Form Of Practical Knowledge Research Articles

“I never look at a temperature device, I just feel it”: Practical knowledge, smart technologies, and heating and cooling practices between Denmark and Australia

Drawing on insights from Danish and Australian households, this article explores the role of practical knowledge in shaping the energy-intensive practices of domestic heating and cooling. Alongside technological interventions designed to shift and shed energy consumption, prevailing discourses regarding heating and cooling regularly emphasise the importance of householders rationally and efficiently using energy at home. Conversely, this study shows that householders routinely draw on practical forms of knowledge, including embodied understandings and everyday know-how, as they heat and cool their homes. Drawing on social practice theories, this article presents insights from 28 ethnographic interviews and home tours conducted in Greater Copenhagen, Denmark, and Canberra, Australia. Both sites incorporate emerging smart technologies which aim to shift and shed household energy demand, including through better facilitating resident's management of the indoor climate. While the selected field sites differ importantly in terms of the technologies and infrastructures present, as well as the prevailing cultures and climate, the cross-national analysis shows a conceptual overlap in the way that residents in these divergent contexts draw on their lay understandings to pursue thermally desirable home environments. The findings thereby highlight how in the course of everyday life technical and ostensibly rational forms of knowledge are often contextualised and operationalised through their combination with practical knowledge. As such, this article seeks to complement existing research into the smart infrastructures increasingly involved in household energy management by demonstrating and advocating for a fuller consideration of the role played by practical knowledge and everyday experience.

PELATIHAN PEMBUATAN IKLAN PEMASARAN PRODUK BERSERTA AUDIO DENGAN FORMAT WAV DAN APLIKASI WIDEO DI SMK BM BUDI AGUNG MEDAN

Marketing advertisements usually introduce and promote a product publicly in the form of images and sounds to the public as a sales strategy to expand sales targets throughout the world. This advertising activity is a very important part of expanding sales reach by using social media platforms, one of which is multimedia-based advertising, which is a combination of graphics, animation, sound, and user interactivity. This training is aimed at students at SMK Budi Agung majoring in multimedia-based marketing in the form of practical knowledge using flash to display animation and sound using the Wideo application in WAV format. Implementation of this training as a community service program as tridharma higher education in the field of education as a routine every semester.

Colloquy with Juan José García-Noblejas on understanding communication from the perspective of Aristotle's Poetics

In this interview we will explore García-Noblejas’ thought on public communication, which is deeply marked by his interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics and influenced by some contemporary thinkers. For García-Noblejas, communication is a service and a form of practical knowledge with five dimensions: ethics, politics, rhetoric, aesthetics, and poetics. Poetics is the most important of these, since its symbolic perspective of the representation of human actions allows us to deeply understand the narrative and dramatic texts typical of journalism, advertising, and propaganda, as well as written and audiovisual fiction. Poetics is the art of creating “possible worlds” in which the reader/spectator recognizes himself (or herself) and with which he dialogues starting from his own identity. García-Noblejas defends public communication that is based on the gift of self and looks to community fruitfulness. He also discusses some frequent pathologies in the media. Finally, he proposes his theory of the Second Navigation to discern the meaning of a text and explains why it is necessary to give a transcendent meaning to the Aristotelian concept of catharsis.

Imagining Futures: Theorizing the Practical Knowledge of Future-making

The study of future-making – how practitioners make and enact imagined futures – has become a cornerstone for understanding the temporal dynamics of organization, strategy and entrepreneurship. This article investigates the texture of practical knowledge that enables entrepreneuring practitioners to jointly address the challenges inherent to future-making. We conduct a video ethnography of a business modelling programme producing 79 hours of audio-visual recordings. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we unpack different forms of practical knowledge that simultaneously binds practitioners in a web of mutual expectations and establishes modes of thinking and acting for the creation of imagined futures. This contributes to existing studies by demonstrating that the discursive, embodied and material dimensions of future-making are fundamentally entangled within textures of practical knowledge. Consequently, we shift the mode of theorizing towards non-representationalism, which opens up new frontiers for future research to observe, participate and reflect with practitioners on the textures of practical knowledge constitutive of future-making in different circumstances and contexts.

