What is Participatory Sensemaking and Why Should We Care?

Tracing its Roots in Systems Thinking, Neurodivergence, and Marxist Theory

How can we listen across species, across extinction, across harm?…

Listening is not only about the normative ability to hear, it is a transformative and revolutionary resource that requires quieting down and tuning in.

From Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Hanne De Jaegher

One fateful day in 2017 I was with my family in the Kootenay mountains in eastern British Columbia. It was August and hot and smoky from wildfires. That was the summer of the bears, and we had been watching black bears enjoying the solid wild plum harvest behind our house. There was one bear in particular — we called them Cinnamon Bear — who had an injured foot. We hadn’t seen Cinnamon Bear for a while and we were worried that they had come to a bad end. But that day, we were distracted from the bears by philosopher/cognitive scientist Hanne De Jaegher, who came down our long, dusty driveway and altered the course of my work and maybe my life.

Back in 2017 I had not met De Jaegher, but I was somewhat familiar with her work through my husband, Evan Thompson. They both - Hanne and Evan - have been seminal thinkers in a tradition in cognitive science that has come to be known as the enactive approach.

Hanne De Jaegher & Evan Thompson, Frog Farm, August 2017

I won’t go into the history of enactive cognitive science here, but, in a nutshell, these are the ideas at its core: The bulk of researchers in the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science, as well as many of the fields that contribute to it (cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, computer science…) define the workings of the mind as sets of computations that take place in a wet computer inside the skull. In contrast, the enactive tradition, which arose from the work of biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, is more, well, biological in its definition of cognition. The enactive approach views cognition as arising from interactions between creatures with bodies and their environments. By this view, as creatures with moving bodies, we make sense of events or objects in the world in relation to whether they are ultimately good or bad for our viability as autonomous organisms — for our survival. To borrow an example, a waiter approaching is meaningful to us in relation to the opportunity they bring to order a glass of water, which for its part is meaningful in relation to our thirst. Cognition is sensemaking, which is embodied and enacted through our interactions with the world. As De Jaegher says, it’s about constantly determining what matters.

To be fair, these two basic opposing views on the nature of cognition — enactive vs more “cognitivist” — go back at least to the 19th century (for a short history, see Tony Chemero’s book, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science). But, at least in North America, the enactive approach in the Maturana/Varela lineage has remained well outside of the mainstream. At any rate, when anyone refers to the “enactive approach” in this interview, that’s what they’re referring to.

One more bit of background: Since this is the origin story of the idea of participatory sensemaking, here’s my brief definition so you know what I’m talking about:

PSM is a focus on the dynamics of relational interactions, looking at individual agents in relation to an emergent interaction process that takes on a life of its own in continuously determining what matters.

What follows is a description of the concept of participatory sensemaking (PSM for short), which De Jaegher formulated with cognitive scientist Ezequiel Di Paolo. For a fuller explanation of the idea, with some concrete illustrations, I recommend this video as well as this more recent podcast interview with De Jaegher.

As you may have noticed, PSM is the organizing concept for this substack as well as much of my current research. In this piece, I talk to De Jaegher and Di Paolo about what PSM is, and why it matters, as well as its roots in systems thinking, autism research, and Marxist theory as absorbed through family dinners from Belgium to Argentina.

Back in the BC mountains in 2017, De Jaegher drove down our driveway with her partner Doran and his two teenage kids. Because of the heat and the smoke we stayed inside in our living room and chatted. At the time, Doran was spending part of his time in the Netherlands, and Hanne was a professor in Spain. But Doran has family in the area and he talked about his dream to build a new house on his land one and a half mountain passes to the east, and live there with Hanne (that dream is now almost concrete). We started fantasizing about seeding a hub of enactive cognitive science in the Kootenays.

When Hanne and Doran left at the end of the afternoon, they saw Cinnamon Bear as they pulled out of the driveway.

