It read “HOSPITALITY: OUR WAY OF LIFE (NOT an INDUSTRY).”

It was a telling window into local politics which, as a visitor, you don’t always get to see. It also revealed something important about how concepts work. Whoever wrote it wasn’t denying that the hotel industry exists in New Orleans — they were fighting over which meaning of hospitality gets to define the city. They were insisting that one genealogy of the concept (relational, communal) was most authentic, and should take priority over another (transactional, corporate).

New Orleans is a city whose cultural and historic crossings are often generalized. But here, in this one word, I could see the specifics: colonial civility, Catholic charity, diasporic and working class generosity, and the tourism industry — all struggling over the heart of the city’s identity and economy. And, despite the centuries of history that informed that struggle, the graffiti proved that the tension in the concept of hospitality is still strikingly alive.

That aliveness is what this piece is about: how concepts are changed in their encounters with each other and the world.

Yet we don’t usually think of concepts as alive. We tend to think of concepts as things that just happen. If you think about them at all, you might say they emerge from shared experience, get absorbed into culture, and are consolidated by institutions or academic disciplines. On a day-to-day level, though, we treat them more like the weather: emergent reflections of a broader zeitgeist which we passively receive or react to.

But they could also be understood more dynamically: as ecosystemic, embedded in living networks that we take part in shaping, and that move dynamically in ways that can surprise us.

Just as we study interactions in social and natural ecosystems, we can and should study how concepts interact in our epistemic ecosystem. What follows is the start of a working taxonomy for how ideas move and change: the processes that shape concepts as they travel through contact with other ideas, contexts, and power structures.

A Few Quick Definitions

Before diving in, let me explain what I mean by conceptual encounters. Throughout, I use concept very loosely to refer to ideas, terms, constructs, and framework. None of these words, in this piece, means anything especially technical.

Encounter, meanwhile, doesn’t imply what it might suggest: two free-floating concepts bumping into each other like strangers in a dive bar. The collisions that change meaning don’t happen in a vacuum (or in a dive bar); they happen in use, where social worlds overlap in shared language.

Concepts are the membranes between these social worlds. When contexts meet, the concepts that connect them become the site of exchange, influence, struggle, and even domination. That’s why hospitality, in New Orleans, feels like a live argument: the concept is a conduit through which disparate worlds—tourism, community, religion, survival—strain for primacy. Each form of encounter I describe below names a way that contexts and their concepts tangle. In other words, these are one-to-many conceptual encounters.

Four Modes of Conceptual Encounter

Hybridity: Dynamic, Perhaps Contested, Conceptual Entanglement

The Braid

Hybridity describes a concept which carries forward multiple lineages at once. As an idea, hybridity was introduced by postmodern scholars in the 90s to describe what happens at the border between colonizer and colonized. The theory was that, in those spaces, power, culture, and language mix unevenly, opening the door for those once subjugated to resist and reclaim power.

As a liberatory or subversive strategy, hybridity later drew criticism, lost prestige, and eventually became co-opted in fields like business and journalism (a form of domination I discuss below) Still, I find it analytically useful: it describes a kind of conceptual encounter in which two or more lineages become inseparably entangled, making it impossible to understand one without the other.

The New Orleans graffiti discussed in the intro—”OUR WAY OF LIFE (NOT an INDUSTRY)”—captures what makes hybridity distinct. The message s clearly advocating for one strand over another, trying to assert that a relational, communal meaning should dominate. I’m on their side, but the fact that they have to fight for it reveals the concept’s hybrid condition. Multiple genealogies remain braided not because anyone in particular wants them to be, but because the power to define the concept is distributed (albeit inequitably) across hotel companies, local communities, cultural institutions, workers, and tourists. Conceptual hybrids don’t settle into stable forms1; they remain contested, with people pushing back against approaches which might, like the hotel version of hospitality, dominate others.

Hospitality in New Orleans is hybrid because both meanings (relational and transactional) actively coexist in practice, rather than one simply displacing the other. But not all conceptual encounters require ongoing struggle. Sometimes rupture forces meanings together before anyone can react.

Contamination: Mutual Influence Under Upheaval

The Spill

In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing introduced contaminated diversity: dynamic forms of life that have emerged in response to the human disturbance of nature. New ecosystems develop; new species and behaviors emerge. I believe concepts work in a similar way. When old frameworks collapse, ideas sometimes collide in the ruins and influence each other in unexpected ways. In the process, they become distorted, energized, or transfigured.

After the tornado in St. Louis in May 2025, devastation exceeded $2 billion. Homes were destroyed. Families were displaced. The North Side, already vulnerable, bore the brunt. People were eager to help, but official channels proved slow and inadequate. Citing insurance issues, hazards, and general inefficiency, our new mayor Cara Spencer, drawing from traditional emergency-management discourse, urged volunteers not to self-deploy.

The people didn’t listen.

Action St. Louis organized a massive response alongside local non-profits, and thousands of ordinary citizens showed up. They (we) cleared trees, cleaned streets, passed out supplies, and worked together to provide care that official actors were slow (at best) to provide. Within a week, “self-deploy” had become a bit of a rallying cry, infused with a spirit of civic mischief and “our streets” determination2. It exposed official disaster responses as slow and insufficient, and redefined ‘disaster recovery’ as something organic and community-directed that might require disobedience, and which certainly couldn’t wait for formal countenance. For many St. Louisans, neither concept (self deployment, disaster recovery) feels the same afterwards.

This conceptual collision was not planned or stewarded; instead, like Tsing’s mushrooms, it arose alchemically in the midst of upheaval. The tornado changed the conditions, people acted, and new meanings emerged.

Months later, many North Side residents remain displaced. The concepts that emerged (self-deployment as self-determination, disaster recovery as community-led) didn’t fix that. Contamination isn’t inherently restorative, but it is a reminder. When rupture happens, meaning-making doesn’t pause to wait for better circumstances. It happens in the wreckage, and we can sometimes shape it.

Hybridity and contamination aren’t opposites so much as neighbors. Hybridity names the braid that forms when meanings coexist in relative balance; contamination describes what happens when the weave comes undone and meanings spill into each other. Hybridity is about people working to make something happen; contamination just happens.

The next two modes are different: they describe what happens when concepts exit their home channels into open waters, where currents pull in every direction and leviathans lurk below.

Drift: Ideas worn smooth by sincere overuse

Lost at Sea, or Gremlins

In my post on Organizing Constructs, I talked about how values like empowerment and care can lose specificity and, with it, the ability to coordinate shared action. They thin over time, without breaking and without changing very obviously. They just… drift, until they’re capable of meaning a little too much, and specifying too little.

Empowerment is a great example. It emerged out of liberatory scholarship and activism: Freirean pedagogy, the community mental health movement, feminist and Black freedom traditions, and the early work of U.S. community psychology. As the concept traveled through academic disciplines, activist spaces, policy discourse, and corporate mission statements, it stretched to fit every context. Eventually, one found it everywhere. It was invoked sincerely, but with diminishing conviction. It just didn’t sound the same in corporate impact reports as it had in Julian Rappaport’s lively theory; repetition had worn it smooth.

Care, meanwhile, took shape within various approaches to feminist philosophy, practice, and critique. It named specific forms of devalued work and held analytical precision: care as feminized, racialized, and exploited under capitalism. It has since traveled broadly. Unlike empowerment, however, I see it holding fast in some places. While I’ve argued it lacks the sort of fidelity we need to organize broad scale action, I’m not prepared to claim it’s lost everything. Why is this?

I think drift is more likely when one concept repeatedly collides with multiple meaning systems. But concepts that are overfitted to a particular context are especially prone to a specific kind of drift: thinning. Empowerment, for instance, gained much of its academic prominence through community psychology’s inside baseball, where it was formalized to address the problems the field was facing at the time. Each time an overfitted concept lands in a new context, it has to stretch a bit. It can’t bend, so it loosens. Repeated over time, this leaves it shapeless, like a garment worn by everyone in the house.

I suspect that concepts that grew in living soil—kept vibrant in particular communities and lived use— move through the world more freely. Think of the concept of network. Originally, it was quite literal: a meshlike arrangement of threads or nets. Over time, it came to mean something more technical and spread into other fields largely on the strength of structural analogy. Neuron maps look kind of like threads, as do computer relays, railways, and social relationship maps. Each of these made sense to describe as a network, and doing so has actually strengthened the concept of network. It hasn’t thinned ; it’s done something else entirely.

