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Personal Reflexive Statement
Damien Contessa: I am an educator, writer, musician, and doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of South Florida, where I research media representations of exotic animals in public life. In particular, I look at the stories people tell when wild animals don’t do what they’re expected to do in public spaces. I lead courses on introductory sociology, nature and culture, and self and society, and love helping students wake up to new possibilities. In between, I study Buddhist meditation contemplate my fears and reservations, and practice opening my heart to what scares me most. I wish everyone will one day delight in goodness, truth, and beauty.
Dustin Hiles: I am an eclectic renaissance man—teacher, writer, life coach, photographer, driving instructor, school bus driver, and more, as well as editor for the Final Thought section of Humanity & Society. I enjoy exploring the natural world, meditation, free-form dance, and healing practices. I come from an academic background in sociology, community (social) sustainability, as well as bilingual and multicultural education. In living practice, I also connect with myself and others through the practice of yoga, working with archetypes, studying shamanism, and mobilizing helpful and healthy relationships in collaboration with the myriad range of wisdom traditions and contemporary insights this world has to offer. Throughout the range of my various endeavors—and everywhere I dwell—I seek to connect the soulful richness of a heart-based awareness with our other individual and collective tools for meeting life fully, conscientiously, and well. Increasingly, I work with individuals and groups toward the cultivation of conducive, helpful, and healthy relationships on all levels. In particular, I enjoy sharing explorations on social change, interpersonal development, and individual transformation—to name a few of layers of this integral onion I see open to our living creativity for the constitution, negotiation, and renewal of meaning in interpersonal, community, societal, and cultural settings. I am especially interested in imagination and cultural creativity, as well as how we not only discover for ourselves and relate to but also track and cultivate our paths of personal calling. Toward these ends, I continue to study psychology while building and honing skill sets in the applied field of counseling.
The longest journey someone must take is the eighteen inches from their head to their heart.
Contemporary society is in big trouble. Some have even argued that social activity on earth, fueled by global capitalism, has become a geological and morphological force. It seems a new geological epoch has been born, and it’s called the “Anthropocene.” Environmental sociologist, Kari Marie Norgaard (2016), argues that global climate change poses the most profound social dislocation since the founding of sociology as a discipline. It challenges our modern sensibilities and demands we look at the world differently and with fresh eyes. But what will it be like to live and think in this emergent era of converging crises, shifting climates, and changing human populations? For one, it won’t be easy. Massive ecological shifts pose various threats to global stability. But could these crises also pose a unique opportunity for a revolutionary transformation in the social order?
To resolve our immense array of troubles, we will need a range of revolutions to occur and recur. Some might be small, some big. Others will manifest in the world around us. Still others may perhaps arise from, and work through, the apparently subtle realm of the imagination. In other words, for such recurrent revolutions to be essential parts of an authentic and viably diverse spectrum of revolutions, they must be removed from the predominating channels of modern establishment. They will not arise tidily from the predictable centers of a mainstream thinking. Nor will they arise
Gone are the days of cutting things up or reducing them to tiny bits. Yes, critique is essential to the political consciousness. It helps us to see differences—in the way things might have been otherwise as well as in the ways things could be otherwise. It helps us to move on these insights, continually approaching an other wisdom, and to act in the world. Yet it is, simultaneously, a discriminatory act. When we critique, we create distinctions between us and them. We identify as divisors, playing ourselves out by our practiced endeavors as skeptics. We wield division to cut down our subject, often at great theoretical distance. We see this in all dominant institutions, whether media, politics, or academia. Yet we may also fall subject to cutting ourselves short. We inadvertently maim the spectral range of our choices, and otherwise viable options, in a situation. We become the double-cutting activists of the analytical knife.
What if we laid down our swords? How might we yield—to open the way—instead of wield, to narrow and secure it? How might we fare by opening our hearts rather than moving comfortably into our heads to critique the opposition?
Behind all critique is the revelation of shared vulnerability. We recognize how social division gives rise to needless suffering and pain. Yet we tend to ignore that relying on critique alone also compounds our troubles by begetting more division. Vulnerability is about embracing our open wounds and catching up with our imperfect attempts in an imperfect world. It is about dissembling the barriers and boundaries that entrap our personal territories. It is about venturing out again, to fully move about—and throughout—our available landscapes once again.
To be vulnerable is to yield—at least momentarily—to what we might not already understand. It is about acknowledging our finitudes and shortfalls. It is about giving wide-open ways for our unknowns to court us, to inform us, and to teach us. It is about listening astutely, taking our next steps in a balanced way, and making our choices in a more thoroughly integrated way.
What if we took up a politics of wonder? A politics of wonder asks us to temporarily transcend our position in the world, even as we dwell more fully and thoroughly within it. A politics of wonder calls us to occupy another vantage point and to send our roots questing more deeply and broadly into unknown realms. It is truly a radical practice. To wonder is to contemplate and to surrender our expectations about how things should be. It is about meeting, dwelling with, and occupying our roots. It is about mingling receptively alongside our own fluid edges, where tidings of wonderment soak us in their rippling revelations. It is about what it means to bear the tidings of experience at the precipice where known and unknown circulate and meld. To wonder is to engage the emergent layers of a situation, or as Bogost (2012) has written, “[to] suspend all trust in one’s own logics, be they religion, science, philosophy, custom, or opinion, and to become subsumed entirely in the uniqueness” (p. 124).
How can we—as academics, humanists, and sociologists, on the one hand, and as growing subjects, dynamics selves, and developing humans, on the other—suspend an often predominant and fundamental trust in our own thinking? After all, as singer songwriter Leonard Cohen has remarked, “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in” (Cohen 2008:n.p.). Rather than just taking a position, and hiding in critique, let’s open a dialogue with what we do not know. Perhaps there is wisdom in not knowing. Let’s invite in the myriad unknowns—beyond the already given moment of our arrival, on the edge, and beyond our presently held or given expectations. At the heart of a politics of wonder is vulnerability. Perhaps we may grow more fully whole and helpfully human by retrieving a sense of our roots here, by thoroughly dwelling here, and by listening well and meeting our own edges, here, at the frontiers—in our throes with a wonderment of vulnerability. This is our challenge now.