Cinnamon Bear, August 2017

The next year, Evan and I held the first of a series of what our son calls “Advances” (because, he said, we want to advance, not retreat). These are nerdy house parties where, in the spirit of Evan’s dad’s Lindisfarne Association gatherings of the 1970s, we invite an interdisciplinary group of academics, neighbors involved in ecosystem restoration, and artists to our place in Vallican BC, on the Slocan River, for a couple of days of camping, presentations, discussions, performances, field trips, rivers, mountains, lakes and food. De Jaegher came to the first two advances in 2018 and 2019 and then, after an extended COVID shutdown, when we re-booted in 2024. Over the first couple of meetings De Jaegher presented her thinking about PSM, and an extension of the ideas she calls Loving and Knowing. I remember her clarity and her strong ethical compass were something we all came to turn to as a reference point and inspiration.

De Jaegher (right) with choreographer Ivani Santana (center) & urban ecologist Sarah Jack Hinners (left), Slocan Lake 2019

I began to develop a deep admiration for De Jaegher. Her ideas resonated with me strongly, but as an experimental researcher in cognitive neuroscience, I didn’t see any way they connected with the methods I used to conduct my research. At first blush, they didn’t seem to have anything to do with my work at all. Well, the ideas marinated, especially during COVID, and over time have come to transform how I think about my research. Not long ago De Jaegher and I, along with musician/biomedical engineer Stefanie Blain-Moraes, got a small grant together to do some preliminary research. And in this substack series I have been and will continue to focus on people who do work — often well outside my own research domain — that I think of as concrete examples of the practice of PSM in the service of healing.

What is Participatory Sensemaking?

De Jaegher and Di Paolo introduced the concept of PSM to the world in a seminal paper in 2007: What follows is the origin story of the idea based on zoom interviews with De Jaegher in Cranbrook, BC, where she is now based, and Di Paolo in Spain where he lives and works at works at Ikerbasque, the Basque Science Foundation, in the Basque Country.

Ezequiel Di Paolo

In these interviews, I often give people my definition of PSM and ask the people I interview if the idea resonates with them. Obviously that wouldn’t make sense to ask of the progenitors of the idea. Instead I give them my definition and ask them if it’s consistent with their concept of it and if there’s anything they want to add. To my relief, my definition was acceptable to both of them.

De Jaegher goes on to explain how she came to it in response to the tendency of psychologists to explain social interaction in terms of isolated individual brains, locked inside their skulls, sending and receiving and decoding messages. “I think participatory sensemaking wants to address all of what we can do intersubjectively in the widest sense possible. And I think that's a reaction to cognitive psychology having talked about social cognition and supposedly being the science of social cognition, but having only talked about how we can explain and predict each other's intentions and react to them. And I think that's been a very narrow scope that has led to some mistakes in how we understand social cognition.”

Di Paolo elaborates, “Immediately we had to ask the question: ‘What is a social interaction? When there are just two people being present together is that enough? Is that always necessary?’

“So using enactive ideas, we realized we could pinpoint that aspect of what we consider to be the really interesting thing about social interaction, which is it becomes an emergent process where all of the participants contribute, yet none of them is entirely able to orchestrate it. It can go in directions that are unpredictable. But that doesn't mean that the participants sometimes do not attempt to control it. That can happen but then there are different points of views and, depending on the situations, the dynamics and so on this can go well or not go well.”

In his definition of PSM, Di Paolo also stresses the importance of the autonomy of each individual participant: “We also wanted to say that the participants remain autonomous as participants in the interaction. And so it turned out that we were using the idea of autonomy in two realms. One is the embodied autonomy of the agent. And the other is the autonomy of the encounter, the dynamic that emerges. I think that was the key because then from there many things started to flow. So when I am a sensemaker in this situation of social interaction I cannot attribute my sensemaking entirely to my own doing. Things are happening that are affecting, shaping, or even co-authoring my sensemaking. That is seen very clearly in the most obvious cases in which we are doing things together, when we are performing an act that requires more than just one single agent.”

By way of illustration of the autonomy of the encounter, dancers who practice a form of improvisation called contact improvisation talk about a “3rd entity” that arises when the dance takes on a life of its own that sweeps the dancers into it.

