What I’m learning: On Noticing (More)
The ever present (in)visible
What kind of world do we enact with our frames?
What happens when we are invited to zoom out?
My work in the last few years has focused on inquiring about that which is not visible - beliefs - those ideas which exert power in how we position ourselves and ‘the other’ in terms of ‘competent’ or ‘good’ communication. I’ve been paying attention, which much care, to how we teach speech-language therapists (SLTs), in general, to define, categorize, and position “good” languaging in some contexts (e.g., diagnostic assessment) and we live it (i.e., as in how this idea of language-in-the-material-body in conjunction with the environment co-construct and evolve each other). As such, much of my work in pedagogical and scholarly endeavors lately has been focused on some basic -yet deep, impactful- questions:
‘how do we define language/communication?’
‘who is the communicator?’
‘what is ‘good’ communication?’
Of note to come back to this: This latter one, I’ve found, does elicit a lot of distancing in explanations. That is, people don’t like the word ‘competence’. More later about another project that is teaching me a lot about words as ‘performative names’ and how our ideas and practices may, sometimes, not fully be aligned. In effect, our embodied ways of doing the SLT work may not surface manifestation of the terms we claim to have adopted, but our lived experiences do! Here, too, though we won’t delve too much, but systemic structures (e.g., diagnostic labels to allow people to get in and out of rehabilitative services) have the power to squash creativity and imagination. Again - the question is ‘what kind of world - including what view of ‘the’ peoples- is enacted with these frames?’
By the way, the photo on the top of this blog happened 9/25/26, right before a big Nor’easter was supposed to hit the East Coast and meteorologists were very excited about prognosticating the potential for weather correctly. Nobody could have anticipated this colorful display of pinks, oranges, and blues…let alone the almost invisible rainbow that peeked fully all over the sky. This reminded me of the importance of ‘movement’ even in our thinking and of noticing, zooming out so-to-speak, in our thinking frames…
So on the topic of zooming out, I was honored to be invited to write a chapter for a revolutionary new volume - which title is not for me to reveal — and my chosen subject was an exercise on zooming out. It is, to date, the hardest text I have ever composed, and I feel most vulnerable about readers engaging with it in their own time. In it, my colleague (Gianna Cioffi) and I experimented with the idea of expanding communication beyond the body….to entangled ecologies. Partly, in driving the ‘object’ of study (language-as-a-noun) outside of the confines of a 'processor’ and in centering its elasticity and active energy, we aim to engage us in a different world - one that invites us to depathologize the bodyminds that are deemed ‘different’ within the ‘variability-from’ frame SLTs are taught to construct, instead noticing that such variability is a feature that can be found ever-present in all the world that surrounds bodyminds.
This took me down a rabbit hole with re-reading Barad’s, Varela’s, Maturana’s seminal works on embodiment and the post-human, (to discover) DiPaolo’s enactivist theory in “Linguistic Bodies” and to be fascinated by the work of philosophers on embodied critical thinking - many here (email if you want a reading list). I won’t claim to understand all that I am consuming as learning but I am enjoying the learning journey once more. I won’t share the specifics of our framework but invite us to begin thinking about three questions:
How does ‘your body’ feel/sense?
How does ‘your body’ move?
How does ‘your body’ tune to ‘the other’ (to include ALL the objects, places, people and their power scripts)?
And then go back to that world you are defining…does it change? If so, how?
Leaving it there for us to continue noticing, zooming out, and maybe expanding our frames…
Keep the learning,
MR
