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 imagine different futures.

These efforts matter. And yet the worlds we inhabit often change much more slowly than our ideas about them.

Part of the difficulty is that we spend a lot of time imagining different futures and much less time noticing how we participate in reproducing the present.

We inherit ways of caring, leading, listening, teaching, deciding, reassuring, explaining, and taking responsibility.

Most of the time, they don't feel inherited.

They feel like us. Like kindness or competence. Like common sense or personality.

That's part of what makes them powerful. It's also what makes them hard to question.

We often think of social orders as being maintained by laws, institutions, or ideologies. They are also maintained in much smaller moments: conversations, meetings, classrooms, families, organizations.

Someone hesitates, and I reassure them before they've finished speaking.

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

A meeting becomes uncertain, and I summarize.

Someone is uncomfortable, and I try to make the discomfort go away.

Nothing extraordinary has happened.

Yet each time, something about what can happen next is altered. A possibility closes, a responsibility moves, a meaning settles, or a relationship takes a familiar shape.

This is political, even when it looks ordinary.

Social worlds are reproduced through countless small ways we make one another understandable, safe, responsible, certain, comfortable, included, or quiet.

By the time we notice what happened, the encounter has already become memory.

Eventually, these movements stop feeling like participation at all. They just feel like the way things are.

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 also depend on what people do, over and over, in ordinary situations. This is why we can spend years trying to change an institution, an organization, or a relationship while continuing to participate in many of the same patterns that hold it together.

We're living through a moment when many of the arrangements we've inherited are being questioned at once.

We're asking what institutions should become, how communities should function, how authority should be distributed, how care should work, and whose experience gets to shape the world.

Those questions can't be answered at the level of ideas alone.

They are also being answered in the ways we listen, respond, wait, decide, care, organize, and participate with one another.

If we want different worlds, we need ways of noticing what we're already doing in the ones we have.

What I do

I create conditions where the ways we participate in a social world can become perceptible while they're still happening.

Sometimes that means working with materials. Sometimes it means another person, a group, a place, or an organization.

I work through puppets and objects, conversation, groups, public spaces, and organizational collaborations because different conditions make different things perceptible.

I don't determine what will emerge. I set the conditions and pay attention to what becomes possible within them.

This isn't personal development in the usual sense. I'm not interested in replacing one set of familiar behaviors with a prescribed version of better participation.

The work begins earlier: with noticing what is already happening, while it is still happening.

What you cannot perceive yourself participating in, you can only reproduce - or oppose from a distance.

You may already know the moments this work is interested in:

• The conversation where you realize afterward that you rushed something

• The responsibility you took on before deciding whether it was yours

• The person you understood before they had finished speaking

• The pattern you can recognize but still seem to recreate

• The feeling that something important happened, but you can't quite say what

These are not problems to solve; they are places to look.

People don't leave with a prescribed way of participating. They leave able to notice things they couldn't reliably notice 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

Different participation becomes possible when what once felt inevitable becomes something we can see.

Ways into the inquiry

The Living Inquiry

A participatory space for exploring the questions that are still changing the work.

Enter the inquiry

School of the Small and Imperfect

A relational laboratory where different ways of participating become possible.

Enter School

Deep Puppetry™

An artistic practice exploring what becomes possible when recognition remains unfinished.

Explore Deep Puppetry

Witnessing Without Colonizing

Practices for remaining with another person before familiarity becomes certainty.

Read more

Bring the Inquiry to your Group

Every inquiry on this site can also be offered privately for facilitator trainings, organizations, book clubs, artist collectives, educational communities, and other groups who want to explore these questions together.

Learn more