I mentioned I was in New Orleans for Halloween. That’s probably why I can’t resist naming this mode of drift Gremlining. Think specifically of Gremlin 2: there was a vegetable gremlin, a bat gremlin, a lady gremlin, a brainy gremlin. Each was specialized for different fields, and had clear distinguishing features — but each was also, without a doubt, fully a gremlin. Just as a computer network, a social network, and a lattice of nets are all networks.

So what about Care? Gremlining3 is a natural, often productive way concepts travel, but gremlining becomes a vector for drift when variants are asked to do too much contact work in their new domains. Care has gremlined into care work, care ethics, self-care — but also healthcare and economies of care. Those variants risk deforming under their domain-specific pressures, losing their structural relationships to each other. What was once a family of related concepts becomes a cloud of associations. Or, like the overstretched Gremlins at the end of the second film: a glob of Goo on the floor of Clamp Tower.

Still, I’m not sure where care will go from here. It’s stretched thin, but unlike empowerment, it hasn’t dissolved. It remains tethered to practice: to caregiving, mutual aid, medical ethics, solidarity work. Those living ties give it a chance to gremlinize rather than dilute. Push me and I’ll throw down twenty bucks that it will branch into specialized forms that stay related instead of drifting apart. But give me one caveat: whether that happens will depend on whether people using it continue to name real labor and relation. For such a primordial concept, I’m confident they will.

Here, it’s worth noting that I think genuine drift is rare. A concept that stays too long at sea, if it has any value at all, is likely to get gobbled up by leviathans. That’s what we’ll discuss next.

Domination: Intentional consolidation

The Leviathan

In On Being Included, Sara Ahmed examines how diversity functions inside universities as a mechanism of institutional self-preservation. The concept performs what she calls non-performativity: diversity policies, offices, and mission statements don’t do what they claim. Instead, like Modest Mouse’s housing developments, they get named after the things they replace. The act of declaring commitment becomes evidence that the work is already being done.

Rather than being corrupted over time, Ahmed argues, diversity was born compromised. It emerged as a replacement language for earlier anti-racist and equal opportunity frameworks: less confrontational, more palatable to power. This shift allowed institutions to retreat from structural critique while appearing progressive. Diversity entered the conceptual ecology as an instrument of containment: a way to acknowledge difference without redistributing power.

When people try to act on the concept’s promise, they hit a wall. Questioning the “happy diversity story” threatens the institution’s self-image. In this way, diversity’s powerful institutional backing dominates more liberatory frameworks, absorbing the language of anti-racism and transformation into a softer grammar of inclusion.

We might call this move replacement. A similar example might involve the importing of DSM concepts into communities with non-pathologizing approaches to mental health. However, there are also other modes of domination: co-optation, by which a genuinely useful or valued concept (resilience) is recontextualized (from a celebration of capability to a justification for austerity), and saturation, where a concept (medical evidence-based ideals encroaching on non-medical spaces like education and social change) takes up all the air in the room, foreclosing alternate explanations.

What each of these modes shares is that a concept does not fully survive its encounter with institutional power: it is pushed out of the frame, transformed and defanged, or buried out of sight.

These modes aren’t static states. Drift often makes concepts more vulnerable to capture; think of how ‘wellness’ drifted widely before being co-opted by industry. Contamination may stabilize into hybridity if power eventually balances, or harden into domination if one side consolidates an enduring advantage. Dominated concepts sometimes escape through drift or hybridity when enforcement weakens. Moreover, these categories are subject to the same dynamics they describe. In fact, I’ve been a bit worried as I wrote this that I might be contributing to the drift of the concepts of hybridity and contamination.

How They Move

Conceptual movement can be mapped along two dimensions: agency (whether encounters are marked by steering of some sort, versus emergent and unplanned change) and power symmetry (the extent to which relationships among actors are balanced enough to sustain ongoing negotiation). It’s also worth noting that these processes unfold at different speeds—some concepts drift over decades, others get captured in months. The velocity of change shapes not only the stability of the encounter, but how much stewardship is possible and what forms it might take. I’ll go more into this in a planned Part 2.

For now, take hospitality. It’s a hybrid construct in my example, but also a contested and political on… so how can power be balanced when there’s such clear struggle? For me, the fact that it remains actively contested without collapsing entirely in one direction or another suggests that the actors involved (hotel companies, local bartenders, cultural leaders, communities) operate under conditions of relative balance of power. No single party can impose their meaning unilaterally. Were this not the case (say, if hotel companies reached a monopoly on meaning) the concept would shift from hybrid to dominated, in this instance through co-optation.

This is different from the drift example above. Empowerment didn’t lose its edge because global companies rushed in to capture it (that happened later). Its loss of function was largely emergent: multiple groups latched onto it, none gained primacy, and the concept stretched until its structure thinned. When no one stewards a construct strongly enough, time itself becomes a vector of drift. We can see this with something like trauma, which has suffered over the years from a lack of coordination between diverse traditions; medical trauma focuses on neurobiological symptoms, therapeutic trauma on psychological healing, sociological trauma on collective harm, while popular usage has stretched to cover any difficult experience.

But sometimes the break comes all at once. A disturbance—political, ecological, or interpersonal—shakes the equilibrium, and ideas collide instead of drifting. In moments of sudden rupture, hidden power imbalances activate. They shape the field in which ideas graft onto one another, shed parts, and take on strange new life. That’s contamination: uneven and unplanned exchange.

Closing Thoughts

This taxonomy is incomplete. Concepts also come into being and fade from prominence. I haven’t elaborated these as separate modes here, but they’re worth remembering as part of how concepts move. Perhaps sedimentation, the slow hardening of a concept into orthodoxy, can be understood as a late form of drift: meaning that once flowed freely begins to calcify, losing plasticity but not entirely disappearing.

In a future post, I’ll elaborate the ecological image that inspired this taxonomy by focusing on the broader epistemic commons. The epistemic commons contains far more than concepts, just as a garden has more than vegetables. It includes practices, narratives, relationships, methods, the questions we know how to ask, and the connections between all of these — everything we draw from to make meaning together. Like any commons, these conceptual resources need care. I’ll explore how we might respond to these encounters outlined here: how practices of care, refusal, and translation can help us steward meaning through contact and change. For now, I want to sit with the observation that concepts move in ways we can track, and that these patterns matter. They shape how we make sense together.

I hope this will be the beginning of a living library: short entries in an ongoing record of how care for meaning shows up in the world. These are just a few I’ve noticed since the last post. They range from individual practices to institutional statements to acts of communal resistance, showing how epistemic stewardship shows up at every level.

If you’re new to this series, the earlier post Why Epistemic Stewardship? sketches the broader frame this library supports.

Oh, and most of the headers are clickable links to more details.

The Pope critiquing clickbait

The practices: caring for meaning as a commons

This one’s interesting, because I don’t believe faith in institutions is well aligned with the general ethos I’m promoting here. The institutional/civic layer attempts to govern the epistemic layer today… and it has not, I think, done a great job. Under advancing collapse, that management is likely to become more hostile or more inept. Direct epistemic stewardship by individuals, small groups, and local communities will be increasingly important.

That said, and maybe it’s the lapsed Catholic in me, but I love that the Pope recently called out clickbait as a “degrading practice”. Though evergreen, that part is nothing new. But he also called journalism “a public good that we all should protect” - a move which positions knowledge as a commons rather than a product. While his focus is, unsurprisingly, on the institutional value of that commons (it “upholds the edifice of our societies”), I hear a quiet ethic of care for shared possibility instead of a more traditional call for better management. That shift is (very) modest epistemic stewardship in action.

Paul F. Tompkins’ continuity through variety

The practices: Archiving, noticing shifts, fostering continuity and memory, creating mattering

I saw comedian PFT’s variety show Varietourpia at the Sheldon in St Louis on 10/18. Midway through a sprawling, heartfelt two-hour set, he paused to play a video from a show he’d performed fifteen years ago. During Covid, he’d digitized years of old recordings and realized he had scores of good material worth bringing back into the light and to his new, national audience

Certainly, the archival impulse here is stewardly, but there are two other aspects of it that struck me. First was the content. The video he played was from the days after phone companies first introduced automatically transcribed voice mails - back when they were terrible at it. Tompkins had played famous speeches into the system (MLK’s I Have A Dream in this case), and invited guests (Tim Meadows) to read the mangled output. It was funny (“Thank you for oppression”), but also a time capsule of a major shift in our knowledge ecology that we’ve since internalized. We moved from listening to our loved ones’ voices to reading text, and from trusting what we heard to trusting a machine’s output so quickly — and I for one had kinda forgotten.

