This article details how a community of practice came crashing down on the iron rocks of bureaucracy. I apply Brown and Duguid’s theorisation of the dialectics of ‘working, learning and innovating’ illustrating how these three aspects came to conflict with one another, and how I worked to resolve them. As an anthropologist leading an environmental health project in a mid-Michigan public health agency, I formed a ‘community of practice’ and proceeded as a researcher, ethnographer and community activist for nearly three years, gathering findings to change the agency’s organisational structure, as a form of ‘disruptive innovation’. The community ‘roundtable’ of external project advisors highly supported the penultimate reports on water pollution, air pollution and restaurant health. The interdisciplinary strategies pursued resulted in valuable integrations of new knowledge in public anthropology across several thematic areas: critical public pedagogy, sustainability, citizen science, radical journalism and anthropologies of violence, trauma and transformation.

中文翻译：

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在公共卫生机构中对抗暴政：将“实践哲学”转变为“抵抗社区”

本文详细介绍了实践社区是如何在官僚机构的铁石上崩溃的。我采用布朗和杜吉德关于“工作，学习和创新”的辩证法的理论，说明了这三个方面是如何相互冲突的，以及我如何解决它们。作为一名人类学家，在密歇根州中部一家公共卫生机构领导一个环境卫生项目，我成立了“实践社区”，并以研究员，人种学家和社区活动家的身份开展了近三年的研究，收集了发现以改变该机构的组织结构。一种“破坏性创新”的形式。外部项目顾问的社区“圆桌会议”高度支持有关水污染，空气污染和饭店健康的倒数第二份报告。