The push and pull of the world: How experience animates practice

Abstract

A refreshed and expanded understanding of experience can contribute to a relevant reassessment of the nature of practice and its relationship with knowledge and context. We characterise experience as essentially transactional, as entailing constitutive interaction with the elements of the social, institutional and physical world. It is within this transactional experience - within the push and pull of the world - that practice addresses the constraints and affordances of what we know and the contexts within which we generate and deploy what we know. Practice is animated by and within experience. Building on a concrete case of police work, we propose and explore three characteristics of the animation of practice by experience: 'actionable understanding', 'ongoing business' and 'the eternally unfolding present'. © 2011 The Policy Press ISSN 1744 2648.