Five advantages of skill

Abstract

In this Special Issue we explore and extend conceptions, characterisations, and applications of skill within and beyond geography. Framed by the question: “where is skill located?”, the papers assembled do not just explore where skilled practice ‘takes place’, its sites and situations, but also prompt a deeper ontological and epistemological rethinking of skill. And it is this rethinking of skill that is at stake in our editorial. In what follows, we map out this rethinking and introduce the five advantages of skill that the papers develop. Firstly, skill is practical in that it is concerned with the actual doing or use of something with accomplishment. Secondly, skill is processual in that the skilled practitioner works emergently and responsively rather than rubrically and successionally. Thirdly, skill is technical in that it involves not just techniques of the body but encompasses what Bernard Stiegler calls the ‘originary technicity’ of the body. Fourthly, skill is ecological in that it is not of the individual body, but of the entire field of relations that make practice possible. And finally, skill is political in that there is a continuous flow between the micro – (that which is emergent) and macro – (that which exists more concretely and can be represented) politics of practice.

Working in the gig economy is boring: Non‐encounters and the politics of detachment in platform capitalism

“…The conceptual ballast that undergirds this work draws from a line of process thinkers from Ravaisson through to Bergson and Deleuze who each stress, albeit in different ways, how repetition is productive of difference from the perspective of a body's indeterminate capacities. From commuting (Simpson, 2016) to crafting (Patchett, 2016), the body depicted by this research is one that is increasingly skilled, positioning skilled practice as ‘dynamic and distributed’ achievements (Patchett & Mann, 2018, p. 24). Crucially, much of this research emphasises how the bodily evaluation of this increase in capacities to act is felt through pleasure and satisfaction.…”

Cultural Geography I: Mediums

“…Such a focus on medium has enabled cultural geographers to assemble increasingly sophisticated vocabularies for talking about their creative doings. In some cases, these foreground the specificities of material and embodied practices, variously skilled bodies, social and political contexts, geographical thinking and histories of practice (Patchett and Mann, 2018). In other cases, these draw on theoretical languages to understand the material specificities of practice, including post-phenomenologies, feminist new materialisms and neo-vitalisms.…”

The Skills Behind the Spatial Practices

“…Skills have been neglected as an explicit and central concept within the geographical approach. As an exception, a very recent special issue (Patchett & Mann, 2018) focused on “skilled practice” (Mann, 2018; Payne, 2018), with most of research working on one specific practice. While most works focused on the importance of skills for specific activities or environments (Bunn, 2016; Graham, 2014; Grasseni, 2004; Spencer, 2009), very few focus on skills within everyday spatial situations and in classic and usual daily practices.…”