Second, in a field (comedy) where novelty is often prioritized over all else, playing an old video to a paying audience is a bold bet on continuity and memory. Fans of PFT and the sphere in which he operates won’t be surprised; he’s a keystone species in the popular improv consciousness for a reason. But it was striking how deeply that ethos ran through the night: the way he shared the stage, covered an old show tune, and honored a friend who’d passed with a tender musical tribute. In fact, that’s a third aspect: making room for people to matter, which is how knowledge itself becomes more robust and resilient.

Scaling Deep (Frasier/Ashoka, 2023

The practices: Caring for meaning as commons, fostering continuity and memory

Scaling Deep is a social innovation framework introduced by Ashoka Canada in 2023. Drawn from a dedicated research initiative, it touches on a few key concerns related to epistemic stewardship. First, it does not take meaning for granted; it recognizes that meaning, though grounded in relationship, is prone to drift and degradation. It focuses explicitly on tending the relational and cultural conditions of change, which would certainly include the things that enable shared understanding. It is also, refreshingly, non-institutional in its framing: it channels attention towards the things that exist now outside of capture, and which will exist even if our institutions degrade: “human experience, connection, friendship and also in mystery, and the spiritual”.

There are, of course, also differences. Scaling Deep is more managerial, morally charged, and transformation-oriented than epistemic stewardship. Where Ashoka wants to change the world directly, I’m more concerned here with maintaining the conditions that make such change efforts possible. But the two share an intuition: that meaning requires deep attention and care. Where Scaling Deep approaches that care as social practice, epistemic stewardship develops the technical tools and lenses that can supplement and specify it.

The Epistemic Determinants of Health (Carel and team)

The practices: Understanding epistemic obstacles, increasing access, public transparency

This academic health literacy framework from the UK may not need much elaboration. Like me, the authors see the chain between knowing and acting as a deepening failure point in efforts to safeguard well-being and care for one another. They recognize that health is an epistemic, and not just a biological or generally-social, concern. I’ll let their abstract speak for itself:

Health and illness are significantly determined by knowledge and its communication. At first glance, this might seem obvious; people use healthcare systems when they suspect that something might be wrong, a suspicion connected both with lived knowledge about and from their minds, bodies, and environments, and broader knowledge about how ill and healthy minds and bodies are supposed to feel and function. Likewise, the possibility for effective treatment depends – among other things – on what knowledge healthcare professionals have, whether that knowledge comes from the ill person directly, from their training or wider reading, or from the resources available to them in their profession (i.e., the sum of accessible knowledge about a particular condition or disease). The problem is that these considerations are rarely straightforward, vulnerable to considerable blocks, barriers, and failures, and structured by systemic injustices in the creation, communication, and reception of knowledge.

Online Etymology Communities

The practices: Archiving, noticing shifts, resisting flattening, public transparency

When I was an undergrad, a favorite online destination was Liberman and Pulley‘s Language Log blog. While researching this project, I was delighted to find it still active 15 years later. It’s a blog about how language actually works in the world, which uses detailed examples to correct misunderstandings, track linguistic evolution, and illuminate understanding. This is manifestly stewardship.

Other communities do this too: Reddit etymology pages, dictionaries and their social media, etc. But I particularly admire Language Log’s careful and transparent tracing of examples, accessible tone, public scholarship, and deep archiving which serves as a living record. It’s also humorous and approachable, which is probably a necessary corrective to the austere and solemn mood an ethos of stewardship can sometimes imply. In tracing the life of words so publicly and precisely, Language Log is quietly entering its third decade of tending the shared soil of meaning.

C. Thi Nguyen’s Bubbles and Echo Chambers (2024)

The practices: Understanding epistemic obstacles, creating mattering

Writing about and researching epistemic collapse led me to a fantastic paper by C. Thi Nguyen. In it, he painstakingly distinguishes two mechanisms for epistemic failure: bubbles, and echo chambers. In bubbles, information is omitted; in echo chambers, trust is manipulated and divergent views are discredited.

It can be difficult to tell which trap we’re in. This is important because generally-beneficial behaviors like curiosity and engagement can actually be harmful in an echo chamber. He discusses different solutions for the two modes, and the risks of treating one situation (or mixed situations) as the other.

There’s a lot I love about this paper from an epistemic stewardship lens. It’s thoughtful and specific about modes of epistemic failure and how to engage with them (which is, clearly, stewardship). But it also adopts a broader frame I find valuable: that the epistemic is a site of struggle, and that it is actively being weaponized and undermined; that outright confrontation (fighting fire with fire) is often counterproductive; and that epistemic care must be relational, careful, and deep-rooted. His proposed path out of echo chambers is rebuilding trust relationships with outsiders rather than simply presenting facts. This resonates powerfully with a stewardship approach.

Young Fellaz Brass Band

The Practices: Resisting flattening, creating mattering, fostering continuity and memory

(First, I want to note my outsider status here. There are likely intricacies and sides of these stories that I don’t understand. As an outsider, it’s not really mine to decide whether this was authentic local stewardship, but the encounter illustrated some themes I think are useful to understanding what I’m discussing here.)

During a recent trip to New Orleans, we had the fortune of seeing a common yet electric occurence: a large brass band named Young Fellaz took over a public corner they’ve played for years on Frenchman Street. The intersection filled with tourists and locals alike; one man even parked his car in the middle of the road to join the celebration. It was the most fun I had during my five days in the city, and one of the most memorable moments of the four visits I’ve made.

At some point during the hour or so I watched, as I danced among a few dozen strangers, I remembered I had heard of this band, and this corner, before. A few months before the trip, an anecdote had circled around a brass band and a bar owner coming into conflict. The band had been playing at that corner for years, but on this occasion, the club owners claimed they were poaching attendees and causing conflict. In turn, the bar received accusations of gentrification, racism, and cultural disrespect.

I dug a little deeper and learned that this wasn’t the first time the Young Fellaz had been targeted for their playing. A few years earlier, one of their members had been arrested while performing at that same corner, also in response to a complaint from a business owner. Local musicians were outraged, and charges were quickly dropped.

Clearly, Young Fellaz are not easily deterred. Especially in light of this persistence, I consider what they do a form of epistemic stewardship: they sustain an energy that many locals recognize as central to the city’s living meaning, resist the flattening of New Orleans’ music-city brand into a commodity, and foster the kind of communal mattering that keeps culture alive. By keeping the music on the streets and open to all, they maintain a critical pathway to its legibility - not just as a facet of culture, but as an evolving practice of cross-cultural meaning.

As one online commenter put it: “What a wonderful story. A hundred and fifty years later, street jazz is still starting trouble.”

As I mentioned up top, these are just a few examples I’ve encountered in the couple of weeks since my last post. These aren’t representative, but I hope they start to sketch the shape of the concept and seed further investigation. The specific practices I’ve identified are provisional and likely to change as I document more examples: what stewardship looks like in other contexts, where its absence appears, and how it might manifest in quieter, more quotidian ways. If you have any examples from your own life or practice, please share them.

For decades, I assumed I’d never be back, but by pure chance I ended up in Miami for my PhD in my 30s. In the five years I spent there, I watched everything change. Blockish development cast shadows over sleepy beach towns; resorts tore up mangroves for unimpeded profits; surging floods totaled cars in canyons between luxury condos.

I knew when I moved that Florida was a frontier of climate change, and part of me was eager for close contact with a phenomenon that had long stirred dread. I’d read about it for years, joined book clubs, marched in protests; I thought I’d be able to metabolize it and learn something useful. Plus, I took solace in knowing that the breathtaking natural paradise I remembered from my youth was just a weekend trip away. As the saying goes, though, everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face.

I still shudder when I think back to the mass coral bleaching in the summer of 2023. I remember reading the news with gnawing horror and an unshakeable apprehension that from here on out it would be one threshold after another. I started paying even closer attention to the climate literature and global news, and lost some of the quiet hope I’d held: that some unforeseeable combination of technology, politics, and simple human pluck would cohere to turn things around.

While I don’t identify as a doomer (the future always has the capacity to surprise us), I’m convinced we’re already well into a long, slow, uneven collapse that will characterize the rest of our lives. Collapse means a lot of things to a lot of people, but for me it’s simply the notion that, across many domains, we’re likely to lose far more than we gain. I think most people are aware - however they feel about it - of the precarity of our natural environment, of the systems that feed us, of the narratives we take for granted. But that awareness feels emptier than it ever has.

Epistemic

This October, it’s been unseasonably hot in St. Louis. Not record-breaking, I don’t think, but undeniably off. More and more each year, I catch people noticing. At the coffee shop, at cycling meetups, in passing at the supermarket, everyone’s making the same little jokes. “Guess we’re skipping fall this year.” An uneasy smile, maybe a shrug and a moment of silence, and we move on.

