Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta & Petra Weckström:Participation as mix(t)able. On being human being in contemporary times

Abstract: Drawing upon materials from project DoT (Delaktighet och Teater; Participation and Theatre) and the think tank DoIT (Delaktighet och Inkluderings tankesmedja; Participation and Inclusionary think tank), this paper aims to explore the nature of belongings, i.e., being human being, in contexts that are flagged as democratic one-society-for-all settings. The curiosity-driven work of theoretical assumptions and doing scholarship from non-mainstream multiple epistemologies in this paper is accomplished through the confluence of the creative dimensions of the performing arts sector and calls for undisciplinary i.e., out-of-the-box thinking within the scholarly enterprise. With the aim of illuminating prerequisites for participation for-all in education, culture and society more broadly, and drawing traction from a loose translation of the Swedish term “mixerbord” i.e., the mixer-table, this paper explores participation in terms of the normality of “mixed” abilities or mix(t)able that marks the human condition. It argues that imaginaries of inclusion and integration build on the taken-for-granted stratification and fixatedness of people’s belongings that in themselves unwittingly curtail and dis/en-able people’s participation in societal arenas. A focus on the banality of participation, rather than on the ideological framings of inclusion or integration that policies and institutional work commonly build on, draws attention to the many-ways-of-being within the matrix of intersectional-complexities, opening for understandings of human beings as always being mix(t)abled, both as individuals and collectives across timespaces. Here the banality of who is positioned by whom, with what aims and purposes, how marginalities are envisaged as being alleviated, and being human being constitutes key issues.

Stichworte: Third position/perspective, performing arts, mix(t)able, inclusion, participation, decolonizing, intersectional-complexities

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Introduction
2. Paradoxes of inclusion and integration
3. On the importance of undisciplinary thinking. Conceptual issues and materials
4. Participation as dynamic being human being
5. Coda
6. References
   

1. Introduction

In the performing arts, light and sound are manoeuvred through a mixing console or mixer-table that controls, balances and combines light and sound from different channels. Consisting of between two to 48 channels, each of which can be individually calibrated and balanced, the mixer-table’s basic function is to shape the brightness or/and loudness of individual light and sound sources and bring these together into a holistic experience for the audience. Using traction from a loose translation of the Swedish term “mixerbord” i.e., the mixer-table, this article explores participation in terms of the normality of “mixed” abilities or mix(t)able that marks the human condition. We argue that imaginaries of inclusion and integration build on the taken-for-granted stratification and fixatedness of people’s belongings that in themselves unwittingly curtail and (dis)enable people’s participation in societal arenas. We also explore how we as unique individuals can use our potentials collectively – through the lens of mix(t)abilities at individual, group and societal scales.
With the premise that all humans are mix(t)abled, a focus on the banality of participation, rather than on the ideological framings of inclusion or integration, draws attention to the “many-ways-of-being” (Bagga-Gupta 2014). Mix(t)able can be seen as a metaphorical tool that acknowledges the many dimensions of functionality (or other minoritized status) within the matrix of intersectional-complexities. This opens for understandings of human beings as always being mix(t)abled, as individuals and collectives across timespaces. Here dimensions of the banality of who is positioned by whom, with what aims and purposes, how marginalities are envisaged as being alleviated, and “being human being” (Asante & Dove 2021) constitute key issues.
Drawing upon materials from a string of sub-projects within a long-term collaboration between ethnographically aligned researchers and colleagues within the performing arts, our joint work as leaders of this collaboration, including our on-going work in the DoIT (Participation and Inclusionary, https://ju.se/en/research/research-groups/ccd---communication-culture-and-diversity/the-think-tank-doit.html) think-tank (see Section 2), the study presented here aims to explore the nature of belongings, i.e., being human being, in contexts that are flagged as democratic one-society-for-all settings. Using the confluence of the creative dimensions of the performing arts sector as well as calls for undisciplinary i.e., out-of-the-box thinking within the scholarly enterprise, we structure our paper unconventionally drawing on different writing genres. The creative curiosity-driven work of theoretical assumptions and doing research from non-mainstream epistemologies are outlined primarily in Section 3. Slices of data from our research materials are presented and discussed in the Section 4. The Coda (Section 5) presents a dialogical exploration regarding being human being. Section 2 discusses relevant concepts that circulate with regards to a one-society-for-all.

