SERIES: SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTIONS AND AUTHORS IN RELATIONAL CONSTRUCTIONISM-SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM

(October 16, 2020)

Diego Tapia Figueroa, Ph.D. and Maritza Crespo Balderrama, M.A.

(October, 2020)

“Praxis gives meaning to words.”

(Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Sheila McNamee (I)

We continue our series of authors with Sheila McNamee, Ph.D. (July 28, 1954, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States).

Some members of the Taos Community have expressed interest in the ideas of the Taos Institute as we engage with our communities. Instead of issuing transformative strategies or techniques, I propose the following as a series of fluid and flexible conversational resources. There are many ways in which any of the following issues can be achieved, thus facilitating the different perspectives of the members of your group. Resources are overlapping possibilities that could be used to engage in challenging conversations and that could foster new possibilities and new ways of understanding:

·        Participate in self-reflective research.  In other words, question your assumptions, and your understandings. Ask yourself how else these things could be described and understood. Do not be rushed to “know”;

·        Try to avoid abstraction.  By this, we mean that it is about avoiding global statements about good/bad, right/wrong, etc., and inviting people to talk about their lived stories, culture, and values;

·        Try to suspend the tendency to judge.  We often want to judge, evaluate, and solve problems. He speaks instead from the desire to understand and from a position of curiosity about differences;

·        Commit to relational reflexivity.  *Check with those you’re talking to about how the interaction is going for them. Are there other topics that should be discussed? Are there questions they expected you to ask or details you could provide? Are there other issues to address?

·        Coordinate multiplicity rather than seek uniformity. Let us try not to force everyone to opt for the same understanding or “position”. And let’s not move towards consensus (a small overlap in the agreement). We can open a space where we talk about our differences without trying to persuade or prove that one position is superior to another. Our focus should not be on agreeing but on creating new forms of understanding;

·        Use the familiar in unfamiliar contexts.  In other words, invite yourself and others to draw on conversation/action resources that they use in other contexts, in other relationships. We spend too much time trying to teach people how to do things differently. What if we invite them, instead, to turn to their familiar ways of interacting in contexts that seem to require something more. For example, it might be helpful to use the voice you harbor as an affectionate friend when faced with a different opinion;

·        Imagine the future.  We waste too much time trying to figure out what fact in the past has caused the present conflict What if we focused instead on what we could build together in the future? How would we like to see each other four months from now? In a year from today? In ten years? Once we engage in this conversation, we have initiated the possibility of co-creating that future together;

·        Create the conversational space.  It is not always possible, but, if we can invite conversations about difficult topics in contexts, spaces, and atmospheres that are more conducive to human care and consideration, we might be surprised at what could unfold. Living rooms and lounges invite human contact and food also helps to bring people together;

·        Seek local consistency.  Instead of judging a person’s stance on an issue, we can try to understand how that position has evolved from that person’s history of interactions. No ideas, beliefs, or values arise in a vacuum; emerge within communities where participants negotiate together what counts as truth, right and wrong;

·        Suspend the desire for agreement and seek new forms of understanding.  If we maintain our disagreement on one problem but come to understand the fundamental reason for the other’s position, we have already moved away from framing a problem as true or false, black or white to gray (which is, complex and diverse).

·        A common mantra uttered by many constructionists is, “There is no constructionist method, per se.” All methods, all theories, all models, and techniques are resources available for social interaction. What makes the use of particular resources consistent with the relational approach of social constructionism is how any resource is used. Once a method, technique, model, or theory is used because it is the right one to use, we abandon our constructionist sensibility. If, on the other hand, a resource is used as an invitation to create possibilities to “continue together”, then our attempts are relationally oriented.

·        Social construction in the realm of human communication says that we create our world, we create our values, our beliefs, our truths, our rights, and our mistakes in interacting with other people. Therefore, our identity emerges through the exchange of conversations, and interaction with others, rather than believing that our identity is fixed from birth. We are different people in different relationships. We are not singular beings. We are multiple beings. Once we realize that relational quality, which comes from our relationships, everything we consider true, everything we value, emerges.

·        Dialogue, from social constructionism, is used as always associated with generative social transformation, we would not connect dialogue to something that is not generative or to open possibilities (…) We create a space where people can really pay attention to the ways they are creating together and understanding; and also that we create a space in which people can browse about differences. That doesn’t mean that dialogue solves the problem or that people come to an agreement, but that people are invited to new ways of understanding differences: and that’s really what dialogue is all about.

