Showing papers on "Social practice published in 2016"

Theories of practice and public health: understanding (un)healthy practices

Abstract: Psychological understandings and individualistic theories of human behaviour and behaviour change have dominated both academic research and interventions at the ‘coalface’ of public health. Meanwhile, efforts to understand persistent inequalities in health point to structural factors, but fail to show exactly how these translate into the daily lives (and hence health) of different sectors of the population. In this paper, we suggest that social theories of practice provide an alternative paradigm to both approaches, informing significantly new ways of conceptualising and responding to some of the most pressing contemporary challenges in public health. We introduce and discuss the relevance of such an approach with reference to tobacco smoking, focusing on the life course of smoking as a practice, rather than on the characteristics of individual smokers or on broad social determinants of health. This move forces us to consider the material and symbolic elements of which smoking is comprised, and to follow ...

Whistleblowing, Parrhesia and the Contestation of Truth in the Workplace

Abstract: In this paper, we develop an approach to the study of whistleblowing as a critical practice that is involved in the contestation of truth and power in the workplace. We situate our analysis in the context of practice-based thinking and specify the social practice of whistleblowing with reference to Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘parrhesia’ (frank speech). We then introduce the case of Guido Strack, a former European Union official who worked as section leader at the Office des Publications Officielles des Communautes Europeenne from 1995 to 2002. Strack spoke out against malpractice in the EU in 2001 and officially reported alleged financial misconduct in 2002. In our analysis, we focus on the interplay between and effects of different modes of truth-telling in the context of this specific organization – a context marked by the uneasy coexistence of different normative and discursive frames. We argue that the parrhesiastic modality of truth-telling threatens the established ‘working solutions’ that reconci...

Environmental identity formation in nonformal environmental education programs

Abstract: This paper explores experiences that remained salient in the memories of former participants in three nature-based programs in Colorado, five to forty years after childhood involvement. Interviews with program founders and staff, archival research, and observations of current activities provided an understanding of each program’s history, mission and educational approach. In this context, 18 former participants were interviewed about program experiences that they remembered and program impacts on their environmental identities and academic or career choices. Results were analyzed through the lens of social practice theory, which has significant implications for the design and evaluation of environmental education programs. Results showed that social practice theory is a useful framework for interpreting the development of a social environmental identity, but an ecological identity that forms through direct contact with the natural world is an important complementary concept.

Policy and Governance for Sustainable Consumption at the Crossroads of Theories and Concepts

Abstract: This introductory article of the special issue compares different conceptual underpinnings of efforts to make the everyday activities of consumers more sustainable. As social practice theory (SPT) is the main theoretical foundation of the articles collected here, we outline its strengths and limitations, when compared with the dominant individual-oriented behaviour change approach, and we focus on theories of planned behaviour, social marketing as well as ‘choice architecture’, based on behavioural economics. This article analyses SPT's usefulness, particularly from the applied point of view for policy-makers and social change programme designers. In the final section we provide some recommendations. These consider the need for greater reflexivity and experimentation with the practices of policy- and programme-making and the building of coalitions of ‘distributed interveners’. They also relate to the need for more focus on consumers' workplace practices alongside domestic practices and analysis of and intervention in the material environments and objects in which social practices are embedded. Finally, they are concerned with the identification of moments of transition in consumers' lives and they focus on the ‘transition practices’ that familiarize people with their new life situations. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Making health information meaningful: Children's health literacy practices

Abstract: Children's health and wellbeing is high on the research and policy agenda of many nations. There is a wealth of epidemiological research linking childhood circumstances and health practices with adult health. However, echoing a broader picture within child health research where children have typically been viewed as objects rather than subjects of enquiry, we know very little of how, in their everyday lives, children make sense of health-relevant information. This paper reports key findings from a qualitative study exploring how children understand food in everyday life and their ideas about the relationship between food and health. 53 children aged 9-10, attending two socio-economically contrasting schools in Northern England, participated during 2010 and 2011. Data were generated in schools through interviews and debates in small friendship groups and in the home through individual interviews. Data were analysed thematically using cross-sectional, categorical indexing. Moving beyond a focus on what children know the paper mobilises the concept of health literacy (Nutbeam, 2000), explored very little in relation to children, to conceptualise how children actively construct meaning from health information through their own embodied experiences. It draws on insights from the Social Studies of Childhood (James and Prout, 2015), which emphasise children's active participation in their everyday lives as well as New Literacy Studies (Pahl and Rowsell, 2012), which focus on literacy as a social practice. Recognising children as active health literacy practitioners has important implications for policy and practice geared towards improving child health.