Some blame AI data centers, or car dependency, or celebrity jets. Others insist: we used to need jackets in October. This isn’t normal. But mostly what we’re doing, myself included, is acknowledging it and continuing with our lives. We recycle, rally, and retweet, but we’re no longer confident we’re moving the needle. We feel the unease, and, generally speaking, go about our days.

The reflex is to meet this eerie reality with calls for acknowledgement and awareness. But I don’t think this is about ignorance or denial; no, the pathways from observation to shared meaning to collective response are badly frayed. The infrastructure that should guide us from “we all notice this” to “so we’re doing something about it” has fractured in a thousand small ways1. And so we keep asking, “When are we going to come together?”

The question itself is a symptom. We can feel that we should be able to coordinate around this. It’s real, it’s urgent, and it’s not going away. We all see it. But we don’t know how to translate that seeing into action, or even into a shared sensibility that might prefigure it. The mechanisms are gone, or broken, or, maybe were never adequate. It’s dawning on us that asking the question over and over doesn’t rebuild them.

This is what epistemic collapse feels like from the inside. It’s more than a failure to agree on facts — it’s the inability to do anything with them. We’re unable to make sense at scale. Though climate change isn’t perfectly understood or predictable, tens or hundreds of millions in the USA alone have enough knowledge to clock the seriousness of the moment. What we’ve lost is the capacity to make that knowledge matter collectively.

And it’s not just climate. AI creep and captured media are warping the information landscape. Authoritarianism advances daily; genocides unfold before us. We watch it happen in real time, name it as it occurs, and still can’t generate the collective response that shared observation should enable. There are always individuals and small groups who act on what they see, but the mechanisms that turn ‘we all see this’ into ‘therefore we act together’ are broken.

What makes this epistemic, and not, say, political or imaginative?2 The problem (or at least one central tangle) is that we can’t get our knowledge to cohere into shared understanding that enables action. Even when we agree on what we see, we can’t push it over the threshold into a lived reality we collectively orient around and respond to. Increasingly, I see this as an epistemic infrastructure failure. The mechanisms that would connect widely-distributed observations and transform them into common knowledge, sturdy enough to anchor coordinated responses, are broken or absent.

And, reading between the lines, I think we all feel a little crazy about this. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion wrote:

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it… We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.

I think we’re living through a collective version of what Didion described. We’re stuck setting out the shoes: taking the kids to practice, firing up podcasts, paying the bills.

I lost both of my parents relatively young, before most of my friends and peers. It distanced me from many of them. This definitive experience — this staggering rupture — found nowhere to land when I tried to connect. People were kind, but quiet, sometimes a bit too eager to see the conversation move on. It was alienating, because that’s the nature of grief that isn’t shared, and because it’s hard to say “well, things are scary, but I have my life in front of me” when the life in front of you is falling apart.

The little jokes about Fall disappearing, or it being hot, but what can you do? — Is this not a kind of madness? We see clearly, but fail to let this seeing reorganize our lives. We’re like Didion’s grieving widow, casually setting out shoes for someone who isn’t coming back. We make jokes about skipping fall while the conditions for collective life disintegrate. And we all feel a little insane about it, because we are.

Or at least I am. I have two things that keep me up at night. The eminence of narrow self-interest, which I’ve written about before. And this: the collapse or destruction of our capacity to make sense together, to move from observation to coordinated action. They feel related. I suspect they’re the same thing seen from different angles, but I needed to sit with this second one before I could see how they fit together.

The answer, I think, lies in the epistemic nature of the problem. I agree with Latour that facts are social products - things we create together using rules and understandings we have painstakingly developed, and sometimes even fought and died for. This means that facts require maintenance, coordination, and care, like any structure we build. As we lose the ability to make motivating sense together, to pivot from individual observation to social action, we abandon the collective responsibility of maintenance.

There was a viral moment a few months ago, when an old clip resurfaced and became a meme. An ESPN commentator lamented that, because young women aren’t cooking as often, ‘we’re losing recipes!’ It was funny in context, but - setting aside the questionable gender politics - I can’t get the phrase out of my head. Because we’re losing the recipes for making knowledge matter. We still have the ingredients (observations, data, awareness), but we can’t complete the process that would transform them into the kind of robust, actionable, collectively inhabited reality that anchors coordinated response. I worry that, as with the corals, there’s a whole lot to lose downstream of that loss.

This is where my two ghosts meet. When epistemic infrastructure collapses, narrow self-interest begins to seem adaptive. When individuals can’t see how their actions connect to collective outcomes, they retreat to what they can control. As a result, we end up with fewer places to add value, fewer communities to recognize us, fewer ways to matter. And when this happens at scale, it accelerates the collapse, which further fragments mattering, which drives more retreat. It’s a vicious cycle.

If the old recipes are disappearing, if the infrastructure for large-scale coordination is falling apart, then what? Do we give up? Retreat into narrow self-interest because there’s nothing else left to do? It scares me how many people seem to be weighing that question without speaking it.

Stewardship

If we’re looking to resist this cycle, the centrality of grief is a hint. How do we learn to metabolize - to live with - grief? Megan Devine writes: ‘True comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away. Companionship, not correction, is the way forward.’ Frank Ostaseki, in his brilliant and gentle Five Invitations, urges us to find ways to witness through fear, and to support one another in doing so. These bits of wisdom - acknowledgement, companionship, accompaniment - point toward an ethic of stewardship. If collapse is the condition, and grief is our experience of it, stewardship is how we learn to live through it.

My working definition of stewardship is acting as if things still matter, even when you don’t know for sure. It’s fidelity to the possibility of coherence, and a refusal to surrender the shared world, even when it’s slipping away. My own guess is that “slipping away” will be a fair enough description for global coherence for the rest of our lives: not ending, but degrading at various rates. Under such conditions, stewardship means not trying to recover the old epistemic commons, but learning to cultivate whatever capacity for shared sense-making and adaptive understanding we can.

In the spirit of stewardship, let me not pretend I’m inventing the wheel. Feminist, Indigenous, Black, and Queer thinkers have been living and theorizing the erosion of meaning, the importance of care, and the search for futures under catastrophe for generations3. What I’m doing here is more limited: I’m building tools because I need them to think, to coordinate with others who I might build with, and to make sense of what I’m seeing. These tools come from my particular training and perspective; they’re my attempt to work with the materials I have. I’m not translating, replacing, or improving on existing frameworks. I’m just trying to build something and document it, in case it’s useful to others working from similar positions.

Finally, genuine stewardship requires being clear about what it isn’t. Too many contemporary uses of “stewardship” in corporate, philanthropic, and political frames are attempts to launder control through the language of care. I am reaching for the opposite. Stewardship, in this sense, is closer to tending than managing. It’s a slow, often anonymous art of preserving possibilities and keeping connections alive.

Less governance, more gardening.

Epistemic Stewardship

When a reef is bleached, it isn’t always dead. Not yet. But if it goes on long enough, we know the surrounding conditions have become too hostile for life to sustain itself. Recognizing this, marine scientists have doubled down on off-site coral nurseries, heat-tolerant species, repopulation scaffolds, and new theories about where corals might endure. I think 2025 is a bleached-coral moment for shared meaning.

Stewardship is not the same as repair. A reef can’t be glued back together; it can only be cared for or given conditions in which to grow. Complex systems (most of our big problems, living things, the world itself) tend to keep moving forward. Stewardship involves resisting the temptation to revitalize old norms and reinscribe faltering institutions. We’ll need different approaches to epistemic life as things continue to shift.

This blog is my attempt to start thinking about these approaches more seriously4. The work has taken shape along a few paths. I’m trying to diagnose where cross-level coordination breaks down and why shared observation so rarely becomes shared action. I’m working to elaborate tricky conceptual traps that catch meaning as it drifts between levels and across time. I’m developing tools for stewardship: organizing constructs that can hold meaning , conceptual recipes that still work. I’m studying how useful ideas drift and fracture, and how we might tend to them as they do. And I’m returning to mattering, both as an analytic lens and as a living toolkit for shared meaning which can help us fight the isolation that makes grief so disorienting.

In the posts that follow, I’ll develop these tools in detail: how to diagnose cross-level failures and semantic drift, how to use epistemic tools (like Organizing Constructs) for coordination, how mattering can help us understand what’s at stake when people stop feeling connected to each other and to the future5.

But writing is, thankfully, not the only, or perhaps even the best, way to practice epistemic stewardship. I’ll explore other possibilities in pieces I have planned: how games can serve as flight simulators for negotiating meaning and care; how hosting and memory can connect us; what it might look like to catalogue and maintain the raw materials - the ingredients - of meaning, even as the frameworks that held them fray.