2. Paradoxes of inclusion and integration

Norms and hegemonies of timespaces shape how human beings are positioned, usually based on ideas of (invisible) majority norms and differences that are related to deviances from those norms. Different reasons are highlighted to account for the key organizational shifts regarding accessibility across societal sectors like education, culture, health services, working-life across the planet since the mid-20th century war in Europe (that is conventionally labelled as “world” war II)[1]. Thus, a “common education-for-all”, “life-long learning”, a “society-for-all”, including “culture-for-all” has seen uptakes particularly in nation-states in Northern territories and through civil societal agencies within nation-states across Northern-Southern territories. Such shifts have had far reaching consequences for individuals, groups and entire societies. While access remains utopian everywhere, the doors to accessibility and equity have become a feasibility (if not a reality) for all human beings on the planet. This means that accessibility for previously marginalized individuals who do not fit into majority norms and who can be boxed-into different named-groups (like immigrants, boys, functionally disabled, the economically disadvantaged, individuals in rural areas, elderly, etc.) has become dramatically different in the 21st century. However, the idea of the majority (largely invisible) norm has not been re-negotiated adequately.[2]
The collective mainstream response to specific marginalities – for instance, dysfunctionality and refugee status – has established specific ways of addressing these, giving rise to societal work that is glossed as inclusion (for one marginal category) and integration (for another marginalized category). As Asante and Dove put it, “ranked notions of human beings is itself the closed door to social transformation” (2021:3) and “ideologies sit at the entrance to the temple of communication, discourse, international relations, and history” (2021:5).
Furthermore, while accessibility issues have been approached fundamentally through the lens of sophisticated “declared policies” vis-à-vis inclusion and integration, including a monitoring of them through “perceived policies”, there is a growing recognition of the need to understand accessibility through the “practiced policies” that play out in the mundaneness of living (Bagga-Gupta 2023a; 2022; Bonacina-Pugh 2012). Thus, the conceptual traditions of inclusion and integration, based upon the notions of equity and human rights,have specific implications regarding (i) what is understood as legitimate in conceptualizations of the human condition, and in tandem, (ii)how accessibility across sectors gets organized for different named-groups that were previously not prevy to collective support. This means that how human difference is conceptualized shapes the organization of provision for named-groups across timespaces (see Mykkänen 2001 for a critical biographical account of relevance to these issues). However, the points of departure for inclusion or integration work is that individuals/groups are included or integrated in what is seen as a one-way move into mainstream ways-of-being. This work is taken-for-granted, usually without questioning the need for the majority to adjust or change. In contrast, participation – as we illustrate and discuss in this paper – is a co-creative enterprise, an ongoing interactive ever-evolving process, something that is, or should be, done together by everyone, actively.
Scholarly discussions regarding creating and sustaining equity in institutional practices tend to focus on the positionalities of gender, sexuality, functionality, migrants, class, etc. Tensions here are marked by a rhetorical or ideological stans, and a praxis-institutional reality (Alm et al. 2010; Sayed, Soudien & Carrim 2003). Thus, while inclusion is reserved for human beings with functional disabilities, evidence from the praxis-institutional scales highlight the parallel excluding nature of lived lives (for historical and analytical discussions on this theme see Haug 1998; Macht 1998; Varenne & McDermott 1998; Winzer & Mazurek 2000). Integration strategies, reserved for immigrants and minorities, are reported to not deliver what declared policies promise either (for analytical discussions in this area see for instance, Mehan et al. 1996, Peterson & Hjerm 2007). Gender and class equality are other areas where a mismatch is reported to exist between the visions of declared policies and the ways in which these get practiced in institutional contexts. What can be surmised here is that both inclusion and integration processes of individuals/groups are conditional, dependent on the openness of majoritized groups whose norms are hegemonic, and that despite concerted efforts across timespaces, inclusion and integration remain unattainable goals.

