Ted Schatzki is professor of Geography and Philosophy at the University of Kentucky, USA. He is a world-leading scholar, best known for helping to develop and establish what has come to be known as ‘social practice theory’. He visited the University of Bristol as a Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor September-November 2023 and was hosted by Professor Dale Southerton Co-Director of the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures.
Understanding social change as it occurs is a tricky endeavor. When the world metamorphoses as one negotiates its transformations, one might also wonder, Where is all this heading?
So is the situation today regarding sociodigital change. The dissemination of digital devices, infrastructures, and services across the globe has occasioned myriad changes in communication, work, and transportation, war and peace, governance and business, writing and making, entertainment and socializing, and so on. These changes are so numerous that it is difficult to keep abreast and to keep track of the problems they throw up. Further exacerbating this predicament is the thorny challenge of grasping how digitalization might be transforming society at a deeper level.
The result is that emerging problems are unevenly ascertained and haphazardly addressed and that society is ill-equiped to confront more profound challenges.
Luckily, the University of Bristol boasts several units seeking to cast light on these matters. Particularly central to the task of grasping the character and scope of sociodigital change is the work of the University’s Centre for Sociodigital Futures (CenSoF), which came into existence in the summer of 2022 through a large ESRC grant.
The staunchly interdisciplinary Centre, which draws academic staff from several faculties and schools, analyzes sociodigital change by asking how sociodigital futures come about, including who or what is shaping them, how such futures emerge in everyday practice, and what their emergence means for widening social-economic inequalities and climate change. The Centre focuses on five domains of sociodigital practice—consuming, caring, learning, moving (people and goods) and organizing—and asks how key technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and augmented/virtual reality are imagined, innovated, and intertwined with them.
My own recent work explores the digitalization of society and the social changes accompanying this. I am developing a theory of social form that, in describing key dimensions of change in social phenomena, identifies the central ingredients of sociodigital transformation. The theory, once developed, should help sort out sociodigital changes and how to confront them. The Centre shares a focus on sociodigital change. As a result, it and I have begun extensive collaboration. The collaboration was initially supported by a Benjamin Meeker Distinguished Professor Award in September-November 2023 and will be sustained in the near future by return trips to Bristol in 2024 (supported by the Centre) and a subsequent six month stay in the first half of 2025 funded by a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship.
Together, the work of the Centre and its ongoing collaboration with external researchers promise to foster greater clairvoyancy and responsiveness vis-à-vis sociodigital changes. In this way, they sharpen society’s capacity to handle, in real time, what is happening to it.
Professor Ted Schatzki
