Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 21.1
(continued)
Session 3—Future Ideal Retrospective
• Future Ideal Retrospective activity (P2) to synthesize the between-session homework. (In
brief, each participant imagined at some
future
time being part of a project that embodied an
ethical framework for participatory processes. Looking back (
retrospective
) to explain to
someone what contributed to making that
ideal
situation possible, three to fi ve words answers
were printed on Post-Its. After collecting and copying these for participants, the task was to
fi nd and name clusters of Post-Its. (Links to a description of the process and to the collated
Post-Its are given in Taylor
2011
.)
• Closing circle (P4): “one thing you're taking away from these sessions to keep developing.”
(The audio linked to Taylor
2011
includes, among other things, mention of the value of
freewriting, the need for being willing to participate, and the diffi culty of being in the process
without knowing the intended product.)
The intended follow up to the last session of the discussion group was that each
person would complete and share the Post-It syntheses then email exchanges might
build on these. Because I had prior experience in—and a disposition for—the
clustering and naming exercise, I readily generated clusters and grouped these into
successively more inclusive clusters, which I shared and have subsequently depicted
as Fig.
21.1
(and discuss in Sect.
21.3
). However, I know of no other follow-up from
the participants. In short, the group did not get to a place where we had developed
“plans and practices… in which all the participants are invested.” (For description
of a multi-stage workshop process for moving to such a result from an initial
“Practical Vision,” see Stanfi eld
2002
.)
Nevertheless, at least for me, the sessions affi rmed that participatory processes
can result in a “project that is richer, deeper, and has more dimensions than what
you came in with. The more angles… that are brought out by the process, the more
likely you are to create something you did not anticipate” (Taylor and Szteiter
2012
,
149) (P3). It was by chewing on the clusters in Fig.
21.1
and tensions among them
that I was moved to articulate the
ideals of engagement
outlined in Sect.
21.3
. For
those ideals to make sense to readers let me fi rst share a refl ection from just after the
2011 Conference, in which I asked what might have happened if ecological science
rather than ethics had taken the lead.
21.2
From Dynamic Flux Ecology to Dynamic Flux Ethics
The scientists, philosophers, and interdisciplinary scholars gathered at the 2011
Conference shared a concern with environmental degradation. One model for stem-
ming that degradation is that people need to have a different ethic about non-human
nature to govern their actions, the assumption here being that a person's ethics governs
their actions, not vice versa. This model was evident in the repeated reference by
Search WWH ::
Custom Search