On God’s Practical Knowledge of Creation

AbstractThis article explores a question that exercised Thomas Aquinas, the nature of God’s knowledge of creation, and more particularly, its practical character. It first sets out the logic of Aquinas’s position, articulated especially in Summa Theologiae I, q. 14, a. 16, that God does have practical knowledge of creation, but that this is contained within God’s speculative self‐knowledge. It suggests that this position raises questions about the adequacy of its treatment of practical knowledge, particularly to do with the central analogy of an artisan’s knowledge of what is made. The article explores these questions, first, by drawing on contemporary philosophical discussions of practical knowledge, and second, by considering a biblical text in which both a form of practical knowledge and of the artisan analogy are prominent: the book of Proverbs.

A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico

A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico

Wildfire forecasting: between criminal act and unintentional events

ABSTRACTForecasting represents the new credo in the reorganization of risks prevention. What does the introduction of such technology mean in terms of fire-fighting practice and policy? By applying Practice-Based Studies, forecasting practice emerges as a form of practical knowledge resulting from the alignment of the forecasting tool with foresters’ former competences, expertise, practices and tools. The acknowledgement of practical and scientific knowledge linked to forecasting allows the identification of the different organizational cultures linked to fire-fighting. For foresters wildfire is mainly a criminal act and forecasting a policing activity. This use of the artefact silences alternative approaches to wildfire-fighting such as the prevention of unintentional acts. While forecasting technology may reproduce forms of blindness in the future, anticipation becomes then an interesting research objet, embedded in dominant professional cultures and forms of knowledge.

The didactics of vocational Bildung: how stories matter in VET research

In the research on education, the field roughly covered by the concept of Bildung has seen a wide-ranging discussion philosophically but less has been said and done from an empirical and vocational perspective. Bildung includes matters such as: formation of character, ethical and aesthetic knowledge/capability, capacity for wise deliberation and reflection as well as the development of personal autonomy. The focus here is on how narratives about teaching and curricula, both enacted and experienced, can be used to articulate significant aspects of Bildung-related practical knowledge. The empirical basis for this draws on a variety of narrative sources. By presenting, comparing and discussing narratives, it will be argued that there is a number of Bildung-related educational matters, not least in vocational education and training, where a narrative articulation can contribute. These can be differentiated in at least five groups: enriching knowledge of vocational tasks; conceptual development and critical reflection; advancement of practice; development of ‘practice fields’ and the articulation of patterns of vocational Bildung affordances. In distinguishing these different ways in which vocational Bildung as a form of practical knowledge can be enriched through narrative studies, the article contributes to our capacity for doing systematic research in the subject area.

The Value of Practical Knowledge: Against Engstrom’s Constructivism

AbstractStephen Engstrom has recently offered an excellent account of morality as practical cognition. He emphasizes the formal conditions of practical knowledge, which he finds in Kant. Engstrom also aligns his account with constructivism, claiming that value is constructed through these formal conditions, chiefly universalisability. In this paper, I employ a variant of Hegel’s empty-formalism objection to challenge the moral significance of the mere form of practical knowledge. I hope to show that Engstrom’s constructivism is neither philosophically compelling, nor required by the rest of his position. In its place, I propose a realist understanding of the value of practical knowledge.

The Form of Practical Knowledge and Implicit Cognition

The Form of Practical Knowledge and Implicit Cognition

Shaping the subject of incontinence. Relating experience to knowledge

In this paper, we empirically analyse the role of experience and its relation to knowledge by working through a case study of a website for people with incontinence. The term “knowledge by experience” may be confusing if experience is framed as “situations someone has lived through” which then come to function as the foundation for experiential knowledge. Foundationalist framing of experiential knowledge leads to problems of “indistinctness”, “incontestability” and “authenticity” of experiential knowledge. The analysis shows how participants structure and process their experiences, for example by collecting, relating and reviewing individual moments and actively interpreting them. Not every experience counts as valid input for “knowledge”. We suggest that in relation to knowledge “experience” is better understood as “having experience with” rather than as “having lived through” something. Experience as “being experienced” is then not something that “grounds” experiential knowledge, but takes the shape of know-how, interpretive possibilities and skills that are not exclusively tied to a particular subject. Interpreting experiential knowledge like this specifies it as a form of practical knowledge that may be contested by (more) experienced others and can be transferred to others still trying to master skills. These skills may help in an attempt to shape experience in new ways.

