Social Practice Framework Research Articles

A Social Practice Perspective of Ireland's Lobster Cultural Food Heritage

The research examines integrating the Slow Food Movement (SFM) with Ireland's lobster industry, emphasising preserving local culinary heritage as crucial for Sustainable Food Systems. This heritage includes both tangible elements, like agricultural practices and intangible ones, such as traditional food preparation. Slow food aims to protect these traditions from the homogenisation of food production. Using Social Practice Theory, the research analyses lobster consumption in Ireland, underscoring its symbolic importance in Irish culture to develop a novel framework adapted from the Social Practice Framework. The study combines qualitative interviews and secondary data analysis to explore lobster's role in Irish culinary heritage and its potential for promoting sustainable seafood consumption. Results from the study highlight the critical role of Irish lobster fishing communities in maintaining cultural food heritage, with traditional practices contributing to ecological and economic sustainability. The SFM influences lobster consumption, supporting sustainable and culturally important food practices. This research underscores the intricate link between tradition and sustainability, suggesting a model to balance cultural integrity with sustainable practices, contributing to a more culturally informed and environmentally conscious food consumption approach.

Exploring the perceptions of early childhood educators on the delivery of multilingual education in Australia: Challenges and opportunities

Australia lags behind other linguistic and culturally diverse countries in policy direction and approaches to early multilingual education, despite well-established research documenting the intellectual, linguistic, sociocultural, familial and economic benefits of multilingualism in the early years. This is evidenced by the absence of a national policy framework that addresses early multilingual education in Australia, and the relatively limited attention given to research on the role of early childhood education in supporting and extending children's home languages. Within this context, using data from a larger study on early multilingual education, this article builds on empirical data from interviews with four educators representing two early childhood education settings. This article aims to examine the educators’ perspectives of their settings’ policy and practice, in the absence of broader curriculum frameworks, regarding their role in extending children's home languages. Despite this policy gap, the authors explore how these settings facilitated the diverse linguistic and cultural assets of children and families by supporting and extending children's home languages. Drawing on Bourdieu's framework of social practice, they examine various pedagogical approaches implemented at the settings that validated children's multilingualism, and explore the range of opportunities afforded to multilingual children in using their home languages at the settings. The findings reveal that despite the educators’ well-developed understandings of the benefits of early multilingualism, there is some confusion regarding appropriate pedagogical approaches for multilingual support in early childhood education.

Fostering food preservation practice: Lessons from a community train-the-trainer program on Canada's west coast

Local food systems programs in Canada's rural and remote communities support residents to improve their access to healthy food by strengthening various social practices within the system. Designing programs to strengthen social practices can help address food insecurity by providing a support structure where people can build competencies and access materials necessary to engage in practices like food preservation, and make meanings that will encourage them to sustain their engagement. The elements needed for successfully establishing a social practice–competencies, materials, and meanings–must be present. Unfortunately, food preservation programs in Canada's local food systems have not fully embedded structures to bring all three elements of social practice together or undertake a participant-focused program assessment. Consequently, we do not know the potential of local food preservation to meet peoples' various needs or the challenges that program participants experience practicing food preservation. This paper uses a social practice framework to determine the extent to which a community food preservation program on Canada's west coast strengthened the three elements of social practice. Findings from interviews show that in line with the paper's three objectives, participants of a community train-the-trainer program (1) built and shared food preservation competencies, (2) accessed materials to practice food preservation, and (3) formed meanings to support their continuous engagement in food preservation. The paper shows how a social practice framework can support a participant-focused program evaluation and provide a practical and straightforward tool for assessing food systems programs.

Праворадикальный дискурс этничности в ультрарадикальных украинских сообществах Рунета: прогнозы и оценка угроз

The article is devoted to right-wing radical traditions in the Internet space as a source of political, ideological, racial, national or religious xenophobia, as well as hostility towards any social or ethnic group. Right-wing radical political traditions are a powerful ideological concept that, hidden within the framework of social practices, lays the motives for potentially possible or realizable conflicts. These practices are implemented in the Internet space. The author shows Internet as a global social and communication network that provides new tools for both constructive and destructive influence on users. Social networks are a platform for various kinds of ultra-radical organizations that use information warfare technologies primarily against young people in the virtual space. The paper determines the theoretical and ideological significance of the phenomenon of political right-wing radicalism in Russian socio-political practices in the virtual space.