If this all sounds a bit abstract, here is a description of the autonomy of the interaction by dancer Valerie Sabbah, describing her experience in an improvised duet:

“There’s a flow that happened. I felt taken by the convergence, like there were two spinning bodies and in the spinning, there's a convergence somehow, like the two spinnings converge into one another. Somehow it's as if we both caught the tail end of the same spins. And that became one stream… And both bodies merged into one another, so there wasn't a separateness anymore… I felt there wasn't an initiation from anyone. I felt that it was a space that both of us entered into.. It was beyond initiation... And our bodies were being taken by this convergence. And I felt a lot of joy… Because there's like this feeling of awe. Of ‘Oh, here it is!!’ And there's an attempt to be as collaborative as possible, to make it last as long as possible. And then at one point it separates, so it's gone. It dissipates.”

Valerie Sabbah (left), Eryn Dace Trudell (right), & the 3rd Entity, January 2025

Di Paolo gives some more everyday examples of acts that require mutual participation from their book, Linguistic Bodies, co-authored with philosopher Elena Cuffari: “Like the act of giving. You give an object to somebody, it has to be accepted for the whole act to be completed. Many things that we do don't require other people. If I want to drink water, I just drink water. But many acts are inherently social. And, by definition of the act, I cannot complete it on my own. I may force a gift into your hands. But if you don't really want to accept it, the act of giving and accepting is not happening, then something else is happening.”

So not every social encounter involves PSM. It’s crucial that each agent interacting has autonomy and agency. De Jaegher explains, “So for instance, according to the definition of participatory sensemaking, each person engaged in the interaction has to be able to maintain their own autonomy — in the face of each other and in the face of the interactive dynamic that emerges between them. And if in the interactive dynamic that emerges between them one or the other person dominates or over-determines the other to such an extent that they cannot participate anymore as who they are, then this interaction stops being a participatory interaction.”

Di Paolo echoes, “Some social encounters cease to be social interactions when that requirement (of autonomy) is diminished or erased. When somebody's not able to participate, they may be present, but they're not really in the interaction.”

The implications are ethical and political. De Jaegher continues, “So when you coerce people or damage people to such an extent that they cannot participate anymore then it's not a social interaction anymore. You can apply that framework to ethical situations and see that actually what we're doing here is wrong because we are making it such that people cannot participate anymore in this situation.”

Again, this view pushed up against the limits of how the field of psychology was defining social interactions. “So in the first step,” De Jaegher continues, “participatory sensemaking tried to understand social cognition much more widely than the perspective of just wanting to predict and explain each other's thoughts and experiences and react to them — in a way that is mechanistic and very exclusionary of a lot of other processes. Like, for instance, how children can perform in school is linked to what kind of economic situation they're in at home. So those kinds of relations between someone's economic situation and how they can think was an element that was completely left out of what cognitive psychology could address — a wide ranging relation between what goes on in the world and what goes on for a person’s thinking.”

The origin story

A lot of De Jaegher’s work has focused on autism, and on participatory sensemaking within and across neurodivergence. For her, this focus, as well as the systems thinking that characterizes enactive participatory sensemaking, have roots that go way back to her childhood in Belgium. Her father was a psychotherapist who worked with autistic children and adults, and studied a form of therapy that was steeped in systems thinking. “My dad trained at the Interaction Academy in Belgium,” De Jaegher explains. “My dad started to study there when I was around 8 to 10 or so. And so he brought talk about systems to the dinner table. And also the work of Varela and Maturana. Because that was studied as part of that course in systemic family therapy.

“And my mom is also an extremely gentle and caring person who worked with autistic children as part of her profession. The way my parents thought, and my mom still thinks, really still informs my thinking.”

Recently, fueled by autistic researchers and activists (see, for example, this recent piece) there has been a move to better understand the experience of people who have divergently wired sensorimotor systems (although my friends who work in schools say this has not, in their experience, made any inroads into that environment). It’s striking the degree to which De Jaegher’s parents took such a perspective long before it started to take hold among researchers, mental health and education professionals, or the public.

