About Us
RIPPLE is a multi-disciplinary research centre that conducts high-quality applied research into and consultation about professional practice. Our research and development work includes investigations in practice philosophy and theory, the nature of professions and professionalism across diverse fields of professional practice, professional identities and practice development throughout professional careers, and issues concerning how cultures and contexts shape professional practices. Five themes orient our investigations:
Understanding and Researching Professional Practice: Theories, methodologies and approaches for enquiry into practice
How can (professional) practices be understood and studied? How do established and existing approaches to understanding and researching professional practice cause us to (mis)understand the nature and consequences of professional practices? More...
Practice Development across the Professional Career: Initial, transitional and continuing professional education
How should professional education be conceptualised and conducted, taking into account the diversity of professions and the evolution of professional practice for changing times and circumstances? How do practices themselves develop and evolve over time and for changing locations and circumstances? How do practitioners develop through their careers, as the ones who enact and develop practices? What are the conditions under which the development or evolution of practices and practitioners are enabled or constrained? More...
Professional Identities and Cultures: Subjectivity, the body and space
What is it to be and to become a professional? What is it to belong to a profession? How are professional identities formed and sustained? What is it to be known as and to see oneself as a practising professional? What is it, more specifically, to be a professional in a particular field? How are professional identities constructed, both at the outset, in the context of pre-service professional education, and subsequently throughout the professional career? More...
Practice in Multiple Context(s): Organisations, technologies and societies
How are practices and professional practitioners changed by different kinds of conditions in the different kinds of contexts in which they are enacted? How do different kinds of organisations shape practices? How do different kinds of cultural settings, including settings characterised by cross-cultural difference, shape practices? Different social and political arrangements? Different kinds of social spaces (for example, urban versus rural versus remote settings)? How do contexts exert pressures - positive and negative - on the conduct of different kinds of professional practices? More...
Learning, Practice and Change: Changing practices and transformative learning
How are we to understand the notions of learning, practice and change? Are they interrelated, and, if so, how? Is it possible to learn anything but practices (for example, information, knowledge or concepts)? How, and under what conditions, does learning bring about transformations in people, practices, professions and states of affairs? More...