‘Coz football is what we all have’: masculinities, practice, performance and effervescence in a gender‐sensitised weight‐loss and healthy living programme for men

Abstract: In this paper we use a social practice approach to explore men's experience of Football Fans in Training (FFIT), a group-based weight management programme for men that harnesses men's symbolic attachment to professional football clubs to engage them in lifestyle change. FFIT is delivered by community coaches in clubs' stadia and is gender-sensitised in relation to context, content and style of delivery. Using a 'toolkit' of concepts from the work of Bourdieu, Goffman and Durkheim we analysed data from 13 focus group discussions with participants, and fieldwork notes from programme observations to investigate the appeal and success of FFIT, and how it worked to support change. Our analysis builds on our work on the importance of shared symbolic commitment to the football club and being with 'men like me' to understand how the interaction context facilitated 'effervescent' experiences. These experiences encouraged men to make changes to their diet and physical activity, talk about them, practice performing them and implement them in their lives. Thus a social practice approach illuminated the social processes through which lifestyle change was achieved, and we argue that it can deepen and enrich both intervention design and evaluation.

Applying social theory to understand health-related behaviours

Abstract: Health-related behaviours are a concern for contemporary health policy and practice given their association with a range of illness outcomes. Many of the policies and interventions aimed at changing health-related behaviours assume that people are more or less free to choose their behaviour and how they experience health. Within sociology and anthropology, these behaviours are viewed not as acts of choice but as actions and practices situated within a larger sociocultural context. In this paper, we outline three theoretical perspectives useful in understanding behaviours that may influence one's health in this wider context: theories of social practice, social networks and interactionism. We argue that by better understanding how health-related behaviours are performed in people's everyday lives, more suitable interventions and clinical management can be developed.

The Tuning of Materials: A Designer's Journey

Abstract: A growing number of scholars have started to look at materials as part of the unfolding of social and cultural practices. Yet, to date, relatively little is known about how to purposefully design for a particular practice in which materials, with their unique qualities, act as co-performers. This paper presents the journey of a designer who includes the explorations on the performative qualities of materials in design ideation. This journey aimed to explore how the material and the performance can "lead the way" in the potential unfolding of a social practice such as "tuning a radio".

Film As Social Practice

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Practice-Based Wisdom Theory for Integrating Institutional Logics: A New Model for Social Entrepreneurship Learning and Education

Abstract: In this paper, we use a practice-based wisdom perspective to address the challenges of managing competing logics in social enterprises. From previous work, it is clear that a major task for social entrepreneurs is to manage the tension between social welfare and commercial success. Although the social welfare logic and its related values and practices form the foundations of social enterprises, social entrepreneurs also have to ensure that their businesses are commercially sustainable, making it necessary to engage with the commercial logic. To this end, we develop a curriculum matrix based on social practice wisdom to assist students in learning appropriate knowledge and skills, enact social entrepreneurship goals, and integrate competing logics in innovative and sustainable ways.

Can environmental awareness explain declining preference for car-based mobility amongst generation Y? A qualitative examination of learn to drive behaviours

Abstract: Preference for private, motorised transportation grew substantially throughout the global North, during the 20th Century. Through this time rates of licencing, and car ownership, and vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT) rose across age groups. This had a range of environmental and social equity implications, and ignited a priority for investment in road infrastructure. The system of automobility was cemented by lock-in through the assemblage of infrastructure, technologies, policies and behaviours supporting, and frequently requiring, car based mobility. Yet recent evidence has shown that generation Y (18–35 year olds) are practicing mobility in different ways to earlier generations. Stabilising and declining rates of VKT, licencing and vehicle ownership have been identified in a range of industrialised countries. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this paper draws from theories of social practice and the theory of planned behaviour, as two traditions to examine what people ‘do’, focusing on the social and the individual respectively. It examines the motivations to learn to drive (LTD), and the preference for driving in New Zealand, a highly car-dependent country, empirically drawing from 51 qualitative interviews. A series of meta-themes are presented and used to explain intended and actual behaviour relating to driving practices. The empirical research finds a diversity of highly nuanced interpretations of LTD, some of which reflect individual characteristics, whilst other interpretations are best understood grounded in a wider societal reading of contemporary trends and meanings. Frequently, justification for learning to drive goes beyond the competency and capacity to drive independently. Implications for policy and planning are detailed.

