(i)
the notion, the natural range, the possibility…
Neurodiversity:
the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions.
Silberman, 2015
Geodiversity:
the natural range of geological (rocks, minerals, fossils), geomorphological (landform and processes), and soil features. It includes their assemblages, relationships, properties, interpretations and systems.
Gray, 2004
Body-landscape diversity:
the possibility of non-intentional or subconscious human action means that it is important to attend to the sort of micro-kinetic knowledge which may not be contained within a traditional verbal account.
Macpherson, 2010
(ii)
the context
Let’s consider life on Scotland’s tiny fragment of Planet Earth as a series of ancient, long-disappeared and ever-changing ecosystems. Each evolved in response to where the ‘land that was to become Scotland’ was on its global journey at any particular time and the environmental conditions that developed as a consequence.
McKirdy, 2015
(Geopoetics) is deeply critical of Western thinking and practice over the last 2500 years and its separation of human beings from the rest of the natural world, and proposes instead that the universe is a potentially integral whole, and that the various domains into which knowledge has been separated can be unified by a poetics which places the planet Earth at the center of experience. It seeks a new or renewed sense of world, a sense of space, light and energy which is experienced both intellectually, by developing our knowledge, and sensitively, using all our senses to become attuned to the world.
White, 1989
All experts prematurely close the curtain on the performance of praxis by presuming to know what’s best for people, instead of the people speaking, thinking, and acting for themselves. In the end, we each have a deeply political choice to make. We can advocate a reformist geography that makes incremental changes by repeatedly shuffling the deck and rearranging the furniture, yet ultimately reinforces existing power relations through a blinkered focus on pragmatism. Or, in contrast, we can demand the impossible by fearlessly embracing a more visionary perspective that encourages the collective exploration of the earth as the center of experience, liberated from established ontologies, familiar epistemologies, and predetermined methods.
Springer, 2016
(iii)
performance
…any experimenter is concerned with all aspects of his relationships with an audience.
…When a performance is over, what remains? … When emotion and argument are harnessed to a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself – then something in the mind burns. The event scorches on to the memory an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell – a picture. It is the play’s central image that remains, it’s silhouette, and if the elements are highly blended this silhouette will be its meaning, this shape will be the essence of what it has to say.
Brook, 1968
(iv)
process
the tentative joy of your unique being