Ideas Playgrounds

Ideas Playgrounds are one-off events that present new ideas for discussion and feedback.

4th December 2024 at 11am-12.00am UK time: on the plasticity of plastics and other materials

In less than a century, plastics have saturated all manner of social practices and society ‘at large’. Much is written on the historical multiplication and diffusion of plastics and even more on the effects – the good, the bad, and the ugly all feature. Less is said about the perplexing plasticity of plastics and the relationships between this capacity for change, forms of proliferation, and emergent consequences. Challenges arise here for social theory and research concerning how to adequately conceptualise and approach the plasticity of plastics and, indeed, the capacities of all materials (whatever their apparent status) to transmute. We will discuss these challenges in this Ideas Playground, considering, among other issues:

• How best to conceptualise the plasticity of materials;
• Whether existing ideas in theories of practice provide a strong basis to conceptualise this quality;
• Whether combinations of ideas, rooted in different social theories, are needed to hone practice-oriented thinking on material plasticity (i.e., those from object-oriented ontology; phenomenology; non-representational theory; Actor-Network Theory)
• The implications of the plasticity of materials for research design, methods, and dissemination and outreach activities.

I’m sure other questions will pop up. There’s no need to do any prior reading as such; an interest in social theory, materials and materiality will suffice. I’m still thinking through the ideas myself as part of grappling with conceptualisations of practice and capacity in tandem. I look forward to the online conversation and coffee!

email  Torik Holmes if you’d like to join. Torik.Holmes@manchester.ac.uk

18 October 2024 at 11.00 am -12.00 am UK time: Practice Theory and Agriculture.

This playground is inspired by an interest in what social practice theories bring to the study of agriculture and vice versa. Although practice theorists have a long history of taking materiality seriously, they have tended to focus on devices, artefacts and infrastructures, not on natural phenomena such as seeds, soil, climate and crops – each revealing their own unique processes. How do these material but non-human and non-artifactual ‘elements’ relate to the practices with which they are implicated? Equally, does a focus on social practice bring anything new to those who study or practice agriculture, especially how it adapts and spreads?

We will consider questions such as:

• How to conceptualize intersecting and cross-cutting material relations that entail human knowings, seeings, doings and sayings, but are not limited to human activities and artifacts
• How to characterize interactions and relations among elements such as…
  • non-human processes, e.g. photosynthesis, seasonal cycles, “no tillage” agriculture
  • second and third orders of mediating elements, such as water, oxygen, carbon dioxide, microbes, climate, that are largely invisible
• Possible research approaches
  • Practices theory perspectives for analyzing how practices spread
  • Practice genealogy
  • “Social practices as biological niche construction” (Rouse 2023)

These are open questions for playground participants to toss about. Feel free to join even if you’ve not read anything about agriculture.

email Jo-Ann Brooks if you’d like to join: joannbrooks36@gmail.com