Theme 5: Participatory practice as interdependence and interbeing

their families and their communities and addressing inequities experienced by communities.

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

re-emerging in virtual reality, with examples such as Wikipedia, crowdsourcing, open-source software, and no doubt many others by the time this book is published. This recognition of the importance of our interdependence is driving a whole plethora of social innovations in which people are reorganising themselves and creating common value together. This goes beyond the passive involvement generated, for example, by YouTube, where you share information but do not work together towards a common object or share common property. The rules of participation of these new shared enterprises are established so as to negate any potential predators looking to buy out or dominate (Bauwens and Ramos, 2018). Thus, creating is an alternative economic relationship to the current dominant corporate enterprise.

Can you think of other examples of such shared enterprises?

But recognition of interdependence goes beyond this, if you think about it in ecosystem terms (see below). It involves recognising that our actions collectively shape the world. Language around the narrative of ‘public’ is important here, particularly in relation to the idea of the collective. By using the word ‘public’, we buy into an old discourse which is embedded in the dualism of public versus private. It is also a word fraught with ambiguity. Who are ‘the public’? Given that in the age of the internet so much private information becomes ‘public’, what ‘public’ means is fuzzy and easily appropriated. Take, for instance, the use in the UK of the words ‘public schools’. These are actually private schools that educate the elite and wealthy and are the seedbed of class inequality. This is an extreme example, but more generally the use of the word ‘public’ hides and muddies the collective and social element. It is a great example of how neoliberalism controls thought patterns. By reimagining the commons and acknowledging our interdependence we can transform the notion of ‘public’ and substitute the word ‘collective’, which highlights that interdependence where no one individual is entitled and we all have responsibilities to one another.

We need to constantly ask ourselves, to what extent are we framing the problems we are seeking to address and proposing a solution informed by the narrative of separation, and how much are we looking from the perspective of interbeing?

To reiterate, we are all interconnected and interdependent. Any action we take individually and collectively has an effect on other people. Nowhere is this clearer than in a pandemic, although, for some, this is difficult to grasp.

How a virus spread because of interconnections: the example of a wedding in Maine, US, on 7 August 2020

It was attended by 55 people in a hotel. The bride and groom came from California. One of the guests had COVID-19. Over the next 38 days the virus spread to 177 other people because social distancing and masking was not attended to. 27 of the 55 got Covid plus a staff member from the hotel, another patron unconnected who was staying there and a vendor. One person of the group also attended a school meeting which infected two school staff members, another visited a parent in a long-term care facility which infected a health worker who carried on working and spread the virus in that facility 100 miles away. Another visited a prison 200 miles away and infected 82 people.

Source: Mahale et al (2020)

This idea of interconnection – collective participation in the whole, and that whatever action we take has collective consequences – goes beyond the wellknown idea of butterfly’s wings leading to a storm somewhere else in the world. Everything is a product of our interbeing and how that manifests collectively. For example, if there is greater inequality in society people trust one another less. This, in turn, has an impact on overall levels of ill health because of the stress created. It is no coincidence that the Scandinavian countries, who have more equal societies, have the highest levels of average life expectancy. When more people live in poverty, there is a greater level of crime. Greater inequality has economic repercussions, too, as the more equal a society is the higher the standard measure of economic health, GDP per capita.

The butterfly wings analogy points, however, to deep interconnection between humans and nature, and the repercussions of that relationship globally. The climate crisis has highlighted this in recent years but there have been many other examples. For years, acid rain as a consequence of industrial pollution in the UK was shown to have damaged pine trees in Scandinavia.

we are able to see ourselves and our immanent value as related to and connected to others – family, community, the world, those behind and those yet to come. Through embracing this world view, each individual becomes intensely aware of personal accountability for the welfare of others. (Graveline, 1998)

As this quote from a member of the Cree in Canada points out, the cultural system of Canadian indigenous systems recognises the interconnection between the individual and the collective and the collective and nature. In many such