We have no shortage of visions for more just, democratic, and sustainable ways of living together.

We organize, educate, facilitate, protest. We build institutions, and we imagine different futures.

These efforts matter.

Yet the worlds we inhabit often change far more slowly than our ideas about them.

The difficulty may be that we spend far more time imagining different futures than noticing how we continually participate in reproducing the present.

We often think social orders are maintained by laws, institutions, or ideologies. They are, but they also depend on ordinary participation.

They survive because they are continually enacted in conversations, meetings, classrooms, families, and organizations.

Most of the time, we experience these actions as competence, care, or common sense.

That is exactly what makes them so difficult to question.

Someone hesitates, and I reassure them. They smile, I feel relieved, and the conversation moves on.

I never discover what that hesitation might have become if neither of us had hurried to complete it.

A child says something unexpected, and I explain what they meant. Everyone understands.

No one notices that we have reproduced a world in which another person's experience becomes meaningful only after it has passed through mine.

A meeting becomes uncertain, so I summarize. Everyone relaxes, and we call that alignment.

It never occurs to us that the uncertainty might have been the most intelligent thing in the room.

None of them feels extraordinary.

They feel like competence. Or like kindness. Like leadership or good facilitation.

That is how reproduction works.

Most of us understand things before we've been changed by them.

How do you study something that doesn't even register as an object of attention?

Social worlds are not sustained by ideas alone.

They continue because they are enacted, moment by moment, in ordinary participation.

Most of the time, we no longer experience ourselves as participating in their reproduction.

We experience them simply as the way things are.

Which means we can spend our lives trying to change institutions, organizations, or relationships while continually reproducing the participatory habits that allow those worlds to endure.

What I do

I compose conditions where the reproduction of a social world becomes perceptible while it is still unfolding.

When something becomes perceptible, a distinction can become available; a question can take shape. Something that was previously difficult to think can become thinkable.

Sometimes a question needs a material home. Sometimes it needs another person, a group, a place, or an organization.

I work through different forms because different conditions make different things possible.

My work takes shape through puppets and objects, conversation, groups, and organizational collaborations.

I don't determine what will emerge. I compose the conditions in which something that wasn’t previously perceptible can become perceptible, thinkable, and practicable.

People don't leave with a prescribed way of participating. They leave with things they can perceive, think, and do that weren't available to them in quite the same way before.

"I realized how much energy I normally spend determining if something is my responsibility or not."

"When the listener didn't respond, I wasn't directed by validation or questions, so I had to decide for myself where to take the conversation next. I realized that was an unfamiliar move in my brain."

"I am now in touch with how much we lose when we rush."

"Something I now notice in ordinary life that I couldn't reliably notice before is how quickly I attribute conflict or discomfort to a mistake having been made."

“I understand my stimming differently. It’s registering my participation pre-articulation. My stimming is contributing.”
-Karalyn Riepert, School of the Small and Imperfect participant

We cannot participate differently in worlds we cannot yet perceive ourselves reproducing.