Enacting Ought: Ethics, Anti-Racism, and Interactional Possibilities

Focusing on political and interpersonal conflict in the U.S., particularly racial conflict, but with an eye to similar conflicts throughout the world, we argue that the enactive approach to mind as life can be elaborated to provide an exigent framework for present social-political problems. An enactive approach fills problematic lacunae in the Western philosophical ethics project by offering radically refigured notions of responsibility and language. The dual enactive, participatory insight is that interactional responsibility is not singular and language is not an individual property or ability, something that someone simply and uniformly 'has' or 'controls'. These points have not been integrated into our self-understanding as moral actors, to everyone’s detriment. We first advocate for adequate appreciation of Colombetti and Torrance’s 2009 suggestion that participatory sense-making necessarily implies shared responsibility for interactional outcomes. We argue that the enactive approach presents open-ended cultivation of virtue as embodied, contextualized, and dynamic know-how and destabilizes an individualist metaphysics. Putting this framework to work, we turn to the interactional challenges of conversations that concern differences and that involve potentially oppositional parties, offering a reading of Claudia Rankine’s Just Us. Finally, we make explicit Rankine’s normative project of mindful navigation of multiple perspectives in an interaction. We abstract three interrelated spheres of participatory intervention: location, language, and labor. These also indicate routes for empirical investigation into complex perspective-taking in dynamic interactions.

Correctional Rehabilitation and Human Functioning: An Embodied, Embedded, and Enactive Approach

<p>In order for correctional rehabilitation practices to be maximally effective, they should be grounded in well-developed psychological theory about the causes, development, and nature of crime. This thesis argues that these theories of crime should be based in an underlying perspective of human functioning, or how people work at a fundamental level. I argue that this level of theory has been neglected in theories of crime, as demonstrated through an evaluation of the Risk-Need-Responsivity model of rehabilitation, which currently stands as the most popular and widely used rehabilitation framework throughout much of the world. This perspective is understood to implicitly present a view of functioning which is reward-oriented, multifactorial, norm-based, and modular, resulting in limited explanatory value and diminished treatment efficacy. I then suggest an alternative model of functioning as being embodied, embedded, and enactive (3e). 3e places an emphasis on the individual as an embodied whole, in an adaptive relationship with their physical and social environment. 3e prioritises the affective experience and agency of the individual, with a commitment to viewing the person as a functional whole drawing on comprehensive multilevel explanations. I outline how this perspective could be used to inform the explanation of crime, before applying the model to an exemplar to demonstrate the potential treatment utility of a 3e approach to correctional rehabilitation, as opposed to an RNR approach.</p>

Correctional Rehabilitation and Human Functioning: An Embodied, Embedded, and Enactive Approach

<p>In order for correctional rehabilitation practices to be maximally effective, they should be grounded in well-developed psychological theory about the causes, development, and nature of crime. This thesis argues that these theories of crime should be based in an underlying perspective of human functioning, or how people work at a fundamental level. I argue that this level of theory has been neglected in theories of crime, as demonstrated through an evaluation of the Risk-Need-Responsivity model of rehabilitation, which currently stands as the most popular and widely used rehabilitation framework throughout much of the world. This perspective is understood to implicitly present a view of functioning which is reward-oriented, multifactorial, norm-based, and modular, resulting in limited explanatory value and diminished treatment efficacy. I then suggest an alternative model of functioning as being embodied, embedded, and enactive (3e). 3e places an emphasis on the individual as an embodied whole, in an adaptive relationship with their physical and social environment. 3e prioritises the affective experience and agency of the individual, with a commitment to viewing the person as a functional whole drawing on comprehensive multilevel explanations. I outline how this perspective could be used to inform the explanation of crime, before applying the model to an exemplar to demonstrate the potential treatment utility of a 3e approach to correctional rehabilitation, as opposed to an RNR approach.</p>

Imaginative Communication and Community: the Phenomenological-enactive Approach to the Co-constitution of Public Phenomena

An ever-evolving phenomenological-enactive perspective can expand our reflection on the entanglement between enactive subjects and their living ecologies. This article applies certain classical phenomenological projects and their enactive extension to public phenomena (objects, spaces, events, etc.). As an instance of the embodied cognition discourse, this research also aims to thematize the enactive, affective, and intersubjective aspects of the relation to the (urban) Lebenswelt. This may help in understanding both the potential of the phenomenological-enactive methodology and the processes of an embodied intersubjective co-constitution of a public ethos. Theoretical ideas presented in the article are illustrated with reflections on some concrete public phenomena. Keywords: Phenomenology, Enactivism, Communication, Embodied Cognition, Perceptual Phantasy, Intersubjectivity, Public Phenomena

Integrating Enactive and Intercorporeal Approaches to Interaction and Interaction Analysis: d/Deaf Persons and Animals. In Search of the ‘In-Between’ and Adequate Methodologies