De Jaegher recalls, “I remember sitting around the dinner table with my parents and talking about the autistic adults and children who they were caring for professionally. Who were sometimes showing strange behaviours that the people around them couldn't make sense of — that were obviously disruptive behaviours that were problematic either for the children themselves or for the people around them. Maybe there was a meltdown in a child or the adults that my father also worked with. Then what the conversation for my parents was about was always: ‘Why are people doing that? What is behind that behaviour?’

“Rather than what I later learned in the theories and so on, which was more like, ‘Oh we have to get rid of this behaviour.’

“But my father's approach was, ‘Why are they doing this? What is going on that this behaviour is happening? And what needs to be changed so the person isn't distressed like this? Or so that there is no cause of distress in the environment?’

“So the underlying thought, as I now understand it, was ‘What is making sense or not making sense to the person, and how can we help make things flow again in a way so that people are well?’”

Marxist influences

Not long ago De Jaegher and I were walking through the forest at the University of British Columbia, lamenting the state of the world and wondering how to respond to it. She told me something I had been completely unaware of, which is that Marxist theory had been an important foundation and undercurrent for both her and Di Paolo in formulating PSM. I follow up on this with both of them in the zoom interviews.

De Jaegher says, “My dad was a communist, or at least he was part of the most leftist party in Belgium. His father was a tailor. In 1968 my dad was 20, and he was on the barricades as a student — he had a code name and everything.

“To me, that's been fundamental. I still follow the party that he was a member of in Belgium (PVDA) and I still gather a lot of support for my own thinking from the work of that party. Because it's not just the political party. It's actually a group of activists who try to weave the fabric of society as fully social and fully supportive of each other. That party to me is an example of how to weave society in a way that everybody can be there and be well. (Here is a link to a talk by general secretary of the party, Peter Mertens about his recent book, Mutiny: How Our World is Tilting)

“And they are fighting against an awful current where this is totally not the concern of the government in Belgium (or globally), which has been contrary to concern with making a good fabric of society for everyone.”

Di Paolo also grew up in a left wing household in Argentina, although the influence was quieter and more subtle. “Like for Hanne,” he says, “Marxist theory was always around. When I was younger, it was without much of a detailed understanding but general interest in revolutionary ideas, critiques of capitalism and so on — that was always around in my household, my family.

“My parents, especially my mother, have always been very left wing, let's put it that way. And my mother still is. It was always a subtle influence, like you read the news and then she would have a comment to make and so on. And it's never very explicitly described. But it was there in the air all the time. Of course, also coming from a period of military dictatorships in Argentina, it’s not the kind of thing you just start talking about in the street. You were careful —not only in those times but even after — essentially you were scared I suppose.

”But it was always in the context, and in my readings and my interests. And then with university, and especially when doing my PhD and onwards, it became much more explicit because it was much more motivated by contemporary affairs: ‘Why is this thing currently the way it is? What's going on? I mean, are we condemned to live in this sort of system that seems very depressing?’

De Jaegher and Di Paolo met at University of Sussex, in the UK where both did their PhDs in an exceptionally interdisciplinary program that turned out to be an incubator of embodied and enactivist thinking. When De Jaegher arrived to begin her doctoral studies, Di Paolo had recently finished his.

”In the beginning,” De Jaegher explains, “My PhD was an extension of my Master’s thesis in which I studied cognition and AI and autistic thinking. And then I continued studying autism in more detail to begin the PhD. And I realized that a lot of the autistic theories were about, well, theory of mind (understanding explicitly that other people have perspectives and knowledge that are different from yours) and very much in the head. And there wasn't anything about what I had seen autistic people or autistic children do when I joined my mom and my dad sometimes, taking part in summer camps caring for autistic kids.

“I also started to be really dissatisfied with the theories of autism being so individualistic and not connected and not embodied. There was no possibility for autistic children or autistic people to connect within those theories. And so I started to realize that rather than work on autism as such, a new theory of social cognition was needed.