Taking sustainable eating practices from niche to mainstream: the perspectives of Swedish food-provisioning actors on barriers and potentials

The food system is a major driver of anthropogenic environmental impacts and in Sweden a sizeable proportion of the country’s relatively large per capita ecological footprint is attributable to food. In short, sustainable eating practices need to become mainstream. Actors within the food-provisioning system likely have valuable insights into how such a transition could be enabled. This article presents the results of a qualitative study that aimed to examine the perspectives of these individuals on such a transition in Sweden using a social practice framework to identify framings of barriers and potentials for mainstreaming sustainable eating practices. We found that conventional framings and models for explaining change and transitions dominate. These approaches center on providing alternative food products, with some attention devoted to normalizing sustainable eating through product design, communication, and marketing. However, exceptions to these strategies include calls for redefining business profitability in terms of human and planetary health and notions of a decentralized food-provisioning system consisting of small-scale actors and limited by the regional and seasonal supply of food. Our analysis suggests that interventions for mainstreaming sustainable eating practices need to move beyond a constrained recrafting of mainstream eating practices and toward systematic practice substitution that favors considerations regarding how eating practices connect to other practices that constitute people’s everyday lives. We conclude by discussing implications for the food-provisioning system and suggest directions for further research that could lead to the development of strategies for mainstreaming sustainable eating practices in Sweden and elsewhere.

Conflicts associated with migratory processes: a political perspective

The objective of the research was to discuss the conflictive nature of the migratory processes that occur in the world today. The need to adapt and solve daily problems inevitably requires the State to implement international, state and regional standards for the implementation of the rights and opportunities of migrants both in the territory of the donor country and in the territory of the recipient country. On the other hand, we see an increase in the phobia of migrants and the characteristic racism of countries where labor migration flows are increasing. In methodological terms, use was made of hermeneutics close to political ethnography. It is concluded that, for a long time, the criticism of racism has developed as a criticism of colonialism, Nazism, including anti-Semitism, and in modern times as a political criticism of migration-phobia and nationalism, in which the Racist speech and practices have found and do find obvious and complete expression. Migrant phobia is a concept that latently generates motives of political, ideological, racial, national, religious hatred, xenophobia, or hostility towards an ethnic or social group within the framework of social practices.

A critical ethnographic study using Bourdieu’s social practice framework to explain vertical and horizontal abuse (VHA) within an undergraduate nurse simulation environment

BackgroundVertical and horizontal abuse (VHA) has been reported in the nursing literature for over 30 years. VHA has also been referred to as workplace bullying, incivility, harassment, and mobbing. Previous work has explicitly focussed on VHA in nurses working in the industry, while other studies explore VHA generally in nursing students. However, there has been little attention paid to episodes of VHA, which may occur among nursing students learning in simulated environments. AimThis study aimed to identify factors which enabled episodes of VHA among second-year nursing students learning in a simulated hospital environment, through the application of Bourdieu’s social practice theory. MethodThis research used a critical ethnographic approach. Methods included observations, and semi-structured interviews with student (n = 40) and academic participants (n = 3) from a second-year undergraduate nursing program. ResultsEpisodes of VHA were evident among second-year nursing students and academics learning and teaching in a simulated environment. This study showed that the organisational and the social spaces of learning and teaching had been influenced by healthcare industry culture and the challenge for capital within the university. This has resulted in the simulated laboratory, becoming a space for cultural reproduction. ConclusionThis study calls for both an educational and organisational response to the findings. An educational response would require a curriculum review to reveal and acknowledge symbolic violence which may be embedded. An organisational response to recognize the symbiotic relationship between the higher education and health care sectors which may result in the reproduction of VHA is also required.