Translingual writing and teacher development in composition

Abstract: Whenever researchers come up with new insights into language and literacy, teachers frantically seek help in implementing them. Therefore, efforts are taken to provide resources for teacher development. When the resolution on Students' Right to Their Own Language was passed by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), a special issue of College Composition and Communication (CCC) was devoted to explaining the implications of the policy for teachers and to provide reading resources. Similarly, as the translingual orientation is introduced now, composition instructors have raised concerns about the radical changes this would involve for teaching practice (see Bizzell; Sohan; Tardy).However, teacher development in composition is not well advanced. Apart from the need for good pedagogical models, we don't have adequate research on teacher development in L1 and L2 composition instruction, as many scholars have recently observed (Hirvela and Belcher; Lee; Matsuda, Saenkhum, and Accardi). It is commendable that there was a special issue dedicated to "the profession" in CCC recently (Yancey), when many compositionists have been concerned about the nascent state of professional training (see also Anderson and Romano; Gleeson; Peirce W and Enos). There are serious controversies and debates on what should constitute the graduate-level practicum (see Dobrin; Dryer). The current practice in many institutions of walking the instructors through rhetorical traditions or composition movements is insufficient. Focusing on professional knowledge in a product-oriented way ignores the experiences, values, and beliefs teachers already bring to the profession. It cannot sufficiently address the uptake of teachers-which can range from avoidance or resistance to creative appropriation (see Dryer). More importantly, it overlooks how classroom practice needs to be reconfigured in the light of competing knowledge and beliefs.As a hybrid professional with one foot in applied linguistics, which focuses heavily on teacher development for language teaching, I am familiar with the advances that have taken place in other fields. There has been a paradigm shift from knowledge to beliefs and from cognition to social practice in teacher development (see Johnson; Varghese, Morgan, Johnston, and Johnson). Recent scholarship holds that if the pedagogical content and professional knowledge are not negotiated in relation to instructors' current beliefs and past experiences or appropriated in relation to the professional identities they are developing, their professionalization won't be effective. To facilitate this reflexive cultivation of identity and beliefs, teacher development courses are adopting reflective journals, teaching practice, and collaboration with peers, in models influenced by communities of practice, language socialization, and sociocultural theory.I treat translingual orientation as referring to a perspective on languages as always in contact and generating new grammars and meanings out of their synergy. The term also posits language as a semiotic system, integrated with other visual, aural, and tactile modalities, to communicate meaning. Translingual writing is a form of situated literate practice where writers negotiate their semiotic resources in relation to the dominant conventions of language and rhetoric. The texts emerging from this practice are variable according to the interlocutors, ideologies, norms, and purposes in each context. Such an orientation to writing presumes a writing pedagogy that would encourage students to draw from their repertoires to strategically negotiate their interests contextually. Since the contexts, genres, and students in each writing course (and literacy event) are different, teachers have to be alert to developing their pedagogies, feedback, and assessment from the ground up. Preparing teachers for such a practice would differ from dominant forms of professional development wherein teachers are armed with predefined norms, materials, and knowledge for classroom purposes. …

From Intervention to Social Change : A Guide to Reshaping Everyday Practices

Abstract: This book explores the design, communication and implementation of social change programmes aimed at solving various social problems, from reducing health-risk behaviour to ’green’ consumption or financial literacy. Examining the application of social practice theory as a way of understanding social change, From Intervention to Social Change connects theoretical reflections with empirical research, sample cases and exercises, emphasising the importance of communication and community engagement in the initiation and implementation of social change programmes designed to address social problems and improve quality of life. Adopting a ’communication for social change’ approach and presenting illustrative studies drawn from ’developed’ and rapidly transforming countries, this handbook will appeal to project managers and communication professionals in the public and private sectors, as well as scholars of sociology, anthropology and development studies with interests in social problems and social change.

