Social Practices, Intervention and Sustainability

Abstract

As Law and Urry ( 2004 ) reflect, methods matter. The enactment of methodology is inherently one of performance – we make (multiple) realities, we make those realities real or less real, and as such intervene in political and social worlds. This chapter reflects on how expanding the range of methods used to actualise theories of practice can be a form of interference and intervention. By using new methods to disturb the relatively unexamined way that ‘consumers’ and their resource consumption is represented in policy worlds, research methods not only disturb what is ‘known’, but also reveal new political realities and possibilities. This process of revealing the multiplicity of ways of representing social phenomena, and then enacting different ways of knowing into a political space, is what is referred to as ontological politics (Mol 1999 ). In this chapter we argue that the use of quantitative and mixed methodologies that reflect practices (as performance, and as entities) disturbs the dominant way that the resource industries and related political spaces represent the consumer. However, we also argue that such a use of research methods creates an alternative politics about, and instrumentation of, processes of consumption as represented through theories of practice.

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