§ 1 – focus and grounding (relax conditioning, receptive)
§ 2 – emergent knowing (enaction, interdependence)
§ 3 – collaborative co-creative leadership (response-ability)
§ 4 – research as care for enactive dynamics at all system levels

Exploring Radical Listening as an Enactive Practice in Research – a Collaborative Initiative

Research involves choice, care and commitment to community – other living systems. As a profession of knowledge-making, research requires ethical consideration – the development of response-ability for finding relevant and viable paths forward. Especially from an enactive perspective, this means knowing how to navigate dynamically evolving forms of participation, as living systems are considered radically interdependent, enmeshed within a multi-level dynamic of constant change. 

To implement this understanding of enactive research, we practice staying present with our unfolding embodied experience, and commit to applying phenomenological approaches in cultivating and investigating our organic autopoietic capacities for emergence. This approach pulls us into research that is intimate and involved – a professional practice that encourages becoming familiar with systems from their own side, from within. 

Our Enactive Research group meets weekly to explore our foundational and ethical principles: embodied grounding – receptive awareness of emerging experience, recognizing conditioning, and collaborative leadership that honors and invites diverse personal histories and contributions. Our approach rests on staying open – for others to join and other ways of engaging and collaborating to evolve and nurture our professional vitality. To document and learn from our process, we engage in reflexive writing.

Our work is very much a process, enriched and guided by collaboration. Our practice is motivated by the wish to further understanding in shared exploration – do get in touch if you want to join!

Questions we hold include: What does it take to (co)operate from an open and listening stance, in the face of difference or difficulty? Can embodied and phenomenological approaches support or enrich concerns around care and power or social/political issues? How would the process of doing science be impacted by awareness of enactive learning cycles?