My experience at the Taos Institute 2022 Gathering, Ongoing Dialogues: Relational Resources for Global Good 

How do we cope with the complex challenges that are affecting our society all over the globe? “Performatory”, a community of Social Innovators at Breda University of Applied Sciences (https://www.performatory.nl) addresses societal challenges by using collaborative and co-creative approaches to practices. Students and teachers are committed to transforming the educational system into a more contextual and human-based system. As a student, I learn how to create change around complex societal issues through real-life projects, e.g. working with socially deprived neighbourhoods in Breda. This approach gives us, the students, knowledge about how to facilitate group conversations, how to build and strengthen communities and how to create meaningful experiences that initiate shifts in mindsets and relational practices leading to transformative action. The various backgrounds, countries and lived experiences of students promote a plurality of perspectives and multiple points of views, making Performatory a living lab for innovative ways of thinking and doing.

Within this context, I am looking back at my participation in the Taos Institute 2022 virtual Gathering, “Unfolding Dialogues: Relational Resources for Global Good”, and asking the question: How can social constructionist ideas and practices help us in creating and bringing forward new ways of going on together? 

I joined different events/sessions at the Gathering such as Releasing Generational Trauma, How to Resist Colonial Structures and many sessions about language shaping and framing who we are and how we express ourselves. During one of these sessions, hosted by Claudia Gross, I learned that most of the language we use in businesses and organisations is rooted in military, master, and machine language. Expressions like “target”, “deadline”, “We are killing it”, “recruitment”, “head quarter”, “divide and conquer”, “producing” and “letting off steam” are maybe obvious in their background however I have never questioned them when hearing or using them. The concept of social constructionism suggests that we live in a world of meaning and that we understand the world from our personal history, experience, and shared culture. Interesting to me is how the words we choose create worlds and as Anais Nin said, “We don’t express things as they are, we express them as we are”. As a 23-year-old student, trying to change the world into a better place, these ideas are very compelling to me and make me feel powerful and hopeful.

We from the Performatory - Angelica van Dam, Celiane Camargo-Borges and Jovita Steeman – also hosted a session, called “Community Design – Performing Social Innovation”. This session was about imagining ideal education and giving the participants an idea about how Performatory is challenging traditional education and re-constructing education in social practices. But apart from imagining possible futures, I learned the importance of how language is also key for social innovation. Do we still want to use language that implies hierarchal and hurtful structures? Do these words match the intentions and values we want to communicate? The world is going through changes, shouldn’t we also change our language with it? If in doubt about the meaning of a word, we can always check and research and then create and re-create, cultivate, and adapt new words that are not rooted in colonial structures. If we change our language, we can change our realities and practices of education, and I think that is a beautiful opportunity that we can all explore together.

About Annalena: I am Annalena Schmidt-Faber from Berlin, Germany currently a bachelor student of Social Innovation at Breda University of Applied Sciences. In the past year I did an internship at Curiko (Vancouver/Canada) founded by Janey Roh and Sarah Schulman, working in the disability justice sector. Next year, after my graduation, I would like to start my master in the area of social sciences. I am always curious about other people’s stories. If you would like to have a conversation, please feel free to reach out to me: annalenasf@posteo.de 

More than 300 people from 44 countries registered to participate in 60 Events during the Taos Institute 2022 Gathering last month! Event topics included education, therapy, research, governance, organizations, leadership, community, and more.

Governments, corporations, and political parties focus on goals, products and results. They have agendas, make plans, set objectives— with no way to realize them. Goals, agendas, analyses, programmatics, and adherence to ideologies can feel comforting at first, but given that human (and other) life is an ongoing, unending process — and processes are inherently unknowable — goals soon become burdens that weigh us down and drown social movements attempting to improve the quality of life. Details available here.

This book is centered on the topic of incestual abuse. Professionals caring for people with a history of childhood abuse have often found it difficult to make sense of constantly changing symptoms, natural incoherence, dissociation with bizarre presentations (often seen as hysteria or psychosis) and cutting (seen as self-inflicted harm or attention-seeking behavior, a waste of precious medical time). These young people are given very pessimistic futures, often labelled as personality disordered, unhelpable, or in need of years of therapy. However, we consider them to be mobile, changeable and holding countless resources and strengths that professionals should help to liberate.