Relational Fieldwork
Training in how participation organizes power
- and how to stay human inside systems that quietly train us to dominate, withdraw, or disappear
laura geiger
About the work
I design and facilitate advanced relational training environments where practitioners learn to recognize how relational participation patterns shape power, responsibility, and possibility inside groups, institutions, and collaborative systems.
Most professional training focuses on skills, techniques, or communication frameworks.
This work focuses on something more foundational: how participation itself organizes authority, agency, and ethical consequence, often before anyone intends it.
Participants learn through structured relational practice environments where participation patterns become perceptible through experience rather than theory alone.
The goal is not self-improvement or behavioral optimization.
The goal is expanded perceptual and ethical capacity inside relational complexity.
Who this work supports
This work is designed for practitioners working inside complexity, including:
• facilitators and leadership practitioners
• educators and organizational developers
• therapists and relational practitioners
• artists and cultural organizers
• people responsible for holding learning, group, or collaborative environments
Many participants arrive already sensing subtle relational dynamics but without shared language, rigorous training environments, or professional support for developing those capacities.
The Core Focus
Across all offerings, the work investigates:
• how participation organizes power
• how ethical intention can unintentionally reproduce domination
• how intervention timing redistributes responsibility
• how relational fields shape what becomes possible inside groups
• how to remain participatory without collapsing into control, withdrawal, or neutrality
Why This Work Matters
Many organizations and communities invest in ethical leadership and inclusive values. Yet most group dynamics are shaped by participation patterns operating beneath intention.
Participation organizes power faster than intention can.
This work supports practitioners in developing the capacity to notice, interrupt, and ethically participate inside those dynamics in real time.
ways to enter the work
Power-Aware Facilitation
Advanced Training & Certification
Professional development for experienced facilitators who want to recognize and interrupt hidden domination patterns inside group participation.
Participants develop relational field literacy and intervention timing sensitivity through experiential group laboratories and integration seminars.
Relational Field Session
Short Practice Lab
A 90-minute live group experiment exploring how participation patterns organize themselves in real time.
Designed as an accessible entry point into relational field awareness.
School of the Small and Imperfect
Interpersonal Practice Space
Weekly relational practice focused on staying present through awkwardness, mismatch, and unfinished interaction without rushing to repair or resolve.
Deep Puppetry™
Object-Based Relational Training
A material practice that trains the capacity to stay in relation with power, dependency, care, and refusal through object-based relational fields.
Participants develop perceptual sensitivity and relational restraint through structured material interaction.
Invitational & Advanced Engagements
Longer-term or custom training environments for organizations, institutions, and advanced practitioner cohorts.
how this work is different
This is not therapy, coaching, or performance training. Participants are not asked to interpret themselves or achieve insight as a primary goal.
Instead, I design structural conditions that:
• interrupt habitual participation
• make relational cost and responsibility perceptible
• slow interpretation and premature resolution
• expand participation options under pressure
Learning happens through participation first and conceptual integration second.
Pedagogical Approach
Training environments use deliberate structural constraint (timing, participation rules, limited interpretation, distributed authority) to make relational dynamics visible through lived experience. Participants are not evaluated or judged. They are invited into rigorous relational practice environments that prioritize: perception before interpretation, participation over prescription, and practice before explanation.
About Laura Geiger
Laura Geiger is a relational fieldwork practitioner and creator of Deep Puppetry™. For more than two decades, she has designed and facilitated relational training environments across artistic, educational, and organizational contexts.
Her work focuses on how timing, attention, participation, and relational structure shape ethical possibility inside group life.
Rather than teaching facilitation techniques, she designs experiential training environments where relational dynamics become perceptible through lived participation.
A Note About Participation
You do not need the right language, theoretical background, or prior exposure to relational field theory.
What matters is willingness to participate in structured relational environments where outcomes are not predetermined and ethical complexity is explored through experience.
Begin Here
Explore Power-Aware Facilitation
Join School of the Small and Imperfect
Participate in a Relational Field Session
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