Inaugural lecture: Can researching everyday practices usefully inform social transformation for sustainability?

By Professor Matt Watson

The multiple crises that human societies are faced with today are fundamentally the consequences of human actions. Any solutions to them have to involve changes to human actions. Yet it is clear that tackling issues like those comprising the ecological crisis requires wide ranging systemic change. Can research that focuses on everyday practices usefully inform wide-ranging systemic changes?

For a couple of decades, I’ve been working on and with social practice theory to see how far it can be towards doing so, through authoring texts developing theory and through interdisciplinary empirical research projects across diverse topics. By decentring human individuals from analysis in favour of focusing analytical attention on shared social practices, the approach promises to hold on to the details of human action while enabling analysis to account for extensive processes of social change.  

I will exemplify the potential and the challenges of understanding systemic changes with a focus on everyday practices, through a focus on moving towards sustainable and equitable urban travel. I will finish with a discussion of the challenges I’ve faced in taking evidence and ideas from social practice-oriented research into the practices of policy-making. This provides a basis for tackling the title's question.