So far, epistemic stewardship is a hopeful call to action, to keep faith with each other and the things we know as we move into an uncertain future. It calls us to tend the places where meaning still holds (conversations, practices, communities) and protect the pieces we can, even if we’re not sure what to do with them in the present. Reefs will bleach and recipes will disappear, but our capacity for care and connection is evergreen. With effort, we can still matter enough to care for each other.

Social Preview Image

Two decades ago, empowerment was everywhere. It was an idea you could see in a grant application, a grassroots zine, and a Nature article in the same day. For a while, that was its strength. It allowed researchers and practitioners to talk about personal, community, and systemic change in a single breath, and offered energizing, accessible language to community members.

Eventually, though, the term collapsed under its own weight. Critics rightly called out its vagueness, its co-optation, and its use as rhetorical cover for power imbalances and chauvinism. Empowerment became, too often, a feel-good floating signifier. Able to mean almost anything, it stopped meaning much at all1.

But the reason it spread in the first place was important: it met a vital, underappreciated need. In social life, big problems span many levels at once. Therefore, our attempts to solve them need to hold for individuals, communities, institutions, and sometimes even societies. When a concept does this well, and when it is backed up with the sort of structure that keeps it from drifting, I call it an organizing construct.

What does it mean to hold in this way? What sort of structure keeps meaning stable? I’ll start with an example, then discuss what makes an organizing construct work in theory and, speculatively, in practice.

Mattering as an Organizing Construct

I developed the idea of organizing constructs while trying to solve a specific problem in my dissertation: why did mattering feel so much more practical than related concepts like empowerment?

Mattering is just what it sounds like: the sense that we are significant, that we are valued, and that we have an impact on the world around us. It’s a construct that has a significant, if relatively quiet, history in sociology and psychology. It has been connected empirically to everything from suicidality to overcoming stigma.

Multidimensional Mattering (MDM) is the name I gave to the comprehensive version of mattering measured by Isaac Prilleltensky’s MIDLS (Mattering in Domains of Life) scale2. This scale assesses an individual’s sense of mattering in different areas of their life. Do you feel significant in close relationships, at work, in your community, and to yourself? This scale assesses mattering in each of those areas, but it also measures a general sense of mattering. MDM is the total construct comprised of both domain-specific and overall mattering.

You may have already realized that MDM is inherently cross-level3. This is part of why it makes a good organizing construct. Because it exists naturally at the level of the self, relationships, and communities, it can naturally connect to ideas and theories at each of those levels. The same construct can connect at the individual level to, say, internalized shame, while engaging with sense of community at the neighborhood level.

But there’s also another reason. Baked into the definition are two distinct, yet related, experiences: feeling valued and adding value. Something only truly counts as mattering, under this formulation, if it includes both4. As I’ll talk about below, I suspect this bifurcation is key to the stability that characterizes a strong organizing construct.

Defining Organizing Constructs

In my dissertation I suggested that mattering maintains meaning across levels without dissipating. But what makes it different from empowerment, which also stretched across contexts? Why does mattering hold up when similar concepts drift into vagueness? The answer lies in the specifics of organizing constructs.

Let’s start with a definition. An organizing construct is a conceptual tool that preserves meaning across individual, organizational, community, and/or societal levels by bridging theoretical frames in accessible language. Its power lies in its ability to align action, communication, and decision-making across domains.

What kind of decision-making? Think of an initiative entitled Healthy St. Louis. Polls show health is a popular cause across the city. Studies suggest there’s huge opportunity to improve health across the population. Even better, analysts find that better health could boost economic outcomes. It feels like a win-win-win… until everyone gets in a room and tries to figure out what to actually focus on.

The mayor thinks people should eat more vegetables. The hospital advisory council cites data suggesting that reduced alcohol consumption would have the biggest impact. Meanwhile, ward leaders argue that pollution and chronic stress are the real threats, and that without addressing those, everything else is just window dressing. They’re all pointing at health, but they’re doing it at different levels, with different levers.

They argue for a while. They eventually land on a single metric that nobody can really oppose: people empowered. It’s vague, but it’s uplifting and signals intention, and it gives them something to track while they figure out the rest. Twelve months later, they report a robust number of lives empowered. The only problem is: nobody is really sure that people are healthier5.

This example illustrates what happens when we mistake shared language for shared structure. Healthy St. Louis had rhetorical force, but without an organizing construct to stabilize its meaning, it couldn’t hold across levels (individual, community) or stakeholder perspectives (mayor, health expert). As a result, it ended up stranded between conflicting interpretations.

This type of half-resolution is common in the face of cross-level problems. “Empowerment” becomes a placeholder for alignment, not a functional operating logic. The stakeholders agree not because it clarifies action, but because it defers conflict. It’s vague enough that everyone can see their goals reflected6. But ultimately, the framing does very little to connect their perspectives.

What’s the problem?

Part of why finding something better is so challenging lies in the nature of scientific expertise. Science knows a ton about what makes people healthy, but scientific constructs are often designed for rigor within a narrow theoretical frame: a particular level, domain, or method. That’s what gives them reliability, but it also makes them brittle. When you move them outside their frame (say, from individual psychology to neighborhood dynamics), they leak both meaning and utility.

This is far from a new problem. Whole social science subfields have emerged to address it:

• Composition models in organizational studies try to build coherent bridges between micro- and macro- by specifying in detail how aggregation works.

• Boundary objects in sociology help us translate across communities via shared anchors.

• Ecological metaphors in community psychology helps us acknowledge the relationship between levels and the complexity of their dynamics.

These solutions are sophisticated and often genuinely useful. However, in complex situations, they risk meaning loss. The rigor that makes them credible also strips away key details. They’re not wrong, exactly; they’re just general enough to pass. So it still looks like the theory is working, but it doesn’t clarify meaning, guide action, or connect levels.

Further, the more rigorous they are, the less portable they become. It’s like bringing a full studio production rig to a jam session. In theory, you have everything you need: perfect signal routing, multichannel mixing, and fine-grained control over every input. But in practice, it’s too rigid and too slow. You’re dragging around gear cases while everyone else is already playing. You optimize for precision instead of participation, and by time you’re ready, we’re on to the next song.

What’s missing is an accessible way to understand how meaning holds across levels simultaneously. Organizing Constructs do this because they exist naturally at multiple levels and make the relationships between those levels visible and actionable.

But what do they actually organize? They coordinate meaning across levels. This happens through four dimensions:

1. Shared language: The construct offers a shared term that means just enough of the same thing across levels to allow coordination without false consensus. When a youth social worker and a city planner both talk about mattering, they’re not necessarily saying the same thing, but they’re close enough to orient action.

2. Connective logic: Organizing constructs act as cross-level bridges. They don’t operate through clean cause-and-effect chains so much as through conceptual resonance. Take mattering: when people feel undervalued, that isn’t just the result of low community trust, or even its cause. It’s part of what low trust is. These constructs help us understand cross-level relationships that aren’t always simple, linear, or discrete but are still structurally meaningful.

3. Social recognition: Different stakeholders can locate themselves and their concerns within the construct. The mayor, hospital council, and ward leaders in our St. Louis example all need to see their worlds reflected.7

4. Normative direction (or relatable values): Organizing constructs carry normative energy without being values themselves. People mattering is good resonates from individuals to institutions, but the construct itself doesn’t dictate how that good should be achieved or just what it will look like. Mattering serves as a scaffold for values like dignity, fairness, or belonging, allowing them to travel without distortion.

A good organizing construct8 balances these four dimensions, allowing it to function not just as an idea, but as a bridge between levels and actors that can orient action and support theory.

Organizing Constructs and Overarching Values

But recognizing one organizing construct doesn’t tell us much about the rest of them. What separates an organizing construct from a concept that just seems like it should work? To answer that, we need to look at some other candidates: concepts that span levels but face different challenges.

If you’ve read the introduction or TOC of this blog, you’ll recognize care as an overarching value that guides my work. My concern with narrow self-interest, my interest in stewardship, my plodding introspection - all these are manifestations of care. It’s no surprise, then, that when I was writing this piece, care was one of the first constructs I looked at. What I learned was illuminating, both in how it fit and how it didn’t.

At first glance it seems promising. Care has clear multi-level relevance: it begins with self-care and showing up for each other. A similar spirit inhabits the community level: a community cares for its members by attending to their needs and providing support; and at the institutional level, this can easily be translated to policy. Even at the societal level, it’s possible to formulate an overarching ethic of care, as several scholars have done. At each of these levels, care takes a slightly different form: nurture, intimacy, inclusion, distributive justice. But at the core, each form involves some combination of attention and responsibility.