3. On the importance of undisciplinary thinking. Conceptual issues and materials

Tensions regarding inclusion and integration notwithstanding, the normative and naturalized core of any one given positionality lends credibility to a selective, but strong idea whereby each identity-construct is understood in terms of a mythical homogeneity. Despite the increased recognition regarding the inherent problems when human identity is approached from essentialist single positions, it is not difficult to understand the seemingly un-eroded hegemony of this singularity. At policy or administrative levels it is pragmatic to scale away complexities of being human being and zoom into compartmentalized thinking since it is easier to formulate support strategies for mainstreaming equality of women, the integration of minorities, the inclusion of functionally disabled, etc. as compared to formulating tangible support for a migrant, who is functionally disabled, aligns with a transsexual positionality, is middle aged, and can be placed in the economically middle class in a Northern setting. Furthermore, and central to our argument here, such institutional logics do not, and cannot frame the research enterprise. Transcending the need for scholars (or for that matter non-academic human beings generally) to re-position people (or themselves) differently in different situations in order to unpack their complexities (or be able to participate in different societal contexts), research logics build on re-searching even when this requires disregarding the comfort zone of compartmentalized academic areas such as Migration and Ethnicity Studies, Disability Studies, sexuality scholarship, etc.
Raising such tensions against the agenda of scholarship enables reflecting on how we can transcend the society-for-all goals (inclusion, integration), including the provision of different support for different groups (exclusion, segregation). Institutionalized activity systems like “special education” and different solutions for different categories raise pertinent issues from a range of perspectives, not least democratic and economical ones. In lieu of different solutions for different groups – immigrants/minorities within the “common support for-all”, individuals with reading and writing problems within the “common support for-all”, deaf people within the “common support for-all”, etc., a third alternative, or a third position would take intersectional-complexity, i.e., mix(t)ability itself as a norm and enable asking newer or uncommonly asked questions:

• Given that it is through membership in different collectives that human beings “become” positioned as particular kinds of humans, who is authorized to give whom possibilities of becoming a part of the overarching “human” collective?
• For whom and by whom are contemporary institutions like higher education, public education, theaters, museums, etc. established, developed and maintained?
• On what basis are individual and group abilities framed, and by whom?
  