"How does understanding occur in encounters of living beings? What is experienced by the interaction partners and what happens in the ‘In-Between’? And how can this be captured? In this paper an enactive approach to interaction is proposed with the focus on reciprocal intercorporeal attunement and co-creation of meaning in a specific environment. As alternative framework this approach is applied to the interaction of d/Deaf persons and animals. In the interaction with an animal, verbal communication - which is challenging for d/Deaf persons - is of secondary importance, so this frame is well suited to focus on intercorporeal attunement. In the interaction discourse regarding d/Deaf persons as well as Human-Animal-Interaction the assessment of the interaction process as such and embodied research methodologies are scarcely to be found. With the enactive approach new perspectives on the mechanisms of interaction and the influencing conditions can be opened as well as new approaches to respective research options. Keywords: d/Deaf, Human-Animal-Interaction, Intercorporeality, Embodied Cognition, Embodied methodologies, Enactive approach, resonance "

Enactivism and Performance Art: Putting on Display Our Perception

"Seeing, according to the enactive approach, is not something that happens inside our brain, rather it is something we do, but, as I will argue thanks to the performance art, it is something we do together. The performing arts, with their characteristics – autopoietic feedback loop, spectator/performer exchange, oscillation of the dichotomous subject-object pair - constitute a model through which to in-vestigate the nature of our perception, which is constitutively relational, participative, and transformative. Keywords: Enactivis, performing arts, percep-tion, enactive loniness, transformation. "

Enactive Ethics: Difference Becoming Participation

Enactive cognitive science combines questions in epistemology, ontology, and ethics by conceiving of bodies as open-ended and mutually transforming through activity. While enaction is not a theory of ethics, it can contribute to its foundations. We present a schematization of enactive ideas that underlie traditional distinctions between Being, Knowing, and Doing. Ethics in this scheme begins in the relation between knowing and becoming. Critical of dichotomous thinking, we approach the questions of alterity and ethical reality. Alterity is relevant to the enactive approach, but not in the radical sense of transcendental arguments. We propose difference, instead, as a more generative concept. Following Simondon, we see norms and values manifest in webs of past and future acts together with their potentialities for becoming. We propose a transindividual concept of moral attunement that includes ethical know-how and consciousness raising. Through generative difference and attunement to configurations of becoming, enaction underpins an ethics of participation linking virtue ethics and ethics of care.

At the Edge: Rethinking Place and Identity in the Context of Wellington's South Coast

<p><b>New Zealand’s long coastline plays an important role in our natural environment and established communities. In recent years, however, there has been enormous urban development and growth at the coastal edge, driven by increased population, growing wealth, and the desire to live by the sea. We are seeing dynamic environments collide with static developments, as contemporary architecture converges on universality – becoming uniform, monotone, placeless.</b></p> <p>In response to this, the research seeks to enhance connection between people and place at the coastal edge, basing the research around the specificity of Wellington’s South Coast, a dynamic environment undergoing significant urban growth.</p> <p>The research is centred on an enactive approach, building on the idea of embodied cognition. This approach helps to shape design strategies and practices that are continually refined throughout the design process. The design research sets out to develop a strong understanding of the different factors that contribute to the South Coast’s unique identity, using this to inform design decisions that further enrich identity of ‘place.’ At the same time, it investigates how architecture might engage with the dynamics present at site to both enhance and intensify the human experience.</p> <p>The research allows design outcomes to emerge, refining the thinking throughout, allowing time to integrate new ideas and discoveries whilst making sure the objectives are addressed. The research ultimately leads to a proposed redevelopment of the Island Bay Marine Education Centre – a design response that negotiates its surroundings, allows for change, and enhances connection to ‘place.’This research begins to challenge the static and permanent norms of architecture, and it provides insight into processes and practices that designers and architects might use to create a deeper level of engagement.</p>

Knowing Groundlessness: An Enactive Approach to a Shift From Cognition to Non-Dual Awareness

The enactive approach has become an influential paradigm in cognitive science. One of its most important claims is that cognition is sense-making: to cognize is to enact a world of meaning. Thus, a world is not pregiven but enacted through sense-making. Most importantly, sense-making is not a fixed process or thing. It does not have substantial existence. Instead, it is groundless: it springs from a dynamic of relations, without substantial ground. Thereby, as all cognition is groundless, this groundlessness is considered the central underlying principle of cognition. This article takes that key concept of the enactive approach and argues that it is not only a theoretical statement. Rather, groundlessness is directly accessible in lived experience. The two guiding questions of this article concern that lived experience of groundlessness: (1) What is it to know groundlessness? (2) How can one know groundlessness? Accordingly, it elaborates (1) how this knowing of groundlessness fits into the theoretical framework of the enactive approach. Also, it describes (2) how it can be directly experienced when certain requirements are met. In an additional reflexive analysis, the context-dependency and observer-relativity of those statements themselves is highlighted. Through those steps, this article exhibits the importance of knowing groundlessness for a cognitive science discourse: this underlying groundlessness is not only the “ground” of cognition, but it also can be investigated empirically through lived experience. However, it requires a methodology that is radically different from classical cognitive science. This article ends with envisioning a future praxis of cognitive science which enables researchers to investigate not only theoretically but empirically the “foundationless foundation” of cognition: groundlessness.