Opening Spaces of Possibility - The Enactive as a Qualitative Research Approach

Extracts from the original text by Johnna Haskell, Warren Linds & John Ippolito

"The world that is enacted is inseparable from how we act in it" (VARELA et al., 1991, p.140).

This approach implies that knowing emerges collectively through engagement in shared action. Embodied action brings forth an awareness of inquiry which is not attached to any one event or concept but is, rather, an un-grounding, as knowing is shaped by our actions with/in the world. Groundlessness is an exciting "space" where possibility arises for how we think about knowledge, cognition, and experience.

If knowledge and learning are not located in a body, but in the shifting movement of experiencing, new possibilities emerge for how researchers perceive, interpret, research, and interact within the world. We cannot imagine ourselves just "operating in" research settings, and then leaving the cultures of which we are part. Nor can we ignore the ethics of research, since research is also the site of an ongoing ethical event implicating all those involved.

If we take our partiality as researchers, the fact that we always influence the direction of our work, indeed, that our work is in many ways an expression of who we are and who we are becoming, we can interact with our connection to the research not as a liability to be guarded against, but as an opportunity to make the research more meaningful by more fully appreciating our part, as researchers, in it. [2]

When one lets go of objectivity as an unattainable and constraining icon then we begin to see our connection to the research as an asset. In what ways are the researcher, the research participants, and the research setting shaping each other? Are they distinct entities, or only possible in relation? How do we understand their mutual interaction? As research? As knowing? As experiencing? [3]

They refer to the "enactive view that cognition has no ultimate foundation or ground beyond its history of embodiment" (VARELA et al., 1991, p.xx). [4]

The enactive approach is best expressed as "the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs" (VARELA et al., 1991, p.9). [5]

Collective action, which can be none other than embodied action, is yet an awareness which is not attached to any one body or event or concept but is, rather, an un-grounding that VARELA, et al., refer to as "groundlessness." Groundlessness is an exciting "space" where possibility arises for how we think about knowledge, cognition, and experience. [7]

how, by engaging in our research in situated and concrete contexts, opportunities arise through shared, relational, and embodied interpretation practices. [9]

Enactive Approach:
We need to embrace the unpredictable and unexpected moments, the unfolding we are immersed with/in yet not graspable, in that they are constantly arising through action and not located in a self. If knowledge and learning are not located in the body or self but located in the shifting movement of experiencing, then this opens new possibilities for how we perceive, interpret and represent research.

Enactive inquiry is not some position, or set of questions, but a way of being "present" or open to the non-concrete. The best way to "record," relay, or interpret such spaces of inquiry is through our embodied listening, storying through photographs, and story telling or writing images (interactions) as they arise. [16]

"The role of the qualitative researcher, much like the artist/dancer's role, demands total involvement and commitment in a way that requires a total immersion of the senses in the experience. ... The researcher is connected to the participants in a most profound way, and that is how trust is established, which in turn allows for greater access to sources and which ensures an involvement on the part of participants that enables them to tell their respective stories. ...

The challenge is how to bring forth such experiencing in such a way that it continues to be enactive and not set in a step by step process.

Dewey:
"Thinking is a process of inquiry ... all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with [whomever] carries it on, even if everyone else in the world already is sure of what [he/she] is still looking for. It also follows that all thinking involves risk. Certainty cannot be guaranteed in advance. The invasion of the unknown is of the nature of an adventure; we cannot be sure in advance" (p.148).

Theatre of the Oppressed is a popular theatre approach which proposes that knowledge emerging aesthetically through a series of theatre exercises and games is already in itself the beginning of a transformation.

My work involves enabling groups of people to create short plays together. Warmup or tune-up exercises are used to develop a sense of community and trust. These activities are also performative as they both develop, and carry, the relationship I have with participants as active sites of knowing and understanding.

"What we do is what we know, and ours is but one of many possible worlds. It is not a mirroring of the world, but a laying down of the world" (VARELA, 1987, p.62). In this process the researcher/facilitator becomes an adventurer, an experimenter, and a catalyst who invites, encourages and dares exploration with others. The participant is also a researcher as, both individually and collectively, they explore through their bodies the themes that emerge.

How can such an enactive7 view assist us in creating conditions where research continually takes into account the emerging networks of relationships that continually grow, change and respond to challenges? [38] I will explore in this essay the implications for inter-subjective forms of qualitative research of how the shaping of a dramatic structure is intertwined with our play within it as knowing emerges through a variety of forms of actions which are simultaneously the medium, subject and re-presentation of research.As facilitator/researcher I am capable of occupying many positions in the work,and don't rest with any. I am continuously learning with/in the workshop environment; I am not just directing participants on what to do. Rather, I am co-implicated in an exploration process and co-evolving alongside the participants in the process. Although I am a facilitator, and they are participants, I am co-implicated with them as a participant. I must be able to shift back and forth—facilitator as participant, participant as facilitator. The work is shaped by me and Iam shaped by it in a circular process.

Judith PIPPEN (1997)'s approach. "the dynamic inter-relationship of our bodyhood and its multidimensional relational space" (p.72), which overcomes bodymind, voice/movement splits in human relationships.