·        Relational ethics, from the perspective of social constructionism, includes dialogue, collaboration, and a whole range of relational practices. I need other people to coordinate with me the construction of the world; to be relationally responsible is to be in tune with the relationship itself.

·        The ethical and political questions are: can we open in our relationships with people discourses of possibilities, instead of discourses of oppression and repression? Can relational ethics address personal issues, while addressing political, social, and economic issues?

·        Relational responsibility and coordination of multiplicity… it has nothing to do with the things we shouldn’t do, but how we do them. And, beyond that, it has to do with who we are in relationships. It is how the dominant conceptualization of ethics does not allow us to relate to people.

·        Interest shifts to the ways in which a plurality of perspectives are coordinated into coherent patterns of interaction, each of which simultaneously enhances and contrasts particular forms of action.

·        When we take that perspective, we recognize that we have so many different relationships and therefore we must also have so many different resources for action, so many different values, beliefs, and truths. We are not singular people and there is no one right way to be in the world.

·        What a constructionist recognizes is that when we face a challenge, we have other resources. We don’t have to do things the way we’ve become accustomed to doing them. We can start from another relational context to interact.

·        The easy way to appreciate social construction is to say that everything that makes us who we are: our intelligence, our emotions, and our personality, is thanks to our relationships with others and also with our environment. This is contrary to saying that everything we are, is within us, without recognizing the role of culture, the influence of others, history, etc.

·        A powerful idea is that, instead of following a specific theory, one can construct possibilities and realities that arise from the relational attributes of many theories. It is possible to build something that comes from us with others. We can change our realities. In this way, social construction becomes part of our life. We embody the constructions we co-create. We can embrace it in our daily lives when we realize that the way we relate, and the way we talk, love, hate, and treat our problems are performances that shape and create our lives. And by changing them we can change our reality. This is one of the most powerful things about social construction.

·        Once people have the epiphany of the power of social construction to determine our lives, they wonder why we didn’t learn this in school and how we can teach this to others. The answer of social constructionists is: Don’t try to teach anyone, just do it, just live this way. It’s the way we position ourselves with each other and with our environment that makes the difference.

·        Social construction is an invitation to look at the world in a more relational, connected, and systemic way. This invitation is also to look more critically at what is presented and at the same time be more empathetic and receptive to all others and other perspectives in life.

·        Instead of addressing conflict and problem-solving to minimize differences between perspectives and work toward consensus, we must develop processes to create a system of coexistence and collaboration that involves immeasurable but respected positions of difference. If you understand how communication creates a way of seeing the world, you can understand how those different points of view are internally coherent; from this position, we invite ourselves and others to be curious about our differences (first) rather than judging.”

·        Relational constructionism is a metatheory or discourse of (human) science. It provides general guidance toward all relational processes, including those that could be called research, intervention, development, leadership, or organization.

·        The “social constructionist method” of research holds that research asks to be considered according to the paradigm of science that the author set out to follow.

·        This position holds that knowledge has a subject and that subject has a voice. Reliability frameworks are more the internal consistency and legitimacy of the linguistic community, than the view of cause and effect and the accuracy of the sample.

·        In everyday interactions with others, the relational reality in which communities and people live is constructed. For constructionism, it is about common action, or what to do together and what constitutes its doing. Constructionism asserts that the use of research lies in the generation of action potentials that it creates along with the reflective critique to which it invites participants.

·        There is no attempt to reach a consensus among different beliefs or values of the different participants; nor is there an attempt to determine the values and beliefs of the community that are “better” or “right.” The constructionist orientation is towards multiplicity, diversity, and difference.

·        Agreement is not paramount; it’s curiosity.

·        The challenge is to open up relational possibilities rather than closing them.

·        For the constructionist, research is not a process of documenting or “discovering” what exists. Research is a process of construction.

·        Research is transformative and ultimately practical; it has generative possibilities for all participants (researchers and co-researchers).

·        For the constructionist, reliability and validity are replaced with the criteria of utility (for whom is this information/knowledge useful?) and generativity (how will this information/knowledge help this community “to continue together?”).

·        (…) when we engage in this relational research, we end up creating the future.

