determines them, although it only exists through the agents placed in it, who, to use the language of physics, 'distort the space in their neighbourhood', conferring a certain structure upon it. It is in the relationship between the various agents (conceived as 'field sources') that the field and the relations of force that characterize it are generated. (2004: 33)
Bourdieu's analytic use of the term 'field' enables us to recognise both fields of research-learning practice (as might be labelled 'disciplines' or 'fields' in everyday speech) and a university field, which in the international context of academic interactions and publications, for example, and the 'internationalisation' of university study and global rankings of universities which have bitten hard for just over a decade or so, is now unquestionably a global field of forces and struggles.
As with struggle, change also must be recognised at the heart of any analysis of research-learning fields. As we confront 'super-complexity' (after Barnett, 2000), with changes in global power and the emergence of 'wicked problems', our once apparently even intellectual keels are destablised. Inter-disciplinary, cross- disciplinary and a variety of innovative problem-oriented fields have surfaced in the ever-more choppy confluence of cross-currents in which universities seek to provide individuals and societies with light by which to understand and navigate (see Strathern, 2004; Holland et al., 2010).
To consolidate the point: research-learning is the generic and core practice of any university, any university system and of the global university field. But research-learning is also richly variegated practice — differentiated into a range of dynamic but generally distinguishable fields of practice as diverse in their research-learning practices as anatomy, Arab studies, or astrophysics (just to start an indicative list starting with 'A').
The next section of this chapter focuses on the social context of learning and transition in practice: communities of practice. I argue that research-learning practice constitutes, and is constituted by, the practices of people in communities of practice.
can be constituted in the face-to-face interactions of everyday life or over the horizon through occasional visitation, web connection and the like. In respect of communities of research-learning practice, they can be constituted in particular units of particular universities, in the occasional get-togethers and virtual communications of 'diasporic' learned societies. Conferences, seminars and electronic bulletin boards no less than lectures, degrees and academic posts constitute the communities of research-learning practice, which in their turn are constitutive of their fields of research-learning practice and struggle.
Once dominated by more or less established disciplines, research-learning is constituted in particularities of practice, as Chandler sought to make clear:
Although disciplines, in the academic sense, can be taken to mean something less like submission to rules and more like a field of study — one's academic speciality — there remains an important distinction to be made between a discipline and a subject matter … The kinds of practices associated with the academic disciplines might be said to involve styles of thought, that is, procedures for identifying and gathering evidence, ways of posing and sequencing questions, conventions for distinguishing productive from unproductive questions and practices for establishing sound demonstrations, building arguments, citing authorities, or making cases. (2009: 732)
I put the case here that a more fecund approach to enquiry is one which focuses on social practice and explores the dynamics of social practice in the actions, relations, learning, 'feel', styles, demeanours, productions, struggles, competitions, and transitions which are constitutive of the field and its communities of its practice.
Lave and Wenger's 'situated' practice perspectives offer us insight into how we come to know in context, in action and in social interaction. In short these research-learners are interested in how we learn in communities of practice and how communities of practice are constituted by learning. Lave and Wenger argue that the 'defining characteristic' of learning is a process they call 'legitimate peripheral participation'. Such participation has the potential to move newcomers toward full participation in a community of practice.
A person's intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is configured through the process of becoming a full participant in a sociocultural practice. This social process includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills. (2007 [1991]: 29)
Legitimate peripheral participants do not simply learn skills as members of a community of practice. They see and in time undertake themselves exemplary practices producing typical and, perhaps eventually, exemplary products. But more than this: they see how exemplary practitioners act — their typical personal styles, demeanours, interactions and being in the world.
Legitimate peripheral participation is pregnant with the possibility of transition. Transition takes place not just by moving into a position of legitimate peripheral participation but also by learning and becoming increasingly adept within a community of practice. At a university a neophyte first-year student arguably becomes a legitimate peripheral participant in fields of research-learning practice when they enrol in learning units (courses, subjects) which introduce and develop those fields of research-learning practice in their undergraduate practice (see Figure 2.4).
But a senior academic moving into a new university, a new locus of practice, is also, for a time at least, a legitimate peripheral participant in its local communities of practice. Despite their professional status, new professors need to know how to get a book out of their new research library, need to learn the taken-for-granted purchasing or IT or meeting practices of that local community of institutional practice.
Figure 2.4: An apparent trajectory in a localised community of research- learning practice
Despite its clumsy expression, the concept of 'legitimate peripheral participation' elucidates characteristic ways of belonging so that such participation is more than a condition of learning; it is a 'constitutive element of its content' (Lave and Wenger, 2007 [1991]: 35). First-year courses (such as say 'Anthropology 101') introduce students to a field of research-learning practice as it admits them as its most peripheral of legitimate peripheral participants. Some students do not complete their introductory courses. Others complete but do not proceed to further units in the field. Over the course of their studies, students may consolidate their participation by concentrating their studies in one field of research-learning practice (for example in a major sequence, or in a major sequence leading to a year of Honours focus in the present system of Australia).
An analytic focus on communities of practice, the learning practices through which they are constituted and the trajectories of transition necessary for their reproduction is clearly a potentially productive approach to the understanding of transitions in the university field. As Lave and Wenger note:
[i]n any given concrete community of practice the process of community reproduction — a historically constructed, ongoing, conflicting, synergistic structuring of activity and relations among practitioners — must be deciphered in order to understand specific forms of legitimate peripheral participation through time. This requires a broader conception of individual and collective biographies than the single segment encompassed in studies of 'learners'. Thus we have begun to analyse the changing forms of participation and identity of persons who engage in sustained participation in a community of practice: from entrance as a newcomer, through becoming an old-timer with respect to new-comers, to a point when those newcomers themselves become old-timers. (2007 [1991]: 56)