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].

Translations / De-scriptions in Workshop1

Inscribing Sensitivities into Design

This is the title of my next paper. Here is the abstract:

This research aims to develop an approach to design in order to support relational nature of human capacity for action. Supporting relationality asks for a different approach or sensitivity to the ways we perform design practice. Rather than trying to control, predict or prescribe actions and relations of users, designers may design for actions more emergent and relations more fluid. Moreover, designers need to consider the performative aspects of design that require a broader notion of design process, which extends the scope of design to include design-in-use. In this broader landscape of design, designers also need to revisit their roles and the traditional boundaries between designers and users. The study follows a research through design approach and synthesizes various perspectives and approaches from feminist Science and Technology Studies, Participatory Design, Seamful Design and Actor-Network Theory. In the paper, we introduce an analysis of previous design cases and approaches that demonstrate different ways of addressing the relational character of human capacity for action. As a result of our analysis, we suggest six qualities to sensitize design: visibility, multiplicity, relationality, accountability, duality and configurability. Finally, we discuss some strategies to inscribe these qualities into design process. Our analysis involves design cases only from interaction design field, but we see a broader relevance to other design domains.

Opening up to possibilities rather than probabilities: A relational constructionist approach

Extracts from Hosking and Pluut's original text:
(Re)constructing Reflexivity: A Relational Constructionist Approach

relational constructionist perspective which radically re-conceptualizes reflexivity:
(a) as a local and co-constructed process oriented towards the question
(b) how are we ‘going on’ together, and therefore paying attention to
(c) the realities and relations we are co-creating during the research process and so
(d) is concerned with local pragmatic and ethical issues (Gergen & Hosking, 2006; McNamee, 1994) rather than with the quality of truth claims.

 

• Our relational constructionist meta-theory implies that the processes that some call “research” are processes in which the identities of researcher, research object and related realities are in ongoing re-construction.
•  The centring of construction invites a view of research as intervention, the centring of relating implies that ethics and responsibility be re-constructed and centred e.g., through reflexive dialogues, and talk of multiple forms of life invites attention to multiple local ways of knowing and “power to.”
• Research as intervention:
• our relational premises imply that participating in inquiry inevitably (re)constructs peoples' lives in some degree (McNamee, 1994) and imply that all participants – including scientific researchers – construct and reconstruct their local (community-based) knowledges, identities and relations. From this it follows that research may be practised in ways that construct researchers as copractitioners and practitioners as co-researchers (Cunliffe & Shotter, 2006). Viewing research (or, as we prefer to call it, inquiry) as intervention, and shifting reflexive attention to the research process itself, enables a relational conception of ethics and responsibility.

• Relational ethics/ Relation responsibility
• our relational premises imply that inquiry is intervention.
• Sheila McNamee speaks of this as a matter of relational (rather than individual) responsibility (McNamee, 2004) – relational responsibility for the research process – and the kinds of people and worlds it (re)produces.

• Ongoing Reflexive Dialogues Directed at the Research Process
• Gergen outlined three important "overtures to innovation."
• deconstruction - “wherein all presumptions of the true, the rational, and the good are open to suspicion” (Gergen, 1994, p. 62).
• democratization or "relational responsibility",
• reconstruction – “wherein new realities and practices are fashioned for cultural transformation” (Gergen, 1994, p. 63).

• Reflexive dialogues are a way of putting these "overtures" to work in research. This can be done by inviting communal reflection (Gergen & Gergen, 1991) throughout the inquiry.

• Reporting strategies:
• Meta-theoretical assumptions offer a different view – the process is the product (Brown & Hosking, 1986)
• Alternatively, the style, form and content of the reporting strategy can be more open and, for example, oriented towards processes, possibilities and generative theorising.
• Another possibility is that full and equal participation is attempted in the
  writing of the report. Participative research practices can be extended to include "cogenerated reports" (Allard-Poesi, 2005)
• Notions of symmetry: all research participants to share responsibility for learning.
• Instead it becomes an ongoing relational process of “turning back” on the construction
  of the ”inquiry.” Reflexive dialogues, directed at the research process, can open up
  new ways of going on together by mobilizing local knowledges and communally
  reflecting on research identities and relations.
• These dialogues can all be considered attempts to construct soft self-other differentiation. In this way reflexivity is not a slide into infinite regress, but an opening up to multiple local forms of life and to possibilities rather than probabilities (Gergen, 1994; Hosking, 2008).