‘What is space syntax not?’ Reflections on space syntax as sociospatial theory

Abstract: Few approaches have been quite so polemical and have stirred quite so many different responses as space syntax. This article is not an introduction to space syntax; rather it aims to discuss its substantive reach and epistemological status. To this end I make use of one of the simplest – though not necessarily the best or easiest – ways of understanding something: namely, defining what something is not. This negative path will lead us to a series of observations concerning the nature of the theory in order to highlight, on the one hand, its main contributions, such as the emphases on social reproduction, co-presence and the embodiment of practice; its hybrid epistemology; its relational concept of space; and the reaffirmation of space as a living dimension. On the other hand, it shall discuss the limits of the theory concerning society–space relations: the reduction of social practice to movement, human interaction to social interfaces and encounter, and the actor to bodily presence; the primacy of syntax over semantics; the problem of time in the structuring of space; and the difficulties of theoretical contribution. Finally I look to discuss the theory’s place regarding distinctions between urban and sociospatial theories, and dilemmas to be faced in its future development.

On Justification and Critique: Luc Boltanski’s Pragmatic Sociology and International Relations

Abstract: Luc Boltanski is one of the most important contemporary social theorists. Whether and how his sociology matters for International Relations (IR) theory has, so far, not been explored. Boltanski’s work, as this article demonstrates, can greatly advance international political sociology by further developing a practice theoretical account which reconciles Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s praxeology. Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology is mainly inspired by pragmatism and ethnomethodology, but it is still concerned with sociology as a critical project of emancipation. He aims to renew critical sociology by focusing on the ‘critical capacities’ ordinary actors use in disputes and controversies of political life. Practices of justification and critique as triggers of conflicts and sources of agreements are consequently the subjects of analysis. This implies, furthermore, a strong notion of normativity in practice, which reveals a blind spot in current debates in IR. Justification becomes a social practice through which diverging legitimacy claims are tested under conditions of uncertainty. Such a view is conceptually and methodologically relevant for IR scholars interested in contested norms, moral ambiguity, and the fragile character of political reality. Considering Boltanski’s work broadens the empirical scope of practice theory and provides promising new directions for IR theory.

What is ‘good’ mentoring? Understanding mentoring practices of teacher induction through case studies of Finland and Australia

Abstract: Mentoring is a practice widely utilised to support new teachers. However, in locally formed systems, the practice of mentoring is conditioned by traditions and arrangements specific to the site. To understand ‘good’ mentoring, these local arrangements cannot be ignored. In this article, the theory of practice architectures is employed to make explicit the prefiguring arrangements of mentoring practices in Finland and NSW Australia. The findings suggest that mentoring practices are shaped by their ontological specificity and this makes reproducing mentoring practices in different sites problematic. Explicating the prefiguring architectures of practices is critical to understanding the contested nature of mentoring.

Methodological breaching experiments: Steps toward theorizing the qualitative interview.

Abstract: The qualitative research interview is arguably the most widespread method of inquiry across the human and social sciences today. In spite of its popularity, there is a significant lack of theoretical reflection concerning this qualitative method of inquiry. On the background of other scholars’ recent experiences with interviewing in different cultural settings, this article begins to develop a theoretical account of qualitative interviewing. First, intercultural interviews are considered as methodological breaching experiments that enable us to better understand the intricacies of a practice that is otherwise taken for granted. Next, I argue that this should lead to a denaturalization of the interview. Qualitative interviewing must be considered not simply as a neutral instrument, capable of representing a “natural” human relationship, but rather as a social practice with a history that provides a specific context for human interaction and knowledge production. Some significant elements of this context ar...

