Participatory practice
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don’t count, as if you have nothing to contribute.’ (Participant at Forum on Poverty, Scotland, 2006) To return to Fraser, she argues we must change the deep grammar of contemporary forms of injustice. Existing critical theories can help the process of questioning (see Chapters 7 and 8 for examples of these), but by engaging directly in the entangled processes of knowing and being in everyday life, the process of critical questioning can take place immersed within the process of participatory practice. By engaging in this way, we do not fall into the trap of critique from the outside, at a distance, like traditional social science, but raise questions from within the realities of daily life. This is what Barad (2014) calls ‘defractive practice’, opening things up like opening up soil to aerate it and encourage new light to come in, while viewing the roots that are interconnected with the whole. In doing so we also have to address the underlying worldview of how we relate to one another (see also Theme 4). Justice, thus, is not morality, but a responsive ethical relationality with the other, and about reworking our relationships with each other
Social justice cannot be achieved unless it is grounded in a truly participatory democracy, one in which every voice is heard. We need to return to the original source of the word. In Greek, demos means people and kratos means power. So, as participatory practice is social justice as an embodied act, that embodied act also requires a reimagining of democracy, one that nurtures our relationship with each other and nurtures each other’s spirit. This is an act against widespread epistemic injustice, the silencing of voices on the margins. It is also an act of challenging the status quo of single-issue tokenism, which is so pervasive in contemporary society, serving to divide us rather than bring us together.
Theme 2: Participatory practice as a worldview Why would anyone bother to articulate a theory of knowledge of her beliefs, if the ground for those beliefs were not challenged? (Harding, 1990: 87) Our behaviours, our habits and our actions in the world, consciously or unconsciously, reflect the frames through which we view the world. If we believe ‘there is no such thing as society’ we will act as if there is no society, and if we collectively think that way, we will co-create a world whereby society does not exist, with everyone isolated, disconnected and mentally ill. As Wahl (2016) argues, the mental models and worldviews we employ act as organising ideas that help to structure what we see and pay attention to. A pervasive concept that has dominated economic and scientific thinking since the 18th century is the notion of separation, whether it is mind from body, matter from spirit, or humans from 19