A iniciativa do magistrado para produção de provas no processo penal brasileiro conforme um olhar foucaultiano

O presente trabalho consiste em um estudo da construção do princípio da verdade real no processo penal brasileiro e suas implicações quanto a legitimidade ativa do magistrado na produção probatória, mediante o marco teórico das práticas sociais e do controle do discurso foucaultiano. A problemática da pesquisa surgiu com a constatação de que, após a promulgação da Constituição da República Federativa do Brasil de 1988, o atual Código de Processo Penal não passou por significativas reformas, persistindo as normas que dispõem sobre os poderes probatórios do juiz na persecução penal. O método utilizado é o indutivo. Por fim, tem-se que, a partir de um olhar foucaultiano, na realidade o discurso da busca por uma verdade real é uma estratégia conveniente às instituições que detêm a jurisdição penal, pois representa interesses escusos aos das partes e às finalidades das garantias e direitos fundamentais insculpidos na Constituição Federal de 1988.

Unfolding Chinese tourist shopping practices: an observational study

Purpose This paper aims to draw upon the notion of practice as performance from social practice theory to unravel the onsite process of Chinese outbound tourist shopping. Design/methodology/approach The study took a mixed methods approach. Qualitative data were collected via 110 participant observations conducted in Australia, and quantitative techniques were used to analyse the data in Leximancer. Findings Chinese tourist shopping practices are performed on site through a range of intra-personal and inter-personal embodied actions, with the patterns these actions constitute being different across shopping settings. The frequency of inter-personal actions also reflects the importance of social interactions and communications in the shopping performances of Chinese tourists, some of which are conducted with people not present in the settings via social media. Originality/value This study uses a social practice framework from sociology to examine in detail how Chinese outbound tourists shop on site. The embodied actions identified in the study present a rich and detailed picture of the flow of Chinese tourist shopping performances. This allows for improved understanding of the forces for change in this aspect of Chinese outbound tourism.

Anger in action: Socio-pragmatic analysis of verbal exchanges in UK parliamentary debates

Abstract This article is an attempt to investigate theoretically and empirically how the emotion of anger is used in political discourse. The descriptive analysis is centred around the conversational analysis of anger, as present in the verbal exchanges in the UK parliamentary debates, correlated with the variables of power (P), social distance (D), and the concept of valence. The key idea underbracing this article is that affect permeates social communication. The central claims of this study focus on explaining how the socio-pragmatic variables of (P) and (D) weave the fabric of conflict talk and how they constitute the springboard for structuring the affective message in a tangible framework of social practice. The questions that inspire the current paper are the following: (1) How does anger determine the relationships of power and distance? (2) What is the reaction of the Offender and Defender in anger-driven interaction? (3) Are the roles of the ‘Emoter’ and ‘Receiver’ of anger evenly distributed in verbal communication? (4) Are valence and its strength indicators of anger experience? The paper concentrates on three theoretical problems including: (1) anger as an intrinsically threatening emotion, (2) anger as a constituent of context, and (3) anger as a gradable emotion. In addition, this study aims to explore how threats to positive face value in the form of unambiguous literal meaning that convey evaluative load (accusations, criticism, insult, irony, imposition etc.), explicitly provide information on P and D shifts in anger-driven discursive action.

The Relational Essence of Natural Recovery: Natural Recovery as Relational Practice

This article offers a relational practice view to conceptualize natural recovery from addiction concerns. Through the lens of a social practice framework, the processes of natural recovery are seen as specific relational trajectories or transformative pathways involving relationships between humans, non-humans, communities, and philosophies, rather than as a process of symptom elimination. We argue that this kind of conceptualization of recovery acknowledges the many people who manage to recover without treatment or professional help, known as natural recovery. In addiction practices, we can see the dominance of pathologizing interpersonal patterns (PIPs) that maintain the addictive process. Over the course of recovery, we can see the dominance of healing interpersonal patterns (HIPs) that support the recovery process. To utilize this understanding as practitioners, we need to help nourish the platforms where the healing interactional patterns in daily life might be supported and maintained. While this reduces power from the position of “expert” in the biomedical model, it also provides more optimism, as members of the social network we can directly contribute to those healing interpersonal patterns—by the way we relate to, support, and engage with other people.

