The Contamination of Practices: How Practice Theories Matter in Multiple Domains

This introduction presents the genesis ofThe Contamination of Practices: How Practice TheoriesMatter in Multiple DomainsSymposium. The Symposium is the outcome of a research networkestablished to explore new ways to adopt, criticize and expand the approaches that fall under the def-inition of practice theory, in relation to different topics, and to answer multiple research questions.The shared foundation underlying the contributions is developed around the metaphor of “contami-nation”: while up to the present the efforts of scholars of major practice theory have been to sharpenedto specify a common theoretical framework, we argue that practice theory is at the verge of enteringa new stage of diffusion and contamination. Contamination is intended here in a double sense: onthe one hand, practice theory is contaminating several fields and domains of social research; on theother hand, its conceptual framework is also being contaminated by other intellectual and theoreticaltraditions, as it is being innovatively adopted and adapted based on the different topics and questionsit addresses. Each of the nine articles comprising the Symposium addresses this contamination in aspecific way