MODERNIST SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH	POSTMODERN SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONIST RESEARCH
Hypothesis Approach	Questions from curiosity and respect Alternative
Data	Continuous process
Results	Processes
Control	Minimum structures and deployment
Positioning of the researcher as an expert A priori	Positioning of the locally located researcher
External and objective researcher	Participating co-researchers
Design	Dialogue and non-hierarchical structures
Method	Forms of practice/performance in context
Truth, Essence	Diversity, Possibilities, uncertainty
Unique speech of the researcher	Multiple voices of co-researchers
Orientation to determine what´s right, the good, the correct	Orientation to value difference, multiplicity and diversity
Diagnosis	Curiosity
Documentation or diagnosis of reality	Construction of reality
Reliability	Generativity
Validity	Usefulness for local communities
Protocols Measurement instruments	Emergence and reflexivity, real dialogue
Focused on science and the scientist	Focused on continuous processes
Objective neutrality	Complexity
Universality and generalization	Social, Cultural and Historical Contextualization
Must be universal	Relational ethics

(October 30, 2020)

Sheila McNamee (II) 

• The world is complex, not simple. It is time for us to accept this complexity and develop ways to coordinate complexity rather than try to eliminate it by providing ‘expert diagnostics’ to decontextualize or partially contextualize actions. Let’s not define coordination of differences with agreements: let’s define it as understanding (where understanding does not mean agreeing, evaluating, or judging – it simply means generating curiosity about differences).
• What if we see differences as a resource for creativity, novelty, and social transformation? As we take refuge in the discourse of psychology, we avoid confronting some of today’s most irritating challenges. By embracing radical presence, we can move beyond the therapeutic state and equip the vast resources available when multiple communities coordinate together to create ways to ‘continue together’. We recognize that we can never create the conditions for “THE TRUTH,” and therefore we must work to create conditions where different voices, different truths, and different value systems can somehow enter into conversation. It is, after all, in conversation that new meanings and modes of understanding can be constructed. In collaborative and dialogic practices, we do not seek to find consensus but to create new forms of understanding.
• When we have a single story that imposes itself on others, we severely limit our ability to understand, which reduces the other to a simplistic place. This unfortunately limited understanding facilitates conflict, violence, and all forms of pathologization. When I think about living within a constructionist sensibility, I become acutely aware that curiosity about differences builds relationships and also creates possibilities to forge a new understanding with others. Our task, as professionals who adopt a relational sensibility, is to recognize our commitments while power takes them lightly. To appreciate the differences, it is necessary to create a space for new conversations, new possibilities, and new and unimaginable worlds.
• To create dialogic situations and contexts the only useful thing is: curiosity, being open to listening to differences, and being reflective about what I myself am thinking about the situation. How to get involved in a dialogic situation? With the Radical Presence: What do we do together to be present with each other in the situation? It is not only to be present with all that I am and open to the other, but also to accept the vulnerability of the situation and the desire, to desire to be in a situation of challenge, where the goal is not to impose what I think or accept what the other thinks, but how, together we create a space where the two parties can participate and meet.
• This training with a “PR”, to therapists, educators, leaders, etc. focuses on observing those things that allow the relationship and that through relationships the problems are dissolved and learned together. The anxiety of doing “the right thing” prevents us from being radically present in the relationship and realizing what happens, because we are too worried about doing it “right”.
• Four questions from Barnett Pearce, useful to be with “Radical Presence”:
• What are we doing together, instead of asking ourselves: What is this person doing in this situation? Instead, we ask ourselves: What is it that we are doing together that is not yielding results?
• How are we doing this, everyone involved?
• Who are we becoming while doing this; how are we transforming?
• How can we do this in a better way?
• These questions help us to stay in a self-reflective process, in which we do not focus on resolving the situation, but focus on how, together, we work to do what we are doing (therapists and consultants). “RP” involves humanizing ourselves in the relationship and putting aside theories, techniques, and tools, and concentrating on what we are jointly producing at the moment; and what is it that produces new meanings and expands relationships; and, how the “RP” infinite possibilities of change and transformation are created.
• Build, as therapists, a relationship that is meaningful to the consultant and that contributes to finding and building other meaningful relationships. We should be able to act in the same way in professional responsibility, as well as in our entire life; be able to commit and invest time in relationships.
• Stop thinking about what you can’t do and start thinking about what you can do. Not getting hooked on what you can’t, but looking at the possibilities and how to create possibilities. To be radically present with us to recognize our limits and to be radically present to recognize the possibilities of creating dialogic spaces where it is possible to generate transformations in relational contexts.
