Intersubjective literacy through participatory sense-making
“Participatory sense-making is a form of healing”
– Prof. Rebecca Todd, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia
We are all intersubjective experts, by virtue of being human. That is, we interact with one another from when we first emerge into life, even before birth.
But we often tend to forget this expertise. Our relational capacities can be diminished or neglected when other pressures or interests take precedence. Maybe you’ve snapped at a loved one, because you were running late for work. Or you and a colleague don’t trust each other — even though you both know that you both want to disrupt this dynamic. Maybe you are a social cognition researcher, and you feel there is something that your methods aren’t quite capturing — and you can’t even quite put into words what.
Many of us sense a great need for better understanding each other, ourselves, and our worlds. We sense a need for working together better, for having better relations, for being able to be vulnerable with each other and truly meeting. Sometimes we are able, oftentimes not.
In my work, I build inter-subjective capacity through increasing people’s bodily, sensitive awareness and conceptual understanding of the intricate dynamics of interacting.
I help people move with more lightness, ease, and understanding through the inevitable difficulties of living with others — through the relational complexities that life throws at us, and that we throw at each other.
This work is practical, conceptual and experiential.
I have developed an approach for understanding intersubjective complexity, called participatory sense-making.
Participatory sense-making was originally developed in the cognitive sciences. Its aim is to help us better understand how we engage in sense-making together, and how this transforms us, our relations, and our world. Participatory sense-making offers a theoretical framework, concepts, hypotheses, and empirical methods to scientifically understand intersubjectivity.
Researchers and practitioners across academic many disciplines and practice sectors — in philosophy, psychology, education, therapy, medicine, sociology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and the arts — engage with, critique, investigate, and further develop this work, and I regularly collaborate with them in doing this.
Apart from researching participatory sense-making, I also work as a consultant, cultivator, and teacher of participatory sense-making.
I offer workshops, writing, teaching, facilitation, and one-on-one counselling and consulting, to researchers, organizations, and individuals.
I offer:
PRISMA
Explore the experience of interactive dynamics. Gain awareness of and insight into participatory sense-making.
For researchers and/or organisations.
- A hands-on, practical-theoretical method to embody the exploration of intersubjectivity.
- To gain increased awareness of and insight into the dynamics of social interactions
- A fully embodied, intersubjective, safe exploration of participation dynamics; what you already know of them and what you did not know or see yet.
- Discover how you and others participate, and what interactions processes do with their participants.
In a PRISMA workshop, participants become researchers, and researchers become participants. Taking part in a PRISMAtic process offers participants an opportunity to hone their sensitivities and powers in interaction.
For researchers, PRISMA provides a hands-on investigation of the dynamics of interactive experience. It can be seamlessly combined with more traditional 3rd person methods in, e.g., social neuroscience, behavioural psychology, or any kind of practice research, such as anthropologies of care, education studies, physio- or psychotherapy research, etc..
PRISMA can be used:
in Research: To study the experience of interaction, a so far much under-investigated facet of social cognition research.
as Facilitation: To give people in a project, organisation or group trust and confidence in working together, through a safe, careful, minute attention to interaction dynamics in a playful-serious process.
PRISMA is a systematic, open-ended, flexible, fully traceable process of investigation of interaction dynamics.
A complete PRISMA workshop takes 1,5 days. However, shorter versions are also available. Each PRISMA process is designed in collaboration with and taylored to the specific needs of the group or organisation it is brought to.
If you are interested in a PRISMA workshop for your research study or for your organisation, get in touch via info@hannedejaegher.com
Support for professionals
Support for anyone working as an intersubjective expert, e.g. caring/helping professionals, teachers, therapists, mentors.
I believe everyone is an intersubjective expert. As humans, since before we are born, we engage with each other, and our very being is built out of, continually entangled with, impacted by, and transformed through our social embeddedness.
Some of us, however, are engaged in intersubjective professions, and in this realm, there is an even higher level of social complexity.
I support therapists, medical doctors, teachers, and other professionals whose job has a high level of intersubjective involvement, to deal with the complexity of their work. I specialise in situations where the complexity of the job entails or reaches deeply into one’s personal, moral, or ethical involvement, and therefore has become existentially or ethically difficult.
If you are interested in one-to-one mentoring, support, or consultation, get in touch via info@hannedejaegher.com
Teaching
The enactive approach
I teach enactive theory and practice to advanced university students (MA, PhD), and in other forms of further education (e.g. college, professional specialisations, community college).
If you would like to me to design and teach a course specifically for your program, get in touch via info@hannedejaegher.com
One-on-one
Interactive-existential counseling
Are you struggling with a relational knot, some interactive complexities?
Life is complex.
Are you confronted with an existential roadblock, an intractable or problematic relational situation?
Let me be your knotty untangler, your captain through complexity, a knowledgeable companion in the mess.
Feel free to book an appointment via info@hannedejaegher.com
testimonials
“”I thoroughly enjoyed spending time in your company, it was refreshing, insightful and deeply respectful – thank you.” – Jackie Elliott
“The workshop modeled balance between flow and control as if a beautifully choreographed dance. There was not a single moment in that workshop that I felt dictated to or that my experience or participation had to meet certain criteria.
“It was humanizing, to say the least.
“In both the context of the workshop and real life, I feel like the takeaway is that we have much to do with this awareness of our place in the world. If science can make us realize these things about how we live, then we’re doing something right.” Joey Manaligod
“Your work very elegantly shows the complex systems at work in deceptively familiar interactions: I get to indulge in my humanness to a degree that I’ve always deserved to. Very generous.” – Allison Holt
““Everything was beyond interesting, I really consider your presentation/your workshop to be one of the best I have ever participated in. It was really engaging and what I found surprising was that things that are so complex where so well and simple explained and exemplificated by you.” — anonymous
All of my consultancy is based in the theoretical framework of participatory sense-making and loving and knowing. This framework serves as my lodestone and guiding logic when I help disentangle intersubjective knots so that they may become easier to navigate (again); when I help clarify convoluted intersubjective situations; when I help navigate the conundrums faced by people in helping/caring/teaching professions; when I offer support to individuals overwhelmed by life and relations.
I do this work based on the perspective on intersubjectivity I have developed over more than 20 years through academic study and through many forms of collaboration, mentoring, supervising, coaching, and teaching.
For doing this work, I regularly work with, and seek feedback and mentoring from my network of colleagues and advisors, which includes academic experts, and therapy, teaching, coaching, and consulting experts.
IIntrigued? Write to me: info@hannedejaegher.com.
paradoxical practices of letting be
hanne de jaegher 