How can we help others learn reflective and mindful awareness that empowers them to access their intuitive and embodied abilities, as well as fuel their interpretive and imaginative powers in their research practice?

As in this exercise, research is a dialogical and social process. Things happen spontaneously as people play and inter-play with each other, finding and filling spaces for dialogue and interaction. Can we also play with the idea that these spaces are also spaces of the possible, enlarged through our interactions?

Complicity—being implicated in/with—moves us as researchers from managing a simplistic system of designed input-outcome-based inquiry towards one of dynamic engagement and interaction. This requires an attentiveness to our participation through events, engaging in knowingbeingdoing in a complex and forever unfolding world.

Fritjhof CAPRA's (1998) contrast of designed structures with emergent ones. Designed structures are formal structures and content, while emergent ones are the informal network of relationships that "continually grows, changes, and adapts to new situations" (p.47). An emergent structure incorporates a different form of relationship than that of a designed structure. Whereas a designed structure is based on rules and procedures, an emergent one facilitates the continual emergence of new structures by encouraging questioning and rewarding innovation. This fits in more with the idea of complicity which I have outlined whereby facilitating emergence requires us to pay attention to how the system operates in order to continually create conditions for it to flourish.

Research informed by and respectful of the complex worlds of these settings are not just "interventions" but instances of complicity whereby our research unfolds with communities-in-the-making through partnerships and interrelationships.

Thus, research means becoming attuned to such complicity, to be able to improvise within it and to realize that control doesn't reside with the researcher all the time, but is distributed amongst the participants from moment to moment. We have a responsibility to embody awareness of the intentions, values and beliefs emerging through such partnerships.

Creating the conditions for interactive inquiry in this light means that research is not the "finding" of some passive knowledge, preconceived, believed to be known in advance, "believed to be (exclusively) a given" (FELMAN, 1995, p.56). Research then becomes an "open space through which thing-flows are distributed rather than plotting out a close space for linear and solid things" (DELEUZE & GUATTARI, 1988, p.361). Such spaces are always emerging, but we must be aware of them when they do, attending "closely to my nonverbal experiences of the shifting landscape that surrounds me" (ABRAM, 1996, pp.59-60). [

I offer suggestions for actions as I guide the group. Not only do these actions bring forth an awareness of feelings in the group, they also bring me into contact with my own senses as the ripples of group action echo back to me.

Our research method is intertwined with the content of our research. This is a phenomenological approach to research method, not as a series of steps but one where I must listen (in an embodied way) to the content or focus of my research and the appropriate method will emerge through my interaction with the research I engage in. Isn't the traditional approach that your research question determines your method. I think what we are suggesting is a much more interactive and holistic process.

Performance theorist Peggy PHELAN explains performance as "honoring the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterwards"

So, rather than having the research question determine the method, my interaction with teachers and students informs my approach and specifies my direction.

This brings us back to the origins of the word research. One root of the French word (rechercher) is the old (1080) word "recerchier", meaning "parcourir en cherchant" ("to travel while searching"). Research as such a journey into knowing means, as John puts it, there are no fixed start or ending points—we are always in the middle of something.

Workshop 3 exercises

Extracted from Really, Really Small: The Palpability of the Invisible by Thecla Schiphorst

Augusto Boal [4] terms these types of experiential exercise de-specialization. He states that in our every day lives “the senses suffer. And we start to feel very little of what we touch, to listen to very little of what we hear, and to see very little of what we look at. We feel, listen and see according to our specialty. The adaptation is [both] atrophy and hypertrophy. In order for the body to be able to send out and receive all possible messages, it has to be reharmonized [through] exercises and games that focus on despecialization.” Boal’s goals in theatre are to create imaginative, social and political agency. His work is premised on the notion that agency at the bodily level (agency of the self) enables agency at the social and political level. Many exercises in Somatics and performance focus on this idea of retraining attention in order to increase awareness and agency through the body, and can be applied to many levels of awareness that extend beyond the personal.

By depriving the body of its external hearing it can become aware of the internal sound otherwise made invisible by the louder external sounds. We are removed from our own ears, but not from our hearing. In performance, artists like Pauline Oliveros and Augusto Boal have created practices such as “deep listening”, and “listening to what we hear”, which probe and access these very same questions of experience. The responses to the very simple question on the cards: What did you hear? focus on access to this level or resolution of experience. Responses indicated the participants’ discovery of the internal soundscape.

At the beginning of the workshop, the participants were asked to move in slow motion, as slowly as possible. They were then left to move very slowly for 10 minutes without speaking.

In Dance practices such as Butoh, this technique is utilized to enable the body to shift its attention to an immersive state in relation to its environment, what Csikszentmihalyi would term ‘flow’, where attention is intensified, and sensory details are sharpened. In neurophysiology and psychology [41] experimental studies show that the slowing or stopping of movement changes the conscious states we normally have and allows for observing the constant shifts of thought, sensation, or expands the ability to observe characteristics of basic experiencing [20].