• For this, it also contributes to relational Ethics: instead of enclosing and limiting what we are doing, we open the possibilities of everything that can be done and that we can build together. In different ways our challenges are in accepting and embracing uncertainty and dialoguing from complexity, trusting in relationships.
• Research has to be conceived as a constructive process that suggests that we construct and deconstruct the descriptions of social life while remaining actively linked in the research process (…) the political nature of the research is enhanced, accentuating the need to listen to the multiplicity of voices.
• What kind of relational realities do you want to participate in? Do you want to highlight and elevate the practices, values, and interests of positive science, for example, or do you prefer to give more space to other (non-scientific) communities and their ways of doing things? What do the local communities involved in the research process want?
• How do we create space? this dialogic space where relational ethics is really the dominant theme. We want to keep the conversation moving forward so that we have a chance to create some new understanding together: how can we come to a new understanding? Not necessarily to an agreement.
• It’s asking questions that generate a relationship. The ways in which our research processes transform the worlds we inhabit, as well as the worlds of those who participate in our research (…) when we engage in this relational research, we end up creating the future.
• Research as a poetic act whose focus is dialogue, places us in the relational present that is specific to each moment and with that concrete, unique other.
• Can we open a space where we can talk about our differences without trying to persuade or demonstrate that one position is superior to another? Our focus should not be on the agreement but forms of understanding.
• … a resource is used as an invitation to create possibilities to “continue together”, so our attempts are relationship-oriented.
• Can we open a space to talk about our differences without trying to persuade or demonstrate that one position is superior to another? Our focus should not be on the agreement but forms of understanding.
• Instead of placing my focus on the content of my courses, I am now more focused on building a sense of community in my classroom. I enter each course asking how students and I are going to “connect” so that together we can create a sense of learning, knowledge generation, and personal and social transformation.
• It has to do with the intentionality of the dialogues, and I think that is the answer to this question. If we adopt the posture of understanding the intention and the position, and what the other can do that comes to me, then it would be seen how this process can involve a person to talk about a difference, a difficulty, another opinion; and, if the other person still emphasizes that they do not want to have that conversation with you, if the other does not want to dialogue, it is important to appreciate and understand that position. Be curious to understand how you don’t want to. If the other does not want to participate, ask us: how do you think that the dialogue to which you are invited is not a safe place?
• If we keep our attention on dialogue we will appreciate and try to understand resistance to dialogue. I’m not saying that all this is bad, but that there are people who don’t want to be in the dialogue. We are saying that it is to stay curious, to try to understand what this dialogue means. It doesn’t have to do with correcting the other, but entering their space and knowing the kind of worldview they have. Because those who oppose dialogue try to persuade themselves that they have nothing to do with their truth or their thoughts. Understand that the steps to dialogue with them are to accept, like them, that position that there is only one truth; those beliefs lead us to a dead end. When they both think they have the absolute truth. It is a way of positioning oneself, of being so that somehow, we can know the other who does not want any dialogue. If we force the other to have a conversation we are not being dialogical but imposing the idea that we have a better way of doing things. Therefore, we are creating a space for a new dialogue to emerge, looking for a common space for people’s stories; seeking to talk about perspectives, and recognizing that you may disagree because you understand that it is not collaborative to maintain rigid perspectives.
• If you start from that position, you may have the idea that dialogue is not a matter of superiority, because if you act like this you are not being dialogical. We can create the conditions so that those who dialogue can dialogue feeling as if they were at home. We can ask a group that does not want to dialogue: What resources can they generate to be dialogical? How to use these resources for different dialogues?
• … the discourse on the social poetry of research aims at the idea and practice of commitment to the relationship.
• The future has not yet been lived and the invitation to imagine a desired future invites the possibility of contributing to building that future. We must articulate more questions about the future than about the past.

SUGGESTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

McNamee, S.  (2012). Conversation at the University of Manizales, Colombia

McNamee, S. and Hosking, D.M. (2012). Research and Social Change: A Relational Constructionist Approach. New York: Routledge.

McNamee, S. (2013). The social poetry of research committed to relationship.  Research as conversation.  In Deissler, K. & McNamee, S.  (Ed) Filo and Sofía in dialogue: the social poetry of therapeutic conversation (pp. 102-109). Ohio, USA: Ed. Taos Institute Publication.

McNamee, S. (2016) Virtual meeting of the TAOS Network of relational research.

Mc Namee, S (2016). Resources for Facilitating Differing Worldviews, Taos Institute December 2016. Recuperado de:

Click to access Resources_for_Facilitating_Multiple_Worldviews_(McNamee).pdf

Taos Institute page containing books and publications by Sheila McNamee:

Sheila McNamee, Ph.D.

English translation of Bruno Tapia Naranjo.