Two interrelated issues can be noted when we shift our gaze from refining policies and peoples/institutions perceptions of policies to the complexities of everyday lives. First, the necessity of paying attention to these tensions from an analytical framework rather than a corrective lens endeavor. Recognizing the analytical nature of such tensions enables leaving aside claims of newer superior methods and models to more fundamental issues wherein the whos, whats, wheres, whys of equity are brought center-stage. Thus, opportunities to become a group member (as we will see in Section 4) become framed not merely in terms of methodological issues for individuals in specific activities or institutions, but more importantly in terms of the reasons for focusing on specific positionalities, norms and routines, and issues of who is doing the work on whos behalf. In other words, issues of the “hows” of doing equity are compounded with issues of the “whats”, the “whos” and the “whys” of equity. These are epistemological issues related to participation.
From analytical points of departure, two initial differentiations can be made: institutionalized equity work transcends neutral understandings of equity; in other words, equity is an embedded dimension of being human being; and, empirically studying human beings’ understandings of their living and existence is not the equivalent of studying the social practices (i.e., practiced policies) in which their lives and existence unfold. Thus, the social practices of communities are significant and need focusing upon from analytical points of departure.
The second issue regarding the tension inherent in the operationalization of policies at the praxis-institutional level or the reported mismatch between peoples/institutions perceptions and practices in the ideology-institutional fields, relates to representations of human diversity (a point that has been made above). Drawing on the linguistic-turn – which among other things, stresses that semiotic resources human beings engage with themselves shape and co-construct human understandings and realities – implies that segregated identity research projects or scholarly fields themselves co-create specific understandings of human identity and diversity. It is an empirically situated analytical position with an interest in intersectional-complexities that is of interest here.[3]
Intersectional-complexities as points of departure for illuminating the human condition draw attention to the need for engaging with the messiness and banality of everyday lives (Law 2004; Ingold 2015) of seemingly homogenized named-groups. Attempting to attend to the intersecting and fluid nature of being human being in and across engagements with other human beings and with tools as individuals live their lives is a complex enterprise. Herein lies the relevance of the metaphor of the mixer-table with endless possible alternatives of mix(t)abilities. An intersectional position arose within research in the 20th century to attend to the mismatch between the singular construct of gender and the lived experiences of scholars-of-color; important layers of the latters subject positionalities were being erased and the concept intersectionalitybrought center-stage the importance of racialized and ethnicized gender in newer ways (Carbin & Edenheim 2013; Davis & Zarkov 2017; Hancock 2016; McCall 2005). From parallel vantage points, other scholars have made equally relevant contributions to the epistemological enterprise from other layers of their subject positionalities: postcolonial and decolonial scholars have challenged tensions inherent between their scholarly discussions regarding equity, rights and the erasures of multiple epistemologies to which they and their communities have been privy (Flores 2021; Rosa 2019; Bhabha 1994) and scholars with disabilities have in parallel bought center-stage the hegemonies and discrepancies between scholarly discussions and their lived experiences (Corbett 1996; Murphy 1990; Mykkänen 2001). Such contributions to the academic literature emerge when researchers who pay “allegiance to a number of different representations simultaneously… are often situated at the crossroads of different academic disciplines as well” (Bagga-Gupta 2007:6). Racializing and ethnicizing gender, raising concerns regarding the monopoly over what counts as science, drawing on the sociality of functionality through a focus on lived experiences on the one hand and living at the boundaries of fixed academic disciplines on the other hand create cracks that enable troubling the logics of knowledge creation. Similar trajectories of increased awareness can be noted in the performing arts sector as well.
The performing arts build on multidimensional embodiment. Thus, dance, movement and acting play out in illuminated sets where costumes and props add fundamentally important layers and perspectives for the audiences’ experiences. Contemporary norms in Swedish contexts however build on measurable theoretical knowledge i.e., know-how that tends to be valued as superior as compared to the practical know-how of the hand. Focusing upon such parallel processes across the sectors of scholarship and the performing arts opens up the proverbial Pandora’s box. Here theorizing being human beings’ positionality processes needs to transcend the siloed fields of Gender Studies, or Post/decolonial Studies, or Disability scholarship. Thus, analytically human beings (scholars included) and disciplines (created by scholars) need to be understood in terms of historical trajectories of being and becomings that cannot belong to singular categories. Mix(t)able as a lens here enables illuminating what transcending contemporary scholarly habits mean. Thinking with Goffman (1996/1963:140), it is remarkable that the social sciences “have so quickly become comfortable in using [labels] as if those to whom [such labels are] applied have enough in common so that significant things can be said about them as a whole”.
The significant point is that while every human being can potentially make claim to a number of key positionalities, it is routine that only one of these is evoked at any given juncture in the practices that comprise human life. A woman (itself an important historical identity construct) can make claim to her immigrantness or her differently-abled status or her sexual-orientation or her biological age or a combination of these at different moments implicitly and explicitly in a range of interactional spaces in different communities of practices. However, compounding more than any one of these at any given moment at once raises complex issues in the analytical work of scholars. What is salient here is that this is an issue for scholars, not for the being of the human beings that scholars focus upon. What is thus routine for being human being in communities of practices, constitutes a problem for research communities and policy makers.
