New Issue: Outlines - Critical Practice Studies (2009)

http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/outlines
Focus and Scope

Outlines. Critical Practice Studies combine critique of science, professional practice, and socio-cultural issues in an attempt to intervene in public discourses and establish counter-discourses in various social fields.

Outlines. Critical Practice Studies  provides a forum for theoretically and empirically informed debates about the relationships between individual subjects, social structures, and historically developed cultural forms in and of practice. The journal is interdisciplinary with a background and focus at the intersections of social and human sciences and philosophy which are established around the idea of practice (in its various forms: Praxis, activity, praxology, process theory etc.). This makes sense because practice, as both material and discursive, both form and process, both subjective and objective, both collective and individual, relays in a distinct way otherwise quite diverse disciplines, traditions, and positions. Perhaps most importantly, it points a way to bridge the gap between modern social theory and postmodern reflections.

Outlines. Critical Practice Studies  wishes to stimulate forms of social research in which theory and practice presuppose and move each other in reflected processes of development. Outlines. Critical Practice Studies seeks new paths between practicism and academism which do not settle for a relationship between theory and practice in which the one is merely modeled in the image of the other. This implies a recognition of the reflexive ("second-order") knowledgeability of or in practices. It also requires a reflection on the socio-historical context and impact of science and knowledge. Outlines. Critical Practice Studies  gives room for open, critical debates between different positions on the role of research and the self-understanding of institutions of research and higher education in our contemporary social formations.

Outlines. Critical Practice Studies  are never complete. They report research and development efforts in the midst of their emergence. An orientation towards the unfinished and the new is an inseparable component of critical research, and we prefer inventiveness and audacity to formal perfection. Outlines. Critical Practice Studies  are sketches full of living promises. They are contrasting lines pointing towards figures not yet clearly seen. They come to life in the richness of concrete social practice if they can make a difference in the field, in contemporary movements and public opinion. And it is by reaching out into social practice that theory may become self-critical.

Finally, it must be stressed that the editorial program of Outlines. Critical Practice Studies  will remain dynamic and changing just as the societal issues subject to reflection and discourse in the columns of the journal. Thus, the editorial program presented here will persistently be debated and will change accordingly.