China-to-UK Student Migration and Pro-environmental Behaviour Change: A Social Practice Perspective

Significant life-course changes can be ‘windows of opportunity’ to disrupt practices. Using qualitative focus group data, this article examines whether the life-course change experienced by Chinese students migrating to the UK has an effect on environmentally impactful practices. It does so by examining how such practices are understood and performed by Chinese and UK students living in their own countries, and contrasting them with those of Chinese students in the UK. Using a social practice framework, these findings suggest that practices do change, and this change can be conceptualised using a framework of competences, materials, and meanings. The findings show meanings – the cultural and social norms ascribed to pro-environmental behaviour – to be particularly susceptible to the influence of ‘communities of practice’ where immigrants and natives mix, with pro-environmental behaviour change resulting from assimilation and mimesis rather than normative engagement.

International migration and dietary change in Mexican women from a social practice framework

Migration from lower- and middle-income to high-income countries is associated with dietary change, and especially with the adoption of a modern, less healthy diet. In this article we analyze the dietary changes experienced by Mexican migrants, employing as a theoretical framework the concept of social practice. According to this framework, practices integrate material elements, meanings and competences that provide their conditions of possibility. Practices are shared by members of social groups, and interact with other competing or reinforcing practices. Between 2014 and 2015, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 27 women, international return migrants living in Tijuana, Mexico. The interview guide asked about history of migration and dietary change. We found three main areas of dietary change: from subsistence farming to ready meals, abundance vs. restriction, and adoption of new food items. The first one was associated with changes in food procurement and female work: when moving from rural to urban areas, participants substituted self-produced for purchased food; and as migrant women joined the labor force, consumption of ready meals increased. The second was the result of changes in income: participants of lower socioeconomic position modified the logic of food acquisition from restriction to abundance and back, depending on the available resources. The third change was relatively minor, with occasional consumption of new dishes or food items, and was associated with exposure to different cuisines and with learning how to cook them. Public health efforts to improve the migrants’ diets should take into account the constitutive elements of dietary practices, instead of isolating individuals from their social contexts.

Changing household water consumption practices after drought in three Australian cities

One of the major challenges of moving toward more sustainable and water sensitive futures is to change people's everyday water consumption habits. The experience of the Millennium drought in Australia (1996–2010) and water restrictions introduced during that time intervened to change everyday water practices in specific ways creating durable change in some practices and mutable change in others. Drawing on focus groups with 62 people, in three diverse Australian cities, a rich picture of diverse water practices emerges. Using a specific social practice framework we explore the key practices of garden watering and showering and tease out the elements in each – we discuss how and why there has been more innovation and change in garden practices than shower practices. We argue that sustained water restrictions drive material change in households and these material changes appear to be more effective in changing water use than transforming water saving competencies or meanings alone. Further, we show that the commitment and resistance to water saving has a spatial context – data from three different cities allowed us to see how location, climate and policy responses interweave with everyday practices. The implication of our research is that policy interventions should be 'fit for purpose' according to social practices in spatial context.

Marketing education and the employability challenge

A major external challenge faced by UK higher education institutions is employability. For some academics, this poses a challenge and many feel it is not their role to help students acquire the generic employability attributes required in the workplace. In this paper, we demonstrate how innovative teaching practice at a UK Business School has ensured the development of good marketing subject learning, whilst at the same time has provided students with an opportunity to acquire generic employability attributes. This has been achieved by approaching an academic staple: the literature review as a series of well-designed tasks in which students learn through participation in rather than individually. The approach is based on a social practice framework and contributes to assertions in the literature that good learning can lead to good employability.