Developing Curriculum to Support Black Girls' Literacies in Digital Spaces

Abstract: What have you learned about equality and freedom in America? I really want you to consider all of the learning experiences we had with literature, digital tools, social media, and classroom conversations to help you name some of your understandings and list questions you still have. What informs your perspective about freedom and equality in America?This question was posed by Ms. Jones (all names and places are pseudonyms), the fifth-grade teacher I worked with in this digital literacies study, to her students before they began working with a partner on a project related to a poem by Langston Hughes. Questions like these are foundational for the work that happens in her classroom and the partnership we created a few years ago. When I began my inquiry into digital pedagogies with Ms. Jones in a large urban school district, I was trying to understand how she developed curriculum, learning experiences, and pedagogies for print-based and digital texts that encouraged students to question power structures that lead to restricted opportunities for marginalized groups. I wanted to know if students were able to create digital texts that probed the intersection of power, language, and identity and whether they would better understand how to engage with, respond to, critique, and create multimodal manifestations of their thinking.As I began to document and analyze data from this inquiry, I sat with a small group of Black girls to discuss the spoken word poems and podcasts they were creating about their lives. I realized after I left their group how little I knew about their interests and the specific ways they were going to utilize digital tools to complement and complicate the messages in their poems. It was at this time that I decided to shift my focus to the work they were doing with digital tools in hopes of making their thinking visible for analysis. In particular, I wanted to better understand how they were individually and collectively enacting Black girls' literacies across modalities and which modal choices were given leverage on particular digital platforms. Considering the significant participation and savvy digital literacy practices that Black girls and women take up across social media platforms to address issues of identity, achievement, safety, self-expression, and social justice (e.g., #SayHerName; #BlackGirlMagic; #BlackLivesMatter), I also wanted to learn more about what affordances each tool provided as a means for making visible their academic knowledge.Scholars such as Muhammad (2015) and Richardson (2002) have contributed to an understanding of Black girls' literacies and practices; however, we still have scant knowledge about how Black girls use digital tools to advance their literacy development. In a world that is rapidly changing and engaging in more multimodal interactions, exploring the digital literacy practices of Black girls is a necessary next step. To address the gap in scholarship, this qualitative study, grounded in Black girls' literacies (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016; Muhammad, 2012; Richardson, 2003), focuses on how classroom curriculum can be inclusive of digital literacies and support Black girls as they take up tools to author complex texts that counter mainstream narratives of Black girls' achievement. Specifically, it builds on Muhammad and Haddix's (2016) conceptual framework for Black girls' literacies, which contextualizes literacy as a social practice that reflects cultural power dynamics within texts and provides insight into the following questions that guided this study:1. What are the affordances of designing curricula that engage Black girls' digital literacies?2. How do Black girls enact critical literacy practices in digital spaces?To these aims, I provide an overview of Black girls' literacies as a theoretical framework; outline the methodology for the study, including instructional unit overviews; share findings from a qualitative study of a fifth-grade classroom to better understand how the nine Black girls in the class enacted critical literacies across digital platforms and modalities to address social issues; and then conclude with recommendations for literacy teachers to help them advance the use of digital tools and criticality in their classrooms. …

Professional development in person: identity and the construction of teaching within a high school science department

Abstract: This is a narrative inquiry into the role of professional development in the construction of teaching practice by an exemplary urban high school science teacher. I collected data during 3 years of ethnographic participant observation in Marie Gonzalez’s classroom. Marie told stories about her experiences in ten years of professional development focused on inquiry science teaching. I use a social practice theory lens to analyze my own stories as well as Marie’s. I make the case that science teaching is best understood as mediated by socially-constructed identities rather than as the end-product of knowledge and beliefs. The cognitive paradigm for understanding teachers’ professional learning fails to consistently produce transformations of teaching practice. In order to design professional development with science teachers that is generative of new knowledge, and is self-sustaining, we must understand how to build knowledge of how to problematize identities and consciously use social practice theory.

The Nation's Gardeners: Social Work Professionalization and Interpretation Work in Scientific Adoption Practice, 1930-1960

Abstract: This dissertation examines the relationship between scientific knowledge, social work and the social practice of adoption in Ontario, from 1930-1960. It focuses on the role of social workers in public agencies, specifically the Protestant Childrens Aid Societies in Ontario, and voluntary relinquishments by unmarried mothers, within social welfare history. The study uses adoption as a site to explore the professionalization of social work and maintains that adoption was important as a professionalizing project of social workers. Existing scholarship on the growth of scientific expertise and the professions often overlooks the co-operative work required to make science work. By contrast, this study shows how social workers strengthened their own position by integrating developments in science, psychology and medicine in the management and assessment of adoptions. The dissertation interrogates the processes through which professional adoptions became the norm, by focusing on the processes of translation, interpretation work and boundary work in adoption. These are analyzed as strategies that social workers used to improve their position within the system of professions and make adoption governable. The scientific approaches that came to shape social work practice and adoption were shaped by and contributed to nature-nurture debates, challenging narrow hereditarianism. Psychology and child development theories were used by social workers to assess the potential adoptability of children, the fitness of mothers and suitability of adoptive parents, leading to the creation of a new social category – the unadoptable child. This study contributes to sociological research in science studies and forms of governance that structured the development of social services. The rise of scientific adoption practice in the post war period coincided with changing notions of the family and the rise of the therapeutic state. The strategies of professionalization used by social workers helped to popularize new forms of knowledge and strengthen the link between the state and bio-medical authority in family making. The study of adoption raises important questions about the extent to which scientific knowledge and techniques can be used as a basis for discerning social obligations and collective responsibilities for those defined as strangers or kin.