So far, so good. But when you try to coordinate a multi-level initiative around it (say, St. Louis Cares), you quickly discover stakeholders mean substantially different things: self-care, sympathy, redistribution, health access. Like empowerment, the concept dilutes rapidly. The relationship between interpersonal care (tending to a loved one) and systemic care (infrastructure and policy) requires constant translation.

Coordination becomes negotiation: which care? whose care? care as what? wait, is care a metaphor?

Care has many intellectual homes (feminist ethics, public health, mutual aid), each with slightly different meanings. That diversity is often a strength in scholarship, but it’s a liability when coordinating across roles or levels. Natural language associations pull too hard in too many directions.

Justice provides another example. It’s been the rallying cry of struggles and movements for millennia, but this broad resonance covers for a surprisingly complex and fragmented ideal. The study of justice has splintered into multiple forms (distributive, procedural), distinct cultural frameworks (Western rights-based, Indigenous relational models), and competing philosophical traditions (utilitarian, deontological). As a result, justice is invoked across radically incompatible political projects, from decolonization to white supremacy.9

Like care, justice functions primarily as an orienting value rather than an organizing construct. It tells us what matters morally, but doesn’t provide the operational stability needed to coordinate across levels. Ask three stakeholders to define just outcomes and you’ll get three reputable frameworks that can’t easily reconcile. The term is too contested and philosophically sprawling to serve as a practical coordination tool, even though it remains essential as a guiding value.

With mattering, on the other hand, you don’t need to check whether you’re talking about the same thing. I’ve tested this in dozens of conversations across wildly different contexts: with youth workers, evaluators, educators, therapists, drunk guys at soccer games. It almost always clicks quickly, whether we’re talking about an individual feeling unseen in their family or a neighborhood feeling ignored by city hall. That immediate portability is the hallmark of an organizing construct. Nail down the two-part structure and you can immediately use it to diagnose problems, guide design, and evaluate outcome10.

Does that mean care isn’t important? No, not at all. A thousand times, no. Rather, I think it’s so important that it comes in prior to organizing constructs, as an overarching orienting value. We’re only interested in mattering if we have an orientation of care, or some similar value that spurs us to acknowledge the significance of others.

So what’s the difference?

• Overarching values tell us what matters. They orient us morally and normatively. Care, justice, belonging: these concepts guide our commitments and shape our priorities. They’re essential for alignment around purpose.

• Organizing constructs help us coordinate action and analysis. They provide operational clarity across levels. Mattering, capabilities, and resilience help us understand problems, design interventions, and evaluate outcomes without constant translation. They’re essential for alignment around practice (including situated theory).

I think we get into trouble when we fail to distinguish here.11 We ask values like justice to do the work of organizing constructs and are disheartened when peers have different ideas, or when coordination challenges prevent us from getting to the heart of the work. We try elevating something like capabilities to the level of an orienting value and are shocked that people tune out.

Both are necessary. Values without organizing constructs leave us inspired but unable to coordinate. Organizing constructs without values can’t engage the world—and, in the situations where we’d reach for an OC, that’s exactly what we need them to do.

So that’s the theory. Now, let’s turn to practice.

Using Organizing Constructs: Preliminary notes

To be clear: organizing constructs are an idea I developed for my dissertation and which I’ve tested in ad hoc conversations and private thinking. It’s a tool I’m now trying to elaborate, but it doesn’t have an empirical tradition to draw from.

What follows is my current thinking on how organizing constructs function in practice. It’s a considered starting point for testing and refinement, not a final blueprint.

Where Organizing Constructs help

I suspect OCs are most useful when three conditions are present: (1) the work spans multiple levels at once; (2) participants hold different types of knowledge or authority; and (3) time, attention, or trust is limited, but the situation isn’t urgent.

My day job is in evaluation, and some of the most challenging initiatives to evaluate are those that operate across levels and domains — for instance, a ten-year initiative to improve student career outcomes starting with elementary-school community support. In that context, organizing constructs offer a shared scaffolding for understanding: sharper than proxies and resistant to indicator sprawl.

In multi-stakeholder systems-change efforts, this matters. We often need to link subjective experience (how people feel, what stories they tell) to structural leverage points (funding, policy, institutional norms). OCs help hold those layers together without forcing them into false alignment. In participatory work12, they can create enough shared resonance that people using different frames can still stay in conversation together.

The capabilities approach offers a partial model here: it scaffolds a value (justice) into an actionable framework that travels across disciplines, decisions, and domains. Not every OC aspires to that level of formalism, but the underlying function is similar: making complex meaning portable without flattening it.

From Healthy St. Louis to St. Louis Matters

Let’s return to the Healthy St. Louis example above, which struggled to move the needle because of the difficulty in mapping the general goal of “health” across levels and stakeholders. What if they had decided, instead, on St. Louis Matters as a rallying call for their health push?

With mattering (feeling valued and adding value) as the organizing construct instead of empowerment, the conversation would have looked different. The mayor might ask: Do residents feel valued by the healthcare system, and do they feel their participation in their own health makes a meaningful difference? The hospital council would need to examine whether patients feel providers appreciate their input, and healthcare workers feel their contributions actually improve outcomes. Ward leaders could investigate: Do residents feel city leaders value their neighborhoods, and do community members feel they can effectively advocate for environmental health?

These aren’t identical questions, but they’re legibly related and easy to map. Each points to specific, actionable levers. More importantly, when someone doesn’t feel they matter to city hall, their sense that personal health choices matter erodes too. The construct reveals those connections instead of obscuring them without requiring a formal theory.

Where Organizing Constructs aren’t the move

OCs are for alignment. If the work is about healing, justice, conflict, or reconciliation, other tools may serve better. I expect they will have limited utility when power, and not shared understanding, is central to the problem13. If people are talking past each other, reproducing inequalities, and playing status games, OCs are likely just another board onto which those dynamics will map. Leaping to coordination in a case where one set of interests is underrepresented, for instance, can actually exacerbate power dynamics.

Similarly, organizing constructs don’t resolve fundamental disagreement about what’s important. Remember, values come prior. And timing matters: in times of crisis or catastrophe, OCs may orient us towards a less-than-helpful theoretical orientation when we should be leading with care and relationality. Finally, just because something can be mapped and coordinated doesn’t mean it should be. Mattering is a great organizing construct, but it’s not necessarily suitable for all tasks. And all the warnings cross-cultural theory has given us around social context still apply.

Some remaining questions

This is just an introduction. The idea is still taking shape, and there’s plenty left to explore. Here are a few questions I think are worth chasing down next.

1. Is a two-part structure important for stabilization?

   I’ve gravitated towards constructs with a two part structure in my search for OCs. I suspect that concepts that bifurcate around complementary tensions (e.g., subjective + structural, rights + responsibilities) carry built-in constraints. They define not just what must be included, but what must be held in relationship.

   This stabilizes meaning while allowing flexibility across frames.

   That said, I don’t see any reason, prima facie, why this couldn’t be true of constructs with three elements or even those with one really sharp one. I imagine as the number of elements grow, the risk of fragmentation does, and as it shrinks there is less to map to. But I don’t really know.

2. How do OCs actually relate to values?

   The distinction between OCs and values is the easy part. What’s harder is mapping their relationship in practice. I assume values come first, but don’t have much guidance to give on how to connect an OC to a value. Are some naturally better paired, or are they agnostic with respect to one another? Is the relationship one-to-one, one-to-many, or tangled and interlaminated? Is it all contextual? Probably.

   One well developed example that we can probably learn from is the relationship between justice or equity (values) and capabilities (an organizing constrcut). Capabilities don’t exhaust what justice means, but they offer a portable, structured, and cross-level way of acting on it. That relationship feels like a model worth studying.

3. Can general constructs become OCs over time?

   Are broad or leaky constructs like care, belonging, or empowerment beyond repair? Or can they be refined and constrained into functioning organizing constructs?

   In some cases, I suspect that natural language associations poison the well, making it difficult to retrofit sharpness onto a word that’s already bloated with cultural weight and the baggage of failed campaigns. But maybe that’s not inevitable. Maybe with the right internal structure, even soft concepts can stabilize.

Bonus: Three Questions to Tell If Something is an Organizing Construct

1. Does it appear intuitively meaningful at multiple levels of analysis?

2. Does it contain internal structure that resists semantic drift without rigid definitions?

3. Can it guide inquiry, coordination, or design without excessive translation?

I’ve also built a more thorough framework (TASC) for evaluating candidate organizing constructs in practice. You can find that in the technical companion.