DISCURSOS ÉTICO-POLÍTICOS Y PRÁCTICAS SOCIALES COTIDIANAS EN LAS COMUNIDADES ZAPATISTAS

RESUMENEl movimiento zapatista ha tenido un gran entramado de prácticas sociales y discursos que remiten a cuestiones de índole ético-política. En nuestra investigación nos centramos en la descripción, interpretación y análisis de estos. Se utilizó la metodología cualitativa recurriendo a la revisión documental y se realizó un ejercicio etnográfico en el que se empleó la técnica de observación participante; los datos obtenidos se procesaron en base al análisis interpretacional. La noción de práctica social se abordó desde la perspectiva de Pierre Bourdieu y su concepto de habitus así como desde la teoría de la estructuración de Anthony Giddens. La noción de discurso es conceptualizada como una práctica social. En la investigación se describe como el entramado de prácticas y discursos ético-políticos en las comunidades zapatistas son posibilitadores de nuevas acciones y que ayudan a la continuidad y las transformaciones del movimiento ético-político.

Beyond Abstraction: Philosophy as a Practical Qualitative Research Method

In this paper, I take up a discussion of what philosophic method is, and why it should be viewed as an important qualitative research method. After clarifying the nature of philosophic method within the larger framework of social practices, I argue that philosophy is important to both practice and research, and I suggest that philosophers work in concert with other qualitative researchers. I argue that recently (relatively speaking) philosophy has been viewed with some understandable disdain among both practitioners and researchers as an enjoyable but abstract (and therefore useless) social practice. That perception can be fixed but only if philosophical research becomes once again explicitly relevant to practice (particularly educational practice). Finally, I provide a brief example of how philosophy can indeed be relevant to practice from a recent symposium that I participated in on reflection in service-learning education.

On the societal nature of praxis and organic research

In its focus on social practices, the feature article presents an interesting theoretical framework for rethinking not only where and how knowing and learning in science education exhibit themselves but also we might change our own research practice. The framework is not new to me, as I have advocated it explicitly for more than 15 years. But over time it became apparent to me that some particularities of participation in practice may be grounded more strongly in an orientation towards the societal nature of any human praxis. In this forum contribution, I present a theoretical approach built on societal-historical activity theory that also takes activism as a major category for theorizing participation. This approach not only covers the extent of the social practice framework but also allows us to make thematic the production of inequity and restrictions to access science and engineering that are characteristic of many societies.

Against the Odds: The Survival of Traditional Food Knowledge in a Rural Alberta Community

The globalization and industrialization of the agri-food system has been linked to declining knowledge and skills in the general population related to growing, preserving and cooking food. In rural communities, loss of this knowledge and associated culture and traditions has been further exacerbated by depopulation due to outmigration and the subsequent erosion of social and physical infrastructure. Counter to this trend of food deskilling, however, are the efforts of individuals who are actively working to maintain and perpetuate traditional food practices. The purpose of this research was to understand what factors motivate and enable the preservation of gardening, cooking and canning skills among a group of women and their children in a small rural community in Alberta. Qualitative research methods were used to gather relevant data, which were analyzed using a social practice theoretical lens. Findings from this study revealed four conditions influencing the continuation of these social practices among the research participants: the experience and history of scarcity; normative expectations; a close connection to family; and, development of a community of practice. This study illustrates the relevance of a social practice framework for examining food knowledge and skills, and points to the potential of this approach for understanding and promoting pro-environmental behaviour and sustainable consumption in the food system.

A Social Practice Approach to Understanding Teachers' Learning to Use Technology and Digital Literacies in the Classroom

Current educational policy in Mexico, as in many other parts of the world, leans heavily on teachers to use computers in their classrooms. This article explores under what conditions teachers are willing to learn about and use digital technology in their work. The authors' central premise is that incorporating technology into teaching is a complex process that includes redefining classroom relationships, re-interpreting the curriculum, and expanding the notion of academic literacy beyond written texts. Using a social practice framework, they present data from a collaborative experience between teachers and researchers who share knowledge and know-how about how to use computers for academic purposes and co-participate in the design of academic activities for their classrooms. This article shows that in order for teachers to use digital technology, they need to participate in viable transitional practices that allow them to foray into the new, take risks in a safe environment, and construct new approaches to what counts as academic work, classroom interaction, curriculum and evaluation.