“Take a gap year!” A social practice perspective on air travel and potential transitions towards sustainable tourism mobility

Abstract: It is widely recognized that contemporary tourism mobility, notably flying, is incompatible with sustainability goals. Fundamental changes in travel behaviour are required. Research shows that environmental values have little impact on tourists' travel decisions and that voluntary behaviour change is unlikely. Therefore, policies encouraging transitions to sustainable tourism require a deeper and more context-specific understanding of factors influencing current carbon-intensive travel patterns. This paper responds to this need by adopting a social practice perspective to explore the gap year phenomenon, an increasingly popular activity for the British youth, often involving multiple long-haul flights. The social practice approach positions young people's travel decisions as not being simply individual, but shaped by existing conventions, normative expectations and facilitated/constrained by available resources. The paper draws on the findings from a multi-sited ethnographic study in England, whic...

Studying Science and Engineering Learning in Practice.

Abstract: A key goal of science and engineering education is to provide opportunities for people to access, interpret, and make use of science and engineering to address practical human needs Most education research, however, focuses on how best to prepare students in schools to participate in forms of science and engineering practices that resemble those of disciplinary experts In this paper, I argue that education research is needed that focuses on how people use science and engineering in social practices as part of collective efforts to transform cultural and economic production Drawing on social practice theory, I argue that learning inheres in such activities, not only because people access and make use of science knowledge and develop repertoires for participating in science and engineering practices, but also because participation in such activities transforms the ways that people imagine themselves and expands their possibilities for action Research can inform and support these efforts, both directly and indirectly, by giving an account of the conditions for science and engineering learning and by diagnosing inequities in access to science and engineering for addressing pressing human needs

Seeing the system: Dynamics and complexity of technology integration in secondary schools

Abstract: This paper introduces system dynamics modeling to understand, visualize and explore technology integration in schools, through the development of a theoretical model of technology-related change in teachers' practice. Technology integration is a dynamic social practice, within the social system of education. It is difficult, if not nearly impossible, for the human mind to fully conceptualize complex social systems. Therefore, it is necessary to use conceptual frameworks designed to examine these phenomena. The model presented in this paper draws together known factors of integration and findings from a large-scale technology initiative in Australia to create a preliminary casual-loop model of technology integration in secondary school teaching. The preliminary model illustrates feedback and multiple effects in the system of education. The use of system models can potentially support a shift from focusing on teachers' technology use to student outcomes, and the feedback loop of students' technology use on teachers' practice. Implications for technology integration, teacher change and learning are discussed.

Keep it rocking: The social space of Portuguese alternative rock (1980–2010)

Abstract: The main goal of our approach is to analyse the social representations of alternative rock in Portugal (or, using a terminology more akin to 1980s Portugal, of the “modern music vanguard”) from 1980 to 2010. This is part of broader research into the 30 years of modernization of the country (from the post-revolutionary period initiated in 1974 on), in which alternative rock is regarded as a significant social practice within the scope of the social, artistic and musical structuring of the country itself. We consider that alternative rock is a subject that is illuminated by Bourdieu’s theory of fields, without overlooking its clear interconnection with ‘art worlds’ or music scenes, and the aesthetic cosmopolitanism of late modernity. The article is a pioneering work on the Portuguese sociology of culture, whose results may be the starting point of a debate to problematize the functional logic of popular music in various Anglo-Saxon settings.

Intervention as a social practice: knowledge formation and transfer in the everyday of police missions

Abstract: The problematic nature of biased knowledge held by professionalized experts and aid workers in statebuilding is already recognized. Yet we still lack understanding on knowledge formation and transfer in the everyday of statebuilding operations. I argue that the actors on the ground gain their knowledge in powerful and self-referential socialization processes. The aim of this article is to reconstruct via an interactionist theoretical framework, how German police officers, deployed for a maximum of 12 months, perceive and interpret other actors and their mission in Kosovo, how they gain this knowledge and how it relates to their work. I draw two conclusions: first, the police officers, both experienced and newcomers, share mostly negative attitudes towards local actors and the mission. Second, the most important mode of knowledge formation and transfer behind these similar attitudes is the informal interaction with experienced interveners and local actors, not official trainings or information. The...