Show Notes
In this second season of the podcast, we are prolonging an experiment of sorts that we conducted in the spring of 2024 in the Core Enaction Programme, our online learning curriculum. Over the course of eight sessions, we invited researcher-practitioners into an open space of dialogue to explore how their intersubjective practices might be informed and enriched by participatory sense-making, and how participatory sense-making might in turn benefit from the forms of knowing implicit in these intersubjective practices. The semester paid visit to artists and curators, therapists and teachers, neurodivergent thinkers and AI specialists, musicians and choreographers. A central thread of these encounters was the intersubjective expertise that we all possess just by virtue of being human, and how that expertise is made manifest and refined in the different intersubjective practices that we explored. The question of ethics quietly guided many of these conversations, prompting us to consider how our ways of knowing eminently relate to our ways of being and doing, and how we might use our knowing to interact with each other in more skilful ways. We ended the semester by considering what an enactive ethics might imply, both as an ethics of participation and an ethics of engaging across difference, where difference is considered in all its generativity. In many ways, it was an experiment of exploring the "living, lived logic" underlying human knowing, to borrow a phrase from Dr Hanne De Jaegher.
We decided to bring each dialogue group back for a second round of conversations, where we not only picked up some of the threads of their earlier dialogue, but ventured further into the moving horizons of their thinking. You'll hear from Dr Hanne De Jaegher, Dr Ezequiel Di Paolo, Dr Elena Cuffari, Jonny Drury, Allison Leigh Holt, Amy Cohen Varela, Dr Sanneke De Haan, Dr Rika Preiser, Dr Luc Steels, Dr Takashi Ikegami, Dr Erin Manning, Dr Joëlle Aden, Luc Petton, Barbara Bogatin, Dr Shay Welch, and Dr Karen Grøn.
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Bruce Clarke and Martin Rosenberg met back in 1989 in a meeting of the Society of Literature and Science. More than 35 years later, they came together again as panelists at the 2026 Barcelona Power & Care Conference, co-hosted by Mind & Life Europe and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Both came from literature departments in an era in which high theory was a defining feature of literary studies, and eventually, both found themselves stretching out well beyond the confines of their original dissertation topics: Bruno, as one of the world’s preeminent historians of systems thinking, second-order cybernetics, and the Gaia hypothesis; and Martin, as a scholar of emergence, jazz improvisation, neuroplasticity, metaphor, hypermedia, and even the game of chess. Both are colourful examples of the many risks and rewards of interdisciplinary praxis, and of the necessity to lay down a path in walking.
Speaking with Andrea Hiott was very much akin to moving through a dynamic constellation of ideas and watching that constellation shapeshift in real time. Hers is an intellect that dwells in paradox, that embraces movement, and that does not shy away from friction. Almost immediately, one is struck by her unbounded curiosity and refreshing humility, as well as the astonishing breadth of her thinking. She is one of those thinkers who pushes us to hear familiar words anew, and reengage with descriptions of our world in a generative, non-reductive way. As you’ll hear in the beginning of the conversation, her work stretches across phenomenology, neuroscience, 4E cognitive science, urban planning, care ethics, and more, and she has elaborated a constellatory approach to thinking and being, which we explore, and at times enact, throughout our conversation.
Welcome back, dear listeners. In Season 4 of The Enactive Fold, we are "Empowering through Caring." You can learn more about our 2026-2027 programming theme on our website.
Stephen Nachmanovitch is widely known as a musical improviser, and wise teacher of improvisation. But his is an improvisation not separate from life; it is more that of a Zen master’s, tuning into the microscopic contingencies of everyday life, probing life itself as the ground for creativity and wonder. His earliest beginnings as a scientist, and later a student of psychology and scholar of William Blake, have afforded him a uniquely integrative view on the power of play and permeability, on the Pythagorean mysteries of the human mind. Most of all, he was a student of the great systems thinker Gregory Bateson, a presence one can feel when speaking with Stephen, whether through his recounting of anecdotes, his love of silence and patterns, or his generous, playful ways of relating.
Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser are forces to behold. As they describe themselves, they are “an artist duo whose work combines poetry and music to conjure speculative futures and multiverses.” Their collective, which you’ll hear more about in our conversation, is “Hylozoic/Desires,” or H/D. H/D “aspires toward a flat ontological ether in which all forms of life—stone, spirit, machine or human—are equal. They skew the linear imagination of time and space to produce divergences that elicit critical wonder. H/D’s research orbits around (non)place and histories of migration, transnationalism and environmental cosmism to learn from the multiple materialities of contemporary existence. They are concerned with the (poly)rhythms of love and the bea(s)t of belonging. Hylozoic/Desires use metaphor as an event, as a force of attraction that holds otherwise distant entities together.”