Permaculture Design: On the Practice of Radical Imagination

Permaculture design is a concept that aims at transforming not only agriculture, but also city planning, architecture, development, etc. In short it aims to change human habitats. It is part of a new ecological paradigm that is currently spreading in popularity from the urban gardening movement to various other alternative movements such as the slow movement, sustainable architecture, etc. Permaculture design defines itself as building on systems theory (as formulated in particular by Howard Thomas Odum and Christopher Alexander). However I would like to propose that the afterlife of systems theory as expressed in the concept of permaculture, first developed by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, should not only be sought in theoretical and analytical discourse. Instead we can understand permaculture as a form of figurative, ecological reasoning; a form of radical imagination drawn from the composite knowledge of a heterogeneous network of actors. Permaculture is thus neither a branch of environmental science nor an environmental political movement. Rather the philosophy of permaculture design questions the division between theory and practice or between rationality and sensibility. In permaculture design, these modes of knowledge are inextricably linked in explorations of patterns. In this article, I attempt to delineate the ways in which permaculture design is rooted in the practical knowledge of systems. I shall limit myself to exploratory drilling, as it were, in three aspects of permaculture design thought. First, I describe permaculture thought as a form of practical knowledge that generated through a kind of visual thinking in patterns. Second, I describe permaculture thought as a type of thinking in which radical imagination and speculation play an active role. Third, I present permaculture thought as systems theory thought. However it departs from the idea of control inherent to systems theory, drawing instead from the equally popular (and colorful) Gaia hypothesis, which posits Earth as an intelligent, material assembly that modifies thought processes.

Knowing Patients

Science and technology studies concerned with the study of lay influence on the sciences usually analyze either the political or the normative epistemological consequences of lay interference. Here I frame the relation between patients, knowledge, and the sciences by opening up the question: How can we articulate the knowledge that patients develop and use in their daily lives (patient knowledge) and make it transferable and useful to others, or, `turn it into science’? Elsewhere, patient knowledge is analyzed either as essentially different from or similar to medical knowledge. The category of experiential knowledge is vague and is used to encompass many types of experience, whereas the knowledge of the `expert patient’ may be assumed to have the shape of up-to-date medical information. This paper shows through a case study of people with severe lung disease that patient knowledge can be understood as a form of practical knowledge that patients use to translate medical and technical knowledge into something useful to their daily life with disease. Patients coordinate this with homegrown know-how and advice from fellow patients, weighing different values - of which `taking good care of one’s body’ is but one - that may conflict in a specific situation. These practices result in sets of techniques that may be made useful to others. The paper argues for two alternatives to state-of-the-art medical research to turn patient knowledge into science: ethnographies of knowledge practices (how patients know) and the collection and making accessible of techniques (what patients know).

Contextualisation and learning: a comparative study of student teachers and student nurses

This article uses an activity–theoretical perspective on context to explore final-year student nurses’ and student teachers’ perceptions of learning in their professional programmes. We analyse focus group interviews about critical aspects of teaching and nursing preparation and articulate processes of learning within and across coursework and fieldwork training. The comparative analysis reveals particular differences between students’ perceptions whereas student nurses, especially in the final year of their programme, experience that both college teachers and practice supervisors help them to contextualise theoretical and practical forms of knowledge so as to enhance their learning, student teachers portray their four-year programme as largely disconnected from the school setting with significant negative learning effects. We discuss possible explanations for these differences and argue that situated approaches should be expanded to better explain and facilitate the process of meaningful learning and thinking.

The Patient 2. Many

The emancipation of patients, their organisation and their participation in medical research and health care policy has expanded tremendously. With these successful attempts at participation, however, there is one problem that has so far hardly been articulated and seems to be unrecognized in conceptions of the Patient 2.0 as an informed and active patient. This is the assumption that there is only one kind of knowledge that matters to patients, and to which they can contribute: biomedical knowledge. The paper explores different kinds of knowledge that patients need to engage with in their life with chronic disease, and articulates a particular form of knowledge – patient knowledge – as a form of practical knowledge that patients use and develop in order to relate to medical knowledge and live their daily lives with disease. The analysis of a small webcam community of Dutch patients with an incurable lung disease will show that patients need to translate medical knowledge in order to make it useful to their daily lives, and need to coordinate health care aims with other aims in life. Rather than looking for ways to legitimate their knowledge, patients try out strategies that may work in specific situations, even if temporarily. The paper argues for a better support of the development of patient knowledge and the practices for developing it, rather than singularly equipping people with medical knowledge that is often oriented towards cure rather than towards living with a disease that will not go away.

A HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER: REMARKS ON ENGSTROM'S THE FORM OF PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE

In the opening frame of Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, heat waves rising from the high desert reduce the visual field to an indeterminate blur. Gradually out of this undifferentiation, a distant figure on a horse emerges. It is as though this stranger has willed himself into existence—as though the thought of his mission makes itself real though an understanding of its own efficacy, and constitutes the stranger as the subject of the film that follows. Moreover, since the efficacy of this thought originates in the consciousness of its own goodness—his mission is for good—this judgment constitutes an audience who can share the same volition and wish for its success. A morality tale follows in which the self-conceit of the people of Lago is humbled by a figure whose identity is at some level familiar, but obscured by their own misrepresentations of self-worth. In the closing frame, unhappiness now reapportioned to vice, the stranger recedes back into the same undifferentiation, his mission complete— brought to fruition but not to an end, since ‘true ends’, as it were, ‘never bring themselves to an end’ (48). In the Form of Practical Knowledge, Stephen Engstrom does not drift, but he does traverse the high plains of Kant’s practical philosophy by a path that lifts our understanding of Kant to a higher plane. He connects Kant’s Categorical Imperative with reason by showing how it can be unfolded out of the very idea of practical knowledge of objective good, where the idea of practical knowledge leads to the conditions of universal validity expressed in the Formula of Universal Law. He then traces its substantive implications for conduct through its application in the ‘primitive act’ of making happiness an end. The Form of Practical Knowledge is a remarkably rich, insightful and deep book, and many ideas in the book deserve attention. With some difficulty, I limit myself to two—his innovative interpretation of the Categorical Imperative, and a conception of certain cognitive acts that offers insight into Kantian spontaneity as norm-guided self-determination. I’ll begin with the latter.

The Esoteric In Postmodernism

Why should one study Western esotericism today, and why is it legitimate to devote an issue of the European Journal of English Studies to this subject? Esotericism is usually associated with secret systems of thought, usually of syncretic character, associating programmes of religious enlightenment (e.g. Gnosticism, or Pietism) and more practical forms of knowledge (alchemy, astrology). Although the scientific revolution dismantled the foundations of the esoteric world view, representatives of modern and postmodern counterculture (such as the ideologues of the 1960s ‘New Age’) blame the problems of our age for the failure of the ‘Enlightenment project’ and the loss of a unified and holistic world view. There is much work to be done in uncovering the history of British esotericism and in this complex, interdisciplinary research (involving fields as diverse as religious studies, anthropology, and cultural, art and literary history) English Studies should have a vital role in revisiting literary and artworks, language use, and ideologies as demonstrated in the essays of this issue.

The form of practical knowledge: a study of the categorical imperative

The form of practical knowledge: a study of the categorical imperative

The Enduring Dilemmas of Realism in International Relations

The present article argues that the discipline of international relations is bound to repeat its rounds of debates about realism as long as the underlying dynamic intrinsic to the realist tradition is not understood. Whereas present debates tend to criticize contemporary realists for going astray (an unhappy conjuncture, as it were), this article claims that there exists a systematic theoretical problem with the way realist theorizing has developed within international relations, and consisting of two fundamental dilemmas. The first or ‘identity dilemma’, the choice between distinctiveness and determinacy, results from the characteristics of the central concept ‘power’ — realists either keep a distinct and single micro–macro link through concepts of power/influence which provides indeterminate explanations or they improve their explanations, but must do so by relaxing their assumptions, thereby losing distinctiveness. The second or ‘conservative dilemma’, the choice between tradition and justification, results from the fact that realism is a form of practical knowledge, which needs some form of justification other than the recourse to mere tradition. Hence, realists either update the practical knowledge of a shared diplomatic culture while losing scientific credibility or, reaching for logical persuasiveness, cast their maxims in a scientific mould which distorts the realist tradition. Realism in international relations is fated to return to these dilemmas until it abandons its own identity as derived from the ‘first debate’ between realism and idealism. By doing so, however, it would be free to join a series of metatheoretical and theoretical research avenues which it has so far left to other schools of thought.

Learning by developing knowledge networks

A central challenge for research on how we should prepare students to manage crossing boundaries between different knowledge settings in life long learning processes is to identify those forms of knowledge that are particularly relevant here. In this paper, we develop by philosophical means the concept of adialectical system as a general framework to describe the development of knowledge networks that mark the starting point for learning processes, and we use semiotics to discuss (a) the epistemological thesis that any cognitive access to our world of objects is mediated by signs and (b)diagrammatic reasoning andabduction as those forms of practical knowledge that are crucial for the development of knowledge networks. The richness of this theoretical approach becomes evident by applying it to an example of learning in a biological research context. At the same time, we take a new look at the role of mathematical knowledge in this process.