Where This Leaves Us

Empowerment collapsed because it tried to do too much without enough stable internal structure and public legibility. But the need it responded to didn’t go away. We still work on problems that span individuals, organizations, and systems. We need better ways to talk across those levels without losing clarity or getting bogged down in methodological complexity.

I don’t know yet how widely organizing constructs apply, or whether they are as agile in the field as I believe they can be. They could be a skeleton key that unlocks conversations and pulls together theory. Or we could learn the difference is just that mattering hasn’t been co-opted yet. If you try using it somewhere, I’d be curious what happens.

Some more academic details and rigor-related thoughts:

Organizing Constructs: Technical Companion

I’ve long thought about a vignette* in which a teacher explains the shape of the earth to a child. The teacher holds up a ball and says: this is the shape of the world. The child nods, it makes perfect sense. But then they think for a second and ask, but if that’s the shape of the world, why don’t people fall off the bottom?

The teacher isn’t wrong. The ball does look like the world, but the question exposes what the model leaves out. That gap, the part we suddenly can’t account for, is the seam between levels.

What is a level? Simply put, it’s the scale where certain patterns hold reliably enough for good reasoning. What’s your zoom: a state, a family, a city, a world? A higher level widens the frame, which means more complexity. Levels can also be understood in terms of particular, consistent units and specifcic, dependable patterns. Moving from the trees to the forest, or from a block to a neighborhood, is moving up a level.**

This may sound abstract, but we talk about levels constantly: ‘on a personal level,’ ‘at the societal level,’ ‘from a 30,000-foot view.’ I notice it in the way cities I’ve lived in (Chicago, St. Louis, Miami) are portrayed in the national media compared to how life feels on my own block. At the city level, the numbers can be rough: crime rates, census shifts, climate risks, poverty maps. At the neighborhood level, though, those same places are also filled with friendships, kids playing, and people living ordinary, peaceful lives. Both pictures are true enough, but holding them side by side can be disorienting.

This is where the ball story helps. It’s usually told to highlight the limits of models: all are wrong, some are useful. But it’s also about what happens when we slip between levels without realizing it. The ball is a good stand-in for shape and distance, but it can’t illustrate gravity. That jolt, when one picture fails to line up with another, is where we so often lose our footing.

* I always associated it with Wittgenstein, but it may be a commentator on him, or apocryphal. If you’re familiar, please tell me! While researching, I did find (to my delight) that this is very much a real thing that happens developmentally for children.

**This draws on the social-science idea of levels of analysis, though that concept is mainly about choosing a frame for analysis. My focus here is on what happens when you move between frames. While an awareness of levels is always useful in real-world decision making, I’m often struck by how unrealistic it is to stick to just one.

It’s also worth nothing that levels are a useful tool in non-physical contexts, like in the distinction between text-level and discourse-level analysis.

2. Cross-Level Naivete

I call this kind of unrealized crossing cross-level naivete. Cross-level naivety is the tendency to assume that a model that works beautifully at one resolution will do so at another. The failure is usually quiet: the model doesn’t announce itself as broken, it just stops mapping cleanly, and we don’t always notice.*

Social researchers have long expressed a similar concern: solutions that work in one cultural or community context may be unintelligible or even harmful in another. A mentor of mine, Ed Trickett, recounted the story of a public health campaign that was met coldly by a Peruvian village because of local taboos against boiling water. From the outside, the evidence was clear: heat kills pathogens. But in the village’s cultural logic, the solution carried a stigma that outweighed the disease risk. What looked like stubborness to researchers was common sense to the villagers.

We saw a similar pattern in COVID-19 vaccine campaigns. At the national level, the messaging was consistent: vaccines are safe and save lives. In neighborhoods and communities, though, other logics shaped how that message was heard. In some places, distrust of government health officials ran deep. In others, social media amplified alternative explanations, or religious communities interpreted the risks differently. From a national perspective, the vaccine campaign was a no-brainer. On the ground, it met hesitation, resistance, and sometimes outright refusal with a frequency that startled the public health world.

Both examples can be understood as cultural clashes where the medical frame conflicts with a local perspective. However, we often overlook that moving between levels can create friction even within (roughly) homogenous cultures or professions. Even within a single village in Peru, where context should hold steady enough, what is true for families or neighborhoods can fail when applied to individuals.

This is critical, because in social reality, we cross levels like this all the time.

* This idea is closely related to the ecological and atomistic fallacies, which concern making inferences from one level to another. I’m focused on something adjacent: many social phenomena require constant movement between levels. So while writers sometimes suggest that “fixing” the level solves these fallacies, in practice we need a more agile skill set for mapping and crossing levels.

3. Social Reality Is (Diagnostically) Different

In the physical world, when you drag a model into the wrong level, the failure becomes clear fairly immediately. Drop a marble on a basketball and it falls. Set up a person at the South Pole, they don’t float off into space. Gravity shows up immediately*.

In social life, failures are slower. A program can hum along for years reporting promising numbers until someone notices that it only worked for a certain subset of people, or that it quietly deepened inequalities. The unraveling doesn’t happen in a tidy moment of visible contradiction. It surfaces gradually, as the model travels across contexts and starts to fray.

That’s not to say cross-level dynamics don’t matter in the physical sciences. Chemical processes translate sugar into energy and biology turns that energy into behavior. But the relative stability of those mechanisms makes them trackable. In social reality, the links are looser. We move constantly from the individual to the neighborhood, from the family to the nation, without pausing to notice that the rules haven changed. The patterns are less stable, the outcomes less visible, and the errors take longer to declare themselves.*

This is one reason why so many social science and policy efforts struggle. We borrow national-scale solutions and drop them into neighborhoods without mapping the mismatch. We apply family logic to national budgets, and individual wellness axioms to county-level challenges. These approaches often look workable at first, perhaps even elegant. But over time the seams show, and the structures begin to buckle under the tension.

*Still, I’m definitely not arguing that physical processes are immune to cross-level challenges. The BMI example below arguably illustrates this; climate change certainly does.

** In fact, the question of what levels even exist—what kinds of social entities there are to be studied—is an underappreciated problem in the philosophy of social science. Because it’s unsettled, and often treated as self-evident, I think the question of what level is the appropriate frame of study is one of the most overlooked methodological details in many fields of social research. We tend to assume that individuals or neighborhoods are uncomplicated frames, but I’m not sure this is always a clean assumption. There are hidden ontological commitments in the choice that, in my opinion, should be unpacked more often.

4. Social Interactions: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

Why does this happen? Because everything social operates across multiple levels at once. Social interaction is inherently cross-level: individuals connect through language shaped at the societal level, through community rituals, and via regional and cultural norms. In fact, some thinkers argue that the self is inherently relational: it gets its meaning from its interactions with others, and can’t be understood in isolation.

For most of us, that complexity makes the biggest problems feel ungraspable. Climate change, pandemics, and ecological collapse menace us at a planetary scale. But most of our leverage is local*: we organize with neighbors, we raise children, we compost or recycle. We hope those acts ripple outward. Critics are quick to puncture that hope: how does rinsing a plastic container matter when billionaires are given tax breaks to jet to underground bunkers? What does a bike ride or a garden mean against a world on fire?

Are the critics right? Maybe, maybe not. Without good cross-level maps, we can’t really know. Some people can live with that gap. They carry it as faith, or hope, or a refusal to give up. Others, like me, find the uncertainty harder to endure. The inability to see how levels connect can lead to paralysis, or to pouring effort into the wrong place.

*Here it’s worth noting how online engagement can give the feeling of transcending the local. To varying degrees this may be true, but often this feeling smuggles in misdirection. I’ll return to this in a later post.

5. Cross-Level Traps

So what’s the solution? I don’t have a clean answer; my own thinking is in progress here. But I do want to discuss two temptations that aren’t solutions — camping, and leaping — and offer some tools that can help.

Camping is the retreat into one level. “Society is too complicated, so I’ll just focus on people.” Or: “Institutions are hopeless, so I’ll just tend my own garden.” These moves can be restorative, even necessary at times. But if the goal is actually to reach the larger scale, camping collapses under its own weight. Refuge too quickly slides into evasion.

The opposite temptation is leaping. Jumping straight from one register to another, skipping the messy in-between. From a basketball to the Earth. From an individual’s insomnia to a society’s fatigue. The leap feels poetic, but it rarely explains much. What gets lost is the connective tissue, the intermediate levels where the rules change.

Importantly, the difficulty runs in either direction. Take Body Mass Index, or BMI. From a public health standpoint, obesity is a significant factor in preventable illness. At the national level, therefore, BMI is a useful proxy for metabolic health. At the individual level, though, BMI quickly falls apart: musculature and body composition matter too much, and suddenly what was a useful proxy becomes a risk vector for bad medical advice, stigma, and misleading comparisons. What clarifies at one level can distort, and even harm, at another.

