As a discipline, practical knowledge is relatively new. Over recent years it has emerged and grown, but there are still only in two places internationally where you can explicitly study it (Nord University in Norway and Södertörn University in Sweden). On the other hand, the main questions of practical knowledge, as they relate to knowledge, are age old philosophical questions, while other questions dealt with implicate other disciplines (cognitive science, pedagogy, work-life research, etc.). As such, practical knowledge is interdisciplinary and should perhaps be considered a set of questions rather than a discipline. But if it can be considered a discipline, then it needs a principle of unity. Perhaps this is the lived exercise of practice and joint philosophical reflection. In the proposed chapter, this is fleshed out in terms of consideration of (a) who the students and researchers of practical knowledge are – what is it that motivates them to study (participant and field plurality)? (b) what are the key resources of practical knowledge that can allow us to ask these questions (disciplinary plurality) and how is practical knowledge related to philosophy as a discipline? (c) what are the spaces of the study of practical knowledge, what happens here and what is the potential for development? Based on this analysis, we will develop a core idea of practical knowledge as a unity that is based on plurality and put in in a framework of a contemporary debate on the relation between science and lived experience as well as philosophy and practice.

This chapter considers professional practice as a potentially collaborative form of practical wisdom, phronesis. The question to be explored is to what extent “collective phronesis” transcends the individual with a focus on the professions of teaching and policing as examples. Professional identity can be seen as an embodiment that involves both the individual and the social. Practitioners “embody” their profession individually and collectively. How can this be understood? As individuals, professionals often make decisions that use the routines and informal rules provided by the profession, and sometimes groups of professionals may make decisions together. There can be conflicts between these settings that challenge the embodied being-in-the-world of practitioners and their capacity to relate to other subjects in an empathetic way. Examples of such challenges will be explored to critically analyse our understanding of phronesis for the individual and the collective.

This paper is a conceptual investigation of whether, and how, action containing judgement can be understood as collective. Using an empirical example from the police profession, the article tries to capture the complexity of a real situation that requires both agency and judgement. The example is analysed in relation to the idea of collective judgement, both regarding ongoing debates in phenomenology concerning the possibility/need for a we-subject, and in social epistemology concerning the idea of judgement based on social evidence. The article claims that a richer account of action is needed in order to describe the collective aspects of judgements. Drawing on an Aristotelian understanding of action, the paper argues that an understanding of certain collective actions requires a notion of judgement that involves both we-subjectivity, and social evidence.

This article explores how constructions of identity, race and difference permeate and are challenged in a Swedish preschool class. The study is informed by theories of phenomenology and critical whiteness. Data are drawn from a larger ethnographic study conducted in an ethnically diverse preschool. The purpose of the study was to explore how preschool teachers manage and reflect upon the construction of children’s social identity within the institution of a preschool. This report considers one incident relating to racial identity. It began with a child’s representation, the boy named Stanley, in a self-portrait: ‘I want to be white and blonde when I grow up… I want to be like Oscar, not a black boy’. Within this article we consider teachers’ reflections on this incident, discussing how ‘whiteness’ is performed, constructed and interrogated by young children and adults in the preschool and uncovering a certain institutional ‘colour blindness’. In this example ‘race’ announces itself and the children make it visible as an existing category in their everyday life. Children’s drawings and narratives reveal much about the implicit understandings and norms that surround them, pointing to teachers’ responsibilities for exploring the possibilities and limitations offered in preschool education to deal with these understandings.