”And then I looked into the enactive approach and the concept of sensemaking. And as I looked more into that, I saw that it was — mostly — also not paying attention to the intersubjective. And I thought, ‘We need to talk about interactions much more. And how that runs through our bodies.’ And so both these elements, how it runs through our bodies and the interaction, became really central, and I built on the enactive approach to think about sense-making intersubjectively.

“Ezequiel was on my committee and we started thinking about these things together. I had started to develop this theory of intersubjectivity based on coordination studies in sociology. I thought that if I want to make a theory of intersubjectivity, in cognitive science, we haven't looked at interaction, and we haven't looked at embodiment. And meanwhile, in social sciences, they haven't looked at the individuals involved in the social systems. So I thought, ‘If we want to have a proper theory of intersubjectivity, we need to bridge social science with cognitive science.’

“ And sensemaking in the enactive approach was the most interesting approach to what individuals do, because it involves what is of concern for individuals — what individuals care about and how they self-organize and self-maintain.

”So I brought those together and that became at first, an intersubjective theory of sense-making. And then one morning or afternoon, in around 2006, close to when I was supposed to submit my thesis, Ezequiel and I were sitting on the grass on the square at Sussex university in front of the library. Thinking about sensemaking and coordination and how does all that fit together. And then we came up with participatory sensemaking, sitting there together.”

As they developed the idea of PSM, Marxist theory continued to inform their work, together and separately. For Di Paolo, Marxist ideas had begun as a background influence he describes as “intuitions and undercurrents of influences, where you know you're interested in a whole set of literature and you still don't see the connection with the other things you're doing. But in some ways your directions of theoretical development are also being affected.”

Indeed, I would guess that some Marxist ideas were probably inherited through enactivism from Francisco Varela as well. Varela was a supporter of the socialist Allende government in Chile in the 1970s, and had to flee to the US and then Europe following the US-sponsored coup.

For example, Di Paolo, points out, enactive theories propose that “The materiality of the circumstances has an irreducible influence” on cognition. “This is also a Marxist idea — that all our mental life is always based on what's actually happening in material terms — what is possible and not possible.”

Here the mind is a process that unfolds in mutual interaction with the work we do to sustain ourselves and our social environment. An example of this is the connection De Jaegher pointed out between a child’s school performance — their capacity to attend and remember, and what they attend and remember — and their economic circumstances — whether they are hungry, tired, stressed, frightened, or otherwise preoccupied with basic survival.

If you’re interested in digging into the link between enactive cognitive science and a Marxist view of cognition as emergent from human activity and social practice — in the connection between biology and politics — here is an interview with Di Paolo as well as a paper he co-authored on the topic.

Both Marxist theory and enactive cognitive science stress the importance of history in shaping what matters at any given time. In the interview I link to above, Di Paolo is quoted as saying “From an enactive perspective, cognition is no longer what happens in your head. Cognition is what you do. And in actually doing you’re changing your surroundings, and you’re changing yourself, you’re changing others, and their actions change you. These changes may be minute, they may simply reaffirm things as they stand, or they may be radical, throwing us into crises. This is summarized very nicely in that verse from Antonio Machado, that enactivists like so much: ‘There is no path. You lay down the path in walking.’ This is the idea of bringing forth the world: that the world is being constantly changed in our actions… You know what happens when you get hit by something, get soaked by the rain, or you fall because the surface is slippery?... (these are) material processes that shape and even constitute you as an agent and what you can and cannot do. We are worldly.”

Di Paolo remembers that around the time of the 2007-2008 financial crash, the Marxist influence on their work became explicit for Di Paolo. In Linguistic Bodies they explicitly drew on Marxist dialectics because it was a tool that helped them deal with some of the tensions and complexity within their own theory. For example, in PSM there is an ongoing tension between the autonomy of the subject and the autonomy of the interaction.