One particularly pernicious (and personally tempting) leap involves moving from planetary forecasts to individual despair. I’ll write about my own takes on ecological overshoot and climate change at some point, but if you want some guidance in the messy mapping involved in orienting to our planet’s troubled future, I strongly recommend Andrew Boyd’s I Want a Better Catastrophe. For now, I’ll just say that the troubles the planet faces don’t always map straightforwardly onto individual lives. We share a fate, but there’s a lot of space between the planet’s fate and ours to fill with decisions and purpose.

6. Okay, so What Should I do?

Because of these complexities, moving across levels is a particular skill. There’s no maxim you can memorize that will save you from naivete. I believe you get better at it through practice, and through paying attention to where the seams are. Still, I think there are tools that help.

The first is specificity. By this I mean the discipline of tracing the actual gears between levels instead of letting them blur. It’s not enough to say “education lifts communities” or “neighborhoods drive health.” Without specifics, those phrases collapse into slogans. Instead, name the level you’re operating at. Who, what, when, and where does your model actually fit? When the model no longer touches on those specific things, be careful.

It can even be useful to create detailed conceptual maps of how elements at one level translate to elements at another. For example, you can outline how classroom learning connects to family stability, how family stability connects to neighborhood vitality, how that vitality connects to larger patterns of health. In my academic work, I have done this with mattering: teasing apart how an individual’s sense of mattering shapes, and is shaped by, the mattering of their groups.*

One specific tool which can guide this mapping is what I call organizing constructs. If specificity is about drawing maps, organizing constructs are trail markers, recurring words or ideas that guide you as the landscape shifts. They manifest differently depending on the scale, but because the word carries a thread of meaning across contexts, it can illuminate what shifts as we move. For example, a person can matter to their parents, and a community can matter to a society. “Mattering” means both the same thing and something different in each case, and that tension is what helps us see how levels connect.

Mattering is a particularly important example of the importance of levels, which is why I’m starting here. Later, I’ll write about its relationship with belonging, which is inherently cross-level in a way that mattering isn’t. This has important implications for how we imagine social change, and for the kinds of liberation each makes possible.

The point is: organizing constructs give us shared language to see both continuity and difference across levels. They don’t solve the problem, but they make it easier to spot when you’ve crossed a seam. And, even more importantly, they illustrate that it is possible to be intentional in moving between levels and to develop tools that help us do so.

*I plan to address this in more detail in a later post.

7. Taking Stock

Levels aren’t just frames of analysis. They’re terrains with different rules. What clarifies at one level can distort at another. Social questions always take us across these terrains, which means our tools are always at risk of slipping. A model that once gave us clarity can, when dragged too far, become a source of harm.

That doesn’t mean understanding is hopeless. But we need better maps. Tools like specificity and organizing constructs don’t solve the problem, but they can mark the trails, keep us from mistaking one ridge for another, give us a way to notice when we’ve crossed a seam.

Moving between levels is a craft more than a science. It’s learned through practice, through paying attention, and through the willingness to admit when a model that once guided us has started to bend or break.

There’s a lot going on in the world, and I’ve been quieter than I’d like. Silence accretes. I don’t want to let it go on for too long like this.

So, I’m starting a blog where I can think out loud. I want to be in closer conversation with the world; too often, my work has felt like a black box. Even when I’ve tried to write accessibly, academic conventions have meant compressing ideas into narrow frames, connecting jargon to jargon. I need practice talking and thinking like a person again.

My first goal is to explain and draw out my scholarly work: what I’ve covered, what could be next, and what still feels unresolved. The second is to refine my thinking and explore with a bit more courage. I’ve spent few years deep in the work of theorizing and measuring mattering: its links to fairness, the ways it predicts well‑being, and how we might capture its shape across different domains of life. I believe in that work and its power to shed light on one of the central motivations of our lives. But there are a few questions, tensions, and stubborn feelings I haven’t yet figured out how to express in academic form. They’re still messy.

I’ve also done a lot of recent thinking on related, but distinct, topics that feel important to elaborate. These connect more closely to the state of the world than the more formal and theoretical work I’ve done in academia, and I haven’t done enough to give them life. My goal isn’t to participate in discourse, exactly, but I do want to document certain ways of seeing.

For that reason, how I write is almost as important as what I write. Transparency is one of the muscles I’m trying to strengthen here, so I’ll get into how I’m approaching this next.

2. How Will I Write?

This seems like one of those questions you look back on six months later and laugh, because there’s no way you could have known where things would end up. Still, I’m starting with some plans, so why not share them?

Some things I’ll focus on:

• Choosing language I haven’t used before. I’ve said a thousand times that mattering is about feeling valued and adding value across domains of life, but this isn’t the only way to express the idea. The academic formulation is probably the most precise, or at least the most careful, but varying how I say things will help me see the ideas differently, and maybe help others see them for the first time.

• Connecting different ways of talking about the same thing. I believe that people see more of the same world than they sometimes acknowledge, but that we tend to get stuck in frames and attached to specific formulations. Shaking the habitual is a multifaceted practice, but one way to do it is by connecting things in unexpected ways.

• Showing my work. Not just the arguments, but the personal history, idiosyncratic connections, and relentless yearnings that ;ed me down the path. In the process of making my academic work stand alone, I’ve cut out a lot of what I loved the most about it. I hope to bring some of that back into the frame.

• Expanding my thinking. I want to critique my past work lovingly and extend it hopefully. I want to fill in the gaps that I’ve seen all along and find pivots where I’ve previously pushed stubbornly forward. I want to connect to the world.

In general, I’ll try to write conceptual memos or field notes rather than polished pieces. Some may not yield immediate clarity, while others may start fast and finish slowly. I think it’s important to start saying the things I haven’t yet found a way to express. I think about them daily, and increasingly I believe they might be useful to someone.

Who? I’d be lying if I said I knew, but I hope it’s people trying to keep faith in the possibility of meaning and care, who want to hold on to the world’s complexity while acting with purpose within it.

3. What Will I Write About?

The easy answer is: I’ll write about what I’ve been thinking about lately. Over the past year or so, a relatively coherent network of ideas has been bubbling up, and I want to get it to paper. This set of ideas is fleshed out a bit more in the Table of Contents, which I’ll update from time to time. I’ll probably start with some of the more technical pieces (frameworks, concepts, definitions) because I think they’re scaffolding for the harder conversations or less certain explorations. The collapse stuff, the ethical weight, the questions about what we owe a future we can’t see: those are coming later.

But a more satisfying answer is rooted in something I haven’t found a satisfying way to say in other spaces: why I do this, and how it ties into who I am. There’s a personal story and a professional version. They’re braided, but each emphasizes the stakes a bit differently. I’ll start with the professional. When I was developing my academic research statement, I compiled a brief list of north‑star quotes (linked here). One in particular made it into the final statement:

“We live in one global environment with a huge number of ecological, economic, social, and political pressures tearing at its only dimly perceived, basically uninterpreted and uncomprehended fabric. Anyone with even a vague consciousness of this whole is alarmed at how such remorselessly selfish and narrow interests — patriotism, chauvinism, ethnic, religious, and racial hatreds — can in fact lead to mass destructiveness. The world simply cannot afford this many more times.”

These words were written more than 30 years ago by the Palestinian theorist Edward Said. They could have been written yesterday. It is the increasing purchase of those selfish and narrow interests that keeps me up at night, and moves me to write. As an academic, I framed my work in this spirit: concern for the conditions of collective care, shared meaning, and mutual empowerment. This led to my focus on mattering, a psychological need that some groups hoard and others go without.

The personal version is harder to tell because it involves acknowledging how late I arrived to understanding what many have always known. In my early 20s, I spent two years in South Africa with the Peace Corps, an experience that taught me as much about American soft imperialism as it did about development. I was a 21-year-old nominally ‘training’ union-credentialed educators with decades of experience. Unsurprisingly, I was the one who got an education. What I saw there wasn’t abstract inequality or a lack of computer skills. It was the livewire connection between exclusion and violence: between who is allowed to matter, who isn’t, and what happens to trust when those lines harden over time. The country was breathtakingly beautiful, full of people doing extraordinary things with passion, energy, and wisdom. It was also profoundly violent, and deeply divided.

I experienced this violence intimately when I was jumped by a group of drunk young white men motivated by ressentiment and aggrieved entitlement. That rattled me, but what really stayed with me was a lens. The same dynamics I’d seen so starkly in South Africa — exclusion, contested mattering, inequality, frayed trust, violence of all kinds—were