To: <s-acc@yahoogroups.com>

From: "Andrew Phelps" <starfish@northcoast.com>

Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:35:55 -0800

Subject: Re: [s-acc] wrestling for terms

 

Efg:

I'm getting a bit lost now. I thought we were discussing and clarifying rather than jumping to conclusions and pointing fingers or name calling, which I thought was more responsible.

If you have ideas on the way to go forward could you please give me an example of how a discussion would go so as to make it more obvious to me?

Sorry but I'm scratching my head at the moment.

To my understanding, you have posed the problem rather well. And maybe scratched well too, but there I can't say for sure. :-)

In Basaglia's psychiatrists' conferences, they had to have "rules of conversation." Someone could look up more on the story (it's probably in books like Nancy Scheper-Hughes' biography). Practically, "no finger pointing" is a key type of rule. The alternative to finger pointing is

  1.   keep the conversation at the level of how social responsibility didn't actually get taken. Aside from "high malice" that doesn't rely on blame. It does engage the discussion of phenomenology.
  2.   when the "social responsibility failure" is sufficiently 'diagnosed' then develop a "social treatment," which typically involved what we are now calling "community engagement."

The net is a pattern of dialogue readjustment.

Here we have the additional intricacy that some folks here are identified with professional activity, while others are identified with "receiving treatment" activity, and of course many/most have touched on each. Plus the vehicle for "community engagement" needs quite a lot of work to get it running.

On the other hand, you and Abc are "geniuses" in this area, and the discussion seems imaginative and creative to me.

 

Best

Andrew

One and one is two
Two and two is four
Four and four is .. too many

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