Practicing Media—Mediating Practice | New Paradigm or Sensitizing Concept: Finding the Proper Place of Practice Theory in Media Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Numerous studies of media and communication processes employ the notion of practice under various working definitions. Recently, there has been growing interest and recurrent reference to a formal philosophical system developed by Theodore Schatzki and labeled “practice theory.” Some scholars have stated an alignment with Schatzki’s practice theory and suggested that its application in media studies marks a new “practice turn.” This article argues that before we decide whether to accept practice theory as the foundation of a new paradigm, we need to take a critical look at its powers and limitations and the ways in which its conceptual instruments need to be adjusted to effectively address the key questions asked in media studies. The article offers a critical assessment of some of the main premises of practice theory. It focuses specifically on what role this theory assigns to material entities and human agency in the constitution of social life. On that basis, it proposes ways in which practice theory could be put in a productive dialogue with other approaches in media studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.127 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.034 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".