While an emic “mobile gaze” (Bagga-Gupta 2023b) on intersectional-complexities promises to unpack the processes of being human being, operationalizing this in research work calls for transcending a focus on both policies of equity and rights and how human beings perceive issues of equity and rights. It calls for approaching the centrality of social practices entangled with perceptions and declarations of equity. Thus, what gets played out at the interactional scale, peoples and institutions understandings of issues and policies enacted to deal with those issues need analytical illumination together, not as separated siloed apertures as is commonly the case. The ombudsman institutions can serve to illustrate the issue at hand. All but one of the ombudsman institutions in Sweden,[4] instituted during the last two decades of the 20th century, are organized on the lines of singular human categories.[5] Bringing together some of the singular identity related ombudsman institutions under a common umbrella ombudsman “Discriminations ombudsman, DO” in 2009 made visible tensions regarding intersectional-complexities of attending to the nature of the human condition on the one hand, and democratic agendas in nation-states that attempt to deal with issues of equity and justice. The analytical issue at stake here relates to how such institutional shifts dis/en-able attending to intersectional-complexities and fluid positionalities of human beings who can simultaneously be boxed into migrant, and functionally disabled, homo/bi/transsexual positionalities, in addition to age, class, gender categories – i.e., their mix(t)able status. The key question relates to which of the ombudsman this fictive human being can turn to if they require equity related support: HomO or HO or DO or… More importantly for present purposes, we need to consider how such a human being can be adequately focused upon in the research enterprise. It is here that transcending disciplinary boundaries and turning to multi/cross/inter/transdisciplinary research holds promise. However, the latter’s inability to deliver at a meaningful level[6] has led to the emergence of calls for undisciplinary research more recently (Ings 2019). Inspired by such thinking, we push for taking seriously the need to attend to issues of equity from a mobile gaze on intersectional-complexities and transcend the silos of disciplinary and multidisciplinary domains of scholarship. Here doing undisciplinary research finds resonance. Furthermore, situated in and across the sectors of higher education, public education and culture and vested in one another’s sectors, we call for the need to contribute to the scholarly work on equity from cross-sectorial vantage points (see also Hira 2023).
Our positionalities and entangled journeys in one another’s sectors can be illuminating here.[7] While formally a member of the nation-state of Sweden, Sangeeta has an explicit multidisciplinary, multi-thematic scholarly trajectory across the planet with a strong international anchoring. Petra has held managerial positions in the various branches of the performing arts across administrative, artistic and technical areas in Sweden. We are both heavily invested in work that is labelled as leadership and teaching in different ways in our own sectors. We both align with positionalities of being middle-aged women, mothers, wives, daughters, sisters and while one of us positions herself as brown, the other aligns to a white embodiment. We engage with several written, oral and signed named-languages. These include Swedish, English, STS (Svenskt TeckenSpråk; Swedish Sign Language), ASL (American Sign Language), BSL (British Sign Language), Hindi, etc. While our lived experiences are embedded in the framings of intersectional-complexities, we recognize ourselves as being “composite” human beings across timespaces. We are also cognizant that our identity positionalities are fore-fronted differently in different arenas that we inhabit as dimensions of the lines of our lives (Ingold 2015). This brief positionality statement substantiates a key argument in this paper: peoples’ positionalities can only be named by temporarily suspending their mix(t)ablities. Anything else is fictive and counter-productive to the agendas of science and detrimental to the equity agendas of democratically framed societal arenas.
The materials we engage with and that push our thinking in this paper build on experiences drawn by us from research projects that have been and are situated at the CCD, Communication, Culture and Diversity research environment (previously at Örebro University, and since 2017 at Jönköping University, Sweden) and particularly our joint cross-sectorial collaborations in two societal developmental projects. First, DoT (Delaktighet och Teater; Participation and Theatre) that ran between 2012–2015, and second, the think tank DoIT (Delaktighet och Inkluderings tankesmedja; Participation and Inclusionary think tank) that we initiated together in 2016. DoT was funded primarily by Kulturrådet (The Swedish Arts Council) and ran under the auspices of Örebro county theatre, Riksteatern (The Swedish National Touring Theatre) and the research environment CCD.
Project DoT was based upon Sweden’s national cultural policy goal that every citizen should have access to professional performing arts. Its aim was to explore possibilities and obstacles for hearing, deaf and hard-of-hearing people to create, arrange and participate in the performing arts on equitable terms and in common arenas. Accessing project financing was contingent on the initial boxing-in of people on the basis of hearing levels. This was insufficient for our broader aims of understanding how such boxing-in shapes individual’s and named-groups possibilities to engage in i.e., get included in a culture-for-all. Despite the constraints of using boxing-in for obtaining funding, such understandings allowed for – as we will see in the next empirical section – widening the aperture of our sub-projects to enable the inclusion of other positionalities.
Furthermore, the cumulative epistemological work that this paper builds upon can be understood in terms of different long term ethnographically oriented projects that are framed at the intersections of sociocultural perspectives and anti/post/decolonial and southern framings. These importantly invite intersectional complexity-based analysis. The issues raised here also draw upon experiences from large-scale developmental projects and national level work for Governmental and policy organizations since the mid-1990s. We now move our mobile gaze towards creative curiosity-driven undisciplinary work to illuminate the doing of equity.