In Linguistic Bodies, according to Di Paolo, “We were dealing with the question of understanding language from an embodied perspective. Imagine that you don't know anything about language. And then you realize that all the traditional methodologies are likely to fail because everything is so interconnected, from the grammar to the gestures to the intonation to the history of the particular word that you're using. And the meanings keep changing. Everything is so entangled. And so the idea is that language is a totality. It doesn't have a center. It's not that grammar is the key to it or recursion is the key to it and everything falls from there. It is rather that this totality has been developing historically with everything else that humans have been doing, their practices, their biology, their landscapes and so on. And in this historic development something like a system, or an entity, a totality has evolved that we call language.

“Now, if we want to understand a historical totality and its development, the dialectical method has been helpful in the past. It tries to avoid very quick conclusions that tend to be very reductive, such as once we discover that an aspect of language is very important, we immediately go ‘Okay, so this is the important thing.’

“We forget about the rest because we have a mindset to just isolate and run away with it, because it's easier, because it's productive.

“But the idea was to see if we could do justice to the whole. We said, ‘Well, Marx did a similar sort of analysis for early capitalism during the industrial revolution. That was a historical totality. He didn't have the one single factor that defined everything, but it was all intertwined. So, that was the reason why we chose that method.“

What’s next?

I ask each of them what they’re most interested in right now. Di Paolo says one thing is using Marxist theory to develop an enactive perspective on labour.

De Jaegher says ideas of PSM have continued to be useful in autism research. “Another thing that's been developing more, and is still very much in development, is the thinking around autism and autistic participation. There's been this development of more and more autistic self-advocacy. And at the same time, more and more researchers who are not autistic are also seeing that we should take seriously what autistic people are saying. We have to really listen. And I think (this meshes with) the participatory sense-making ideas in the way I've developed them, but also other people are helping to do that.

“Now I think we can see autistic participations and autistic interactions for what they are. There is research now showing, for instance, that interactions are quite fluid between autistic people when it's between only autistic people. And between non-autistic people only, it’s also quite fluent. But when the two come together and interact with each other that's when it goes wrong or when it becomes awkward or difficult. And this is based on both ends of neurodiversity spectrum. So it’s not that autistic people are less capable. It's when they are with people who are different from them, and the same goes for the neurotypical people when they have to interact with people who are too different from them. Then they also have difficulties. So actually the onus is on everyone to listen better.

“That's one development that I find really interesting. Also, with participatory sensemaking you see that everybody who is engaged in an interaction cares about certain particular things that are relevant and of concern to them. And starting from that you can think about how people can make better sense with each other. And that has come for me in my own development of my work through working with autistic people and listening to autistic people, and that's still an ongoing development.”

“Another of the developments of participatory sensemaking is also in relation to ethics. And I think that's also really thrilling, using participatory sensemaking as a conceptual framework to think about ethical questions. You have to be very clear on what the principles and the concepts and the starting points of the theory are, and how the different conceptual elements hang together. And that is that everybody cares for something in every moment. And it's particularly related to their particular and concrete embodiment and situation and history and materiality in that moment that they come with. And that means they care about something. Something is of concern to them. And sometimes it's a matter of life and death.

“Like situations of war or in situations where, for instance, you're a trans person in the US right now. Your very existence and your social interactions — your social persistence — is a matter of life and death, or might become one very soon. And so… having the principle of how that matter of concern hangs together with the kind of interactions and interactive dynamics we engage in, and how they modulate what we can and cannot do – You have to have that theoretically clear and then you can apply it to actual situations that people are in.”

De Jaegher concludes, “The largest purpose of PSM is to make the world a better place and to have people better able to live well together. And those are two different things and yet they also can inform each other. My life's purpose is to contribute to a better world, right? Where people can live better together.“

Photo from: https://www.zooborns.com/zooborns/2017/12/manatee-calf-charms-visitors-at-beauval-zoo.html

Could we communicate more like manatees, who stay in communication in all kinds of emergencies, place their bodies in a way that protects children, touch each other to remember and know?

From Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

by Alexis Pauline Gumbs