"Opening Up the Space Between Us"

As an introduction to this new season of conversations, I sat down with Dr Hanne De Jaegher, who was the backbone of Semester 4 of our Core Enaction Programme. She is well known in the worlds of philosophy and cognitive science for her development - with Dr Ezequiel Di Paolo - of the theory of participatory sense-making, which grew out of the enactive approach and which takes seriously our expertise in intersubjectivity by virtue of our being human.  

For those who are new to participatory sense-making, here are a few words from Hanne’s wonderful website: “Participatory sense-making is a conceptual, scientific, and experiential framework for investigating our social lives. It builds conceptual bridges between the different disciplines working on intersubjectivity. These concepts and methods are being applied to issues such as autism, therapeutic practices, learning and teaching, intimacy, development. In turn, the applications inform the further construction of the theory.” See also Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo, "Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition" (2007).

In this conversation, we dwell with some of the key questions that emerged from our experiment in Semester 4 of bringing participatory sense-making into conversation with the exigencies of intersubjective practices in the world today. And we consider some of the tensions that are necessary to an approach that seeks to understand interactional dynamics across differences and asymmetries, recognising the care or concern that is at the core of a person’s agency. We also reflect a bit on the experiment itself of Core Enaction, Semester 4, and the ways in which it mirrored the ongoing challenge we all encounter of neither overdetermining nor underdetermining an interactional situation. 

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