Expressing and legitimating ‘actionable knowledge’ from within ‘the moment of acting’

Some extracts from the original text by John Shotter:

Expressing and legitimating‘actionable knowledge’ from within ‘the moment of acting’

"In this paper I distinguish between two kinds of speech/writing: ‘withness (dialogic)’ -talk and ‘aboutness (monologic)’ -talk . Crucial in this distinction is our spontaneous, expressive, living, bodily responsiveness.While monological aboutness-talk is unresponsive to the activities of the others around us, dialogical withness-talk is not. In being spontaneously responsive both to the expressions of others, as well as our own, as I show in the paper, it engenders in us both unique anticipations as to what-next might happen along with, so to speak, ‘action-guiding advisories’ as to what-next we might do"

"To turn to Bakhtin’s (1986) contribution first: He introduces us to the idea of a previously unnoticed kind of understanding spontaneously occurring within our ongoing involvements in our ordinary, everyday, practical activities, a relationally-responsive understanding, that can contrasted with the representational- referential forms currently more familiar to us."

"It is a kind of thinking that takes place, not like geometric reasoning, in episodic moments in terms of static, spatially arrayed shapes and forms; nor in terms of measuring spatial like up against spatial like to achieve a correspondence or not. Indeed, it is a style of thought that, metaphorically, is not best described as a kind of ‘seeing’ at all. Instead, it is a style of thought that only takes place in motion, that works in terms of felt, living, inner, expressive-responsive ‘movements’ unfolding in time—above, I have called it ‘withness’- thinking to contrast it with our more usual style of ‘aboutness’-thinking."

"that when someone acts, their activity cannot be accounted as wholly their own activity—for a person’s acts are partly ‘shaped’ by the acts of all the others around them. Thus, because the overall outcome of any exchange cannot be traced back to the intentions of any of the individuals involved, the ‘dialogical reality’ or ‘space’ constructed between them is experienced as an ‘external reality’, a ‘third agency’ (an ‘it’, a ‘something’) with its own (ethical) demands and requirements: “The word is a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet, but a trio)” (Bakhtin 1986: 122)—in other words, it is as if this third agency, this something, has a ‘voice’ of its own to which dialogue participants must also respond. This is where all the strangeness of the dialogical begins."

"such inter-activity cannot be simply described as a sequence of actions (for it is not done by individuals; and cannot be explained by giving people’s reasons ), nor can it be simply described as behavior (as it cannot be explained in terms of causal principles either); it constitutes a distinct, third sphere of dynamically intertwined activity, sui generis , with its own distinctive properties. It involves a special kind of nonrepresentational, sensuous or embodied form of practical-moral (Bernstein 1983) understanding, which, in being constitutive of people’s social and personal identities, is prior to and determines all the other ways of knowing available to us. What is produced in such dialogical exchanges is a very complex ‘orchestration’ of not wholly reconcilable influences — as Bakhtin (1981) remarks, both ‘centripetal’ tendencies inward toward order and unity at the center, as well as ‘centrifugal’ ones outward toward diversity and difference on the borders or margins."

Their complex intertwined nature makes it very difficult for us to characterize them: they have neither a fully orderly nor a fully disorderly structure, neither a completely stable nor an easily changed organization, neither a fully subjective nor fully objective character. As a complex dynamic ‘orchestration’ of many different kinds of influences, they lack specificity, they are only partially determined: they are just as much material as mental; just as much felt as thought; in being ‘spread out’ amongst all those participating in them, they are ‘non-locatable’; they are neither ‘inside’ people, but nor are they ‘outside’ them; they are located in a ‘dialogical space’ where ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are, seemingly paradoxically, one. Due to their living continuity, they do not allow for the spatialization of time into a sequence of events each with a separate ‘before’ and ‘after’ (Bergson), nor do they allow for separable agencies or effects; they consist only in meaningful wholes which cannot divide themselves into separable parts."

"Indeed, it is precisely their lack of any pre-determined order, and thus their openness to being specified or determined by those participating within them in practice (while usually remaining quite unaware of having done so), that is their central defining feature."

"this is precisely what makes this sphere of activity interesting to us, for at least the two following reasons: (1) to do with in situ practical investigations, i.e., action research, into how people actually do in fact manage to ‘work things out’ effectively between themselves, and the part played by the ways of talking/ writing we interweave into them in so doing; but also (2) for how we might refine and elaborate these spheres of talk intertwined activity, and how by an appropriate use of such talk, we might extend them into novel spheres as yet unknown to us."

"I began with a comparison of two styles of writing: 3rd-person reportings and 1st-person tellings, a comparison between talk/writing that leaves us ‘unmoved’ with that which ‘moves’ us. While objective, reporting-style of writing may serve an important authoritative function in setting the outside limits, so to speak, within which an institution must function. To the extent that action research has to operate within the ordinary, ongoing, everyday life activities of organizations, institutions, businesses, and all the other everyday spheres of worklife, each unique in its own way, it is the second telling-style that will give rise to actionable knowledge.While the first style attempts to capture the nature of life in another world independent of us, it is the second that enables us to enter into another world, with a life of its own, not independent of us, but in relation to us —thus to gain a sense of its movements relative to ours."

