scholarly journals A Pattern Language for Social Field Shifts

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-57
Author(s):  
Ricardo Dutra Gonçalves ◽  
Arawana Hayashi
Keyword(s):  
Social Systems ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Mental Health Crisis ◽  
Social Field ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Verbal Language ◽  
Social Patterns ◽  
Crisis Call ◽  
Embodied Intelligence

The complex systemic issues of today, including climate change, racism, social inequality, mental health crisis, call for new ways of engaging the heart (feeling), mind (thinking), and will (doing) to actually change deep-rooted behaviors. To develop these new ways of engaging, one must learn how to cultivate first, one’s interior condition (the inner place from which we operate) and second, one's capacities to co-create with others the exterior conditions for healthy social relationships. In this paper, we claim that by living in a body we are embodied and that wisdom lives in a holistic knowing that includes embodied intelligence. We argue that to address the complex challenges of our times, we must cultivate embodied and perceptual capacities and a language for our embodied experience(s). Over three years of workshops with advanced practitioners of an embodied practice called Social Presencing Theater (SPT), we used embodied activities and design prompts (drawing, photo, video) to surface and make visible social patterns. This has led us to develop a language in the context of social systems change, in particular of social field shifts (i.e., transformations in the relational and felt qualities of our social systems). Through this paper we aim to contribute to social field research by proposing an embodied, visual, and verbal language for social groups to describe and reflect on social field shifts, made up of two parts: first, an aesthetic language to describe social field qualities; and second, three families of social field archetypes to describe social fields.

Keynote

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanne LIEDTKA
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Performance ◽  
Design Thinking ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Lens Design ◽  
Social Sector ◽  
Extensive Field ◽  
Innovative Solutions ◽  
The Impact

The value delivered by design thinking is almost always seen to be improvements in the creativity and usefulness of the solutions produced. This paper takes a broader view of the potential power of design thinking, highlighting its role as a social technology for enhancing the productivity of conversations for change across difference. Examined through this lens, design thinking can be observed to aid diverse sets of stakeholders’ abilities to work together to both produce higher order, more innovative solutions and to implement them more successfully. In this way, it acts as a facilitator of the processes of collectives, by enhancing their ability to learn, align and change together. This paper draws on both the author’s extensive field research on the use of design thinking in social sector organizations, as well as on the literature of complex social systems, to discuss implications for both practitioners and scholars interested in assessing the impact of design thinking on organizational performance.

Transnational Habitus and Sociability in the City: Zimbabwean Migrants’ Experiences in Johannesburg, South Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Khangelani Moyo
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Field Research ◽  
The South ◽  
Economic Networks ◽  
Social Field ◽  
Transnational Migrants ◽  
Telephone Calls ◽  
The City

Drawing on field research and a survey of 150 Zimbabwean migrants in Johannesburg, this paper explores the dimensions of migrants’ transnational experiences in the urban space. I discuss the use of communication platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook as well as other means such as telephone calls in fostering the embedding of transnational migrants within both the Johannesburg and the Zimbabwean socio-economic environments. I engage this migrant-embedding using Bourdieusian concepts of “transnational habitus” and “transnational social field,” which are migration specific variations of Bourdieu’s original concepts of “habitus” and “social field.” In deploying these Bourdieusian conceptual tools, I observe that the dynamics of South–South migration as observed in the Zimbabwean migrants are different to those in the South–North migration streams and it is important to move away from using the same lens in interpreting different realities. For Johannesburg-based migrants to operate within the socio-economic networks produced in South Africa and in Zimbabwe, they need to actively acquire a transnational habitus. I argue that migrants’ cultivation of networks in Johannesburg is instrumental, purposive, and geared towards achieving specific and immediate goals, and latently leads to the development and sustenance of flexible forms of permanency in the transnational urban space.

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