4. Participation as dynamic being human being

The banal flow of life in the vignettes presented in this section illustrate the whats, whys, whos, whens and wheres of being human being in Swedish territories in the 21st century.

Vignette 1: Who leads who, in what ways: The work that inclusion and integration do[8]

Vignette 1 illuminates taken-for-granted norms and praxis that shape routine ways-of-working when the agenda is a one-society-for-all. It displays dimensions of institutional practices in both the performing arts and society at large in relation to participation. A key issue in the Wonderland sub-project builds on the idea of challenging norms related to who leads who in Deaf-Hearing environments. The fact that the project leaders were deaf contributed centrally in making visible interesting taken-for-granted norms when everyone was to be included – i.e., when participation- by/for-all was on the agenda, not inclusion or integration of marginalized people into majority norms. The initial reactions of confusion from the (primarily) hearing workshop participants made visible taken-for-granted norms that frame people and institutions ways-of-being in the world. Other norms include how religious biases shape what is taken-for-granted and what is normal-languaging. For instance, a participant highlighted what they perceived as a clash of norms: “I recognize that we have different norms in different groups, not least since I was born in a non-Christian family in Sweden. As a deaf person, I need to be physically near and touch another person to get their attention. But for many women from other religions the expectation is perhaps not to make eye contact or even touch a man”. Languaging norms regarding the use of oral communication by everyone in a group or normed codes of drawing attention to oneself as dimensions of turn-taking are imagined to be fixed based on gender and religion. In contrast to deaf “visually-oriented” norms, white Swedish hearing norms too downplay public physical proximity and touch among strangers.

Vignette 2: From language-bath to language-work: Norm shifts across time

Vignette 2 illuminates how positionalities of those in power, including whether they have experience of “visually-oriented” knowledge can potentially develop and re-shape routine ways-of-working and ways-of-understanding what constitutes the nature of work at an institution like Crea. Existing norms become explicit in contexts where deaf and hearing individuals collaborate as we see through Vignettes 1 and 2. We see that different epistemologies or types of knowledges (in the plural) matter and how prerequisites for participation change. A new leaders awareness and situated knowledge that STS is far from a unified competence that all deaf and/or hearing people either have or do not have, became the driving force for shifting the framings from “språkbad” to ”språkarbete”. While språkbad became indicative of something passive in that a language needed to be translated word by word or sentence by sentence, språkarbete became framed as an active stance, illustrating something complex. Language-work called for deep knowledge of different meaning-making repertoires in both STS and (oral and written) Swedish. While this shift has been initiated, the work involved in translating visual written text to visual STS neither receives acknowledgement nor renumeration in terms of copyright over materials. This highlights how power matters in terms of the mix(t)abilities of participation.
Prerequisites for reshaping ways-of-working based upon equitable mix(t)able framings can be driven by leaders, i.e., those in power.[10] A deeper acknowledgement about one’s own and others’ intersectional-complexities can be noted in both Vignettes 1 and 2. This includes recognizing one’s own privileges and erasure-spots. For instance, a hearing leader highlighted how participation in the Wonderland workshops opened up an unknown parallel world of deaf human beings in the city that they lived and worked in. Given the city’s proclamation as the “sign language Capital of Europe”, it is an ironical fact that temporarily financed projects (like DoT) become educational sites for hearing citizens. What transpires in a democracy when people in power lack significant knowledge about the lives of minoritized groups in their own geographies calls for moving away from the ideologies of siloed inclusion and integration efforts and bring center-stage a third position where the participation of everyone is crucial. Instead of refining existing policies to correct such gaps, being human being calls for arenas where the normalcy of mix(t)abilities is acknowledged and that constitutes the basis of participation in and across different settings. This also opens for recognizing that norms shift across timespaces, as we see in our next illustration.

Vignette 3: “Normal” expectations… By whom for who

In the short time-bound sub-project “My Own Bodies – All Stars”, whose goal was to include a minoritized group that normally never visits or participates in a mainstream cultural institution, eight deaf persons were invited to work with a hearing choreographer who placed high expectations on the participants in a performing arts project. No long-term changes could be envisaged through the choreographer’s routine ways of working, even though it was hoped that some participating individuals’ lives could be enrichened. While this can be seen as an example of inclusion by an institution, i.e., the project that we lead (when the normal majority norm is not under scrutiny), the lack of long-term engagement becomes a curtailing and instrumental inclusive effort. The choreographer and the researcher’s short-term engagement, a lack of time and a lack of a joint platform to reflect on personal and collective learnings from the findings too hinder sustainable enrichment for all participants in such time-bound projects. Instead of societal or sectorial development, it is the individual participants’ journeys (at best), our journeys as project leaders, the individual researchers’ journeys, etc. – that can be said to have been touched. Such findings themselves testify to the inadequacy of individual projects that are always time-bound as the societal tools for attending to the grand agendas of what gets glossed as inclusion and integration.
In comparison to Vignettes 1 and 2 wherein problematizations of competencies – i.e., who has the power in terms of privileged knowledge and the possibility to lead work in a context – constitutes a core idea and understandings regarding the need to re-formulate how participation can or should take place, Vignette 3 more clearly illuminates shortcomings of time-bound projects wherein learning becomes relegated to individuals, rather than collectives. The learnings accrued in such instances cannot be expected to implement sustainable changes. Here key dilemmas arise: What transpires in the realm of emotions and possibilities for claiming and realizing their new potentials in the future when the deaf participants were taken seriously for the first time after the sub-project ended? Given the deaf researchers important observations after the project ended, what recourse did the deaf participants have to take care of their own feelings of having been further marginalized during the project work? What could we as project owners do other than reflect on our own inadequacies in conceptualizing the project? How can the different learnings from two scholars who had been invited into the project enrich our understandings of the complexities of participation in the agendas of both research as well as societal arenas wherein participation is the cornerstone of democracy?
As we have noted so far, participation and equity gets done in and across mundane settings where human beings receive and also afford or curtail opportunities for one another for getting socialized into fossilized or newer ways-of-being. Acknowledging this potentially shifts focus away from normative ways of conceptualizing equity. Recognizing the significance of social practices and pushing boundaries for understanding the relevance of practices opens up for far reaching implications: for instance, recognizing the inherent instrumentality when spaces are reduced to places where better models or methods of equity for specific named-groups are seen as being in need of implementation (this can be seen in the work of Crea illustrated in Vignette 2). Focusing upon social practices allows for understanding the nature of mix(t)able intersectional-complexities, and the very process of the doing of equity and creating possibilities for participation for individuals and groups. Accounting for these doings and spaces becomes significant both for what goes on inside and outside institutional arenas like higher education, adult education, work-places, cultural arenas, etc. and for theoretical-methodological implications for doing research more generally.
The banalities of being human being in the 21st century in territories that purportedly have inclusion and integration on their agendas highlight the paradoxes of declared and perceived policies. The three illustrations presented and discussed in this section illustrate that boxing-in human beings is itself a dimension of the ideologies of inclusion and integration that impede participation. Focusing on participation as a fluid process of being human being together enables complexifying issues of accessibility and peoples mix(t)abilities in important ways. This calls for transcending disciplinary and sectorial silos and the need for undisciplinary thinking.

5. Coda

“The discursive construction of social justice […] is informed by conceptual webs of meaning, which not only condition experiences of social injustice but also respond to them” (Sayed, Soudien & Carrim, 2003:231).

Poster. Dialogues across timespaces in three Acts[11]

Final Act. On what is needed to disturb established (in)visible norms…

Being human being in contemporary times calls for what Hira (2023) and others are calling attention to, i.e., the need for cross-sectorial dialogues to meet the contemporary challenges related to both existential and epistemological sustainability.  

“No single knowledge formation exhausts the human possibilities of knowing. Societies have many needs for knowledge and generate an enormous range of temporary and local knowledge projects, as well as elaborated ones. Universities produce and hold knowledge, but also need to learn from what is around them” (Connell, 2019:141).

6. References

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