"While 3rd-person reports of research, represent important regularities and de-contextualized universals, i.e., facts, about the groups in question researched into by outsiders to the groups, 1st-person tellings work in a different way. They are related to the experiences of insiders to those groups, and they work so that in their telling they ‘move’ listeners into paying attention to previously unnoticed particularities within the ‘world’ of the insiders—and it is in this way, in making the unnoticed noticeable, that, although the cases described might seem to be utterly unique and particular, they can in their telling give rise, nonetheless, to transferrable or actionable knowledge."

"a distinction between ‘withness-‘ and ‘aboutness-thinking/talking/writing’: Withness (dialogic)- thinking is a form of reflective interaction that involves coming into living contact with an other’s living being, with their utterances, their bodily expressions, their words, their ‘works’. It gives rise, not to a ‘seeing’, for what is ‘sensed’ is invisible; nor to an interpretation, for our responses occur spontaneously and directly in our living encounters with an other’s expressions; but to a ‘shaped‘ and ‘vectored‘ sense of our moment-by-moment changing placement in our current surroundings—engendering in us both unique anticipations as to what-next might happen along with, so to speak, ‘action-guiding advisories’ as to what-next we might do.While aboutness (monologic)-thinking, however, is unresponsive to another’s expressions; it works simply in terms of a thinker’s ‘theoretical pictures’—but, even when we ‘get the picture’, we still have to interpret it, and to decide, intellectually, on a right course of action"

"While Sacks’s account works in terms of unfinished, fluid or flexible varieties of possibilities. And while he leaves it open as to how Dr P. might respond—for he issues invitations not commands—it is the relation of Dr P’s unique responses to Sacks’s invitations, that are revealing of the unique nature of Dr P.’ s ‘world’.  Furthermore, in engaging us, Sacks’s style of writing is ‘moving’, we are ‘moved’ by it in the sense that provides us with a shaped and vectored sense of Dr P.’ s ‘world’, i.e., a sense of how, practically, to find out ‘way about’ within it, thus to ‘go on’ with him in practical ways that make sense to him (Wittgenstein 1953)."

"In dialogical-prospective-relational styles of writing, however, we would be talking/writing to our readers of the character of our ongoing involvements with certain other people, as if from within that involvement - while both looking back on what had been achieved so far, and forward prospectively, toward the possibilities open to us for our next ‘steps’. Our concern in such talk/writing would be with attempting to ‘show’ or ‘make manifest’ to readers (metaphorically) how they might, justifiably , be able to make sense of the character of such involvements."

"People’s sense of their own responsibility for their actions is, then, at the very basis of science itself. Scientists lacking any sense of their own participation in events occurring around them would be unable to do experiments. So, although Sacks’s style of writing may seem ‘anecdotal’, may seem to be merely about single, peculiar particularities, it is an unavoidable style of communication that all scientists must indulge in, if they are to instruct one another in how the categories of their theories should be used and applied—for the categories of such un-involving, such ‘non-moving’ forms of talk, do not apply themselves."

Voloshinov's dialogical approach by John Shotter

Some extracts from the original text by John Shotter:
"INSTEAD OF THEORY CRITIQUE AND DEBATE:  VOLOSHINOV'S UNENDING, DIALOGICALLY-STRUCTURED PARTICIPATORY MODE OF INQUIRY"

"what is important for the speaker about a linguistic form is not that it is a stable and always self-equivalent signal but that it is an always changeable and adaptable sign."

"Listeners, also, do not look for identical forms in order to make sense of a speaker's talk. In the real-life practice of social exchange, a second person simply shows their understanding of the expressions of a first in how they spontaneously respond to them. The task of understanding a verbal utterance "does not basically amount to recognizing the form used, but rather to understanding it in a particular, concrete context,... i.e., it amounts to understanding its novelty and not to recognizing its identity"

""Individuals do not receive a ready-made language at all," claims Voloshinov (1986), "rather, they enter upon the stream of verbal communication; indeed, only in this stream does their consciousness first begin to operate" (p.81). Initially, that is all that matters: being able to enter into the spontaneously responsive stream of activity already occurring amongst those around us."

"Instead of taking people's willful and intellectual acts as basic, and looking back to discover a supposed already existing but hidden source of organization with ourselves, he starts by considering people's activities prior to their individual willful and intellectual acts. And furthermore, rather than inward and backward, he looks outward and forward, toward how people responsively create ways to 'go on' in their spontaneous and non-deliberate acts."