen – Zeitschrift Für Medien- Und Kulturwissenschaften, 17 (1), 7–36.
At the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Media Studies the volume asks for the continuing actuality and productivity of Susan Leigh Stars (1954-2010) works on boundary objects, marginality, work, infrastructures and communities of practice. For the first time the seminal works by Star are published in German and are made available in Open Access.
Star, S. L. (2017). Grenzobjekte und Medienforschung. (S. Gießmann & N. Taha, Eds.) (Vol. 10). Bielefeld: transcript.
Potthast, Jörg (2017a): Sozialkonstruktivistische Technikforschung zur Einführung. In: Bauer, Susanne; Torsten Heinemann & Thomas Lemke (eds.) Science and Technology Studies. Klassische Positionen und aktuelle Perspektiven. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 99-122.
The landscape of social theory has changed significantly over the three decades since the publication of Anthony Giddens and Jonathan Turner’s seminal Social Theory Today. Sociologists in the twenty-first century desperately need a new agenda centered around central questions of social theory. In Social Theory Now, Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, and Isaac Ariail Reed set a new course for sociologists, bringing together contributions from the most distinctive sociological traditions in an ambitious survey of where social theory is today and where it might be going.
Potthast, Jörg (2017b): The sociology of conventions and testing. In: Benzecry, Claudio; Monika Krause & Isaac Ariail Reed (eds.) Social theory now. Chicago: UP, 337-360.