Participatory practice
their families and their communities and addressing inequities experienced by communities.
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Source: Based on Zulla (2021)
Relational processes shape who we are as individuals and how we can be in this world. We are constantly constructing the sense of ourselves and others through the social and cultural practices in which we participate. Sociocultural environments shape how individuals relate to each other and how they affirm each other. Through relational processes, self-conceptions are stabilised, threatened, or opened up to new ways of being. This is why dialogue and opportunities to create what Kemmis (2008) drawing on Habermas (1984; 1987) calls ‘communicative spaces’ are so key to participatory practice (see Chapter 6). Hearing each other’s stories, and entering into dialogue about what we hear, reshapes our meaningmaking as we co-create meaning, understanding and knowledge together. This, in turn, changes the way we act towards each other and the world. But that dialogue will not take place if there is no trust between people. Participatory practice therefore seeks to create relationships based on trust and reciprocity. Only when we have created trust and deep listening can we then start to expose and transform power relationships. In doing so, our aim eventually is to move from power over to power with. Moreover, the power one experiences in such a relational process is not the limited conception of power we are presented with in the press and other media, rather it is the power of the life force in all living things.
Theme 5: Participatory practice as interdependence and interbeing In a participatory worldview, the individual gains knowledge to grow and connect within society and with the natural world. The aim is to pursue a shared vision of thriving together, while being sensitive to the uniqueness of place and local culture. Out of this process emerge the types of community-level collaboration that regenerate the social capital that has been so depleted in our society. Through our participation in relationships we become part of a dynamic whole within which we both define ourselves and create our reality and, in seeing this, we can start to reframe the narrative of separation to one of interbeing (Wahl, 2016). With this new frame, or way of seeing the world, our perceptions as to the value of the commons begin to change. By ‘commons’ we mean not just the common land enclosed against the wishes of local people in the later medieval and early industrial period. Nor do we mean its current manifestation in the appropriation of public land and public capital for private use in the form of selling off publicly owned property such as water, or town squares and spaces in shopping centres. We mean a wider concept of the commons, a sense of collective ownership of outcomes, of knowledge, of action. There are signs that such an alternative is 25
