Theme 2: Participatory practice as a worldview

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

nature. This dominant worldview is so hegemonic in contemporary society that it is assumed to be the most accurate view of reality and is one that has been imposed on those countries colonised by Europeans. An alternative worldview is a participatory one that takes us beyond this illusion of separateness. It is one shared by many indigenous people in those same colonised countries and found in the ancient myths and legends of the European countries themselves. Opening up to this alternative ‘reality’ changes your perception of the world and how you act in it. As you will see when we bring in the ideas of ecological and system thinking later, at the core of participatory consciousness is the understanding that all life is a circle. It is not the linear cause-effect model of the world, which currently dominates. Instead, a participatory worldview gives us a different lens or frame through which to view the world, providing a different picture of what we see and do not see. For example, it sees our world as one that seeks balance and one in which we engage with our environment and each other with our hearts, not just with our minds alone. Most of all it is one where there are no dualistic opposites; rather, it is about interconnection and wholeness. In many ways we instinctively know this, but socialisation and institutional structures, trauma and life circumstances have distorted our perceptions, clouding our minds and preventing us from connecting with our hearts. By changing our awareness, bringing what has hitherto been unconscious to the surface through critical questioning (see Chapter 7), we can start the process of awakening and hence transformation.

At this moment in time humanity is facing a terminal crisis of an outdated worldview. We argue in this book for an alternative participatory worldview with its emphasis on complexity and connection; one where spirit, consciousness and matter are inextricably linked. Further, we argue that you cannot truly engage in participatory practice unless you also adopt the lens of participatory consciousness (see Chapter 4). Focusing on separation, for example, also justifies competition, whereas focusing on connection leads to cooperation and an emphasis on the process of relating rather than one of ‘putting one over’ on the other. ‘Cognition is not a representation of an independently existing world, but rather the act of bringing forth a world through the processes of living as relating’, according to Maturana and Varela (1987). These biologists also suggest that we have to realise that the ‘world-as-we-know-it’ emerges out of the way we relate to each other and the wider natural process. Drawing on Biology of Love by Maturana and Verden-Zöller (1996), Wahl (2016: 34) writes:

Is our ability to love what makes humanity worth sustaining? We are not the pinnacle of evolution but participants in its processes – conscious participants capable of self-reflection. We are only just beginning to understand consciousness and in the process are becoming aware of our intimate communion and entanglement with all there is. Every living being reflects the whole, the evolving and transforming universe, back onto itself in its own unique way.