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.

Stichwörter:

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