Ways of the Jam: Collective and improvisational perspectives on learning

By Lars Brinck

In the PhD-dissertation Ways of the Jam Lars Brinck investigates jamming and learning as profoundly collective and improvisational matters. Bridging a theory of funk jamming with situated learning theoretical analyses of New Orleans second line, everyday leadership, and of a studio recording session demonstrate how looking at human activity from a jamming perspective enhances our understanding of learning as a complex collective and improvisational process.
Ways of the Jam demonstrates how learning is a matter of changing improvisational participation in changing practice in analytically inseparable ways, circumscribed by what practice is ‘about’.
This leads to the dissertation’s closing argument: putting what practice is about and the collectivity of practice first enhances important aspects of learning. The dissertation offers a set of theoretical as well as empirical speculations on this ‘aboutness’ of practice, on the collectivity of changing practice, on the improvisational aspects of participation, and on these analytic perspectives’ complex hegemony and subordination.

Download the PhD-dissertation in .pdf, HERE