Seminar for the DFG (German Research Foundation) Research Training Group “Self-Making: Practices of Subjectivation in Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspective”. Drawing on examples from a study of ‘leisure practices’ and a new study of the institutional rhythms that make up hospital life, this workshop will explore various challenges involved in studying practices. In particular it will question how to capture the temporal qualities of practice; how to understand the embodied aspect of practice; and how to account for the institutional arrangements of embodied activity. What methods, techniques and epistemologies are required to capture empirically different aspects of these “routinized types of behaviour” and what do these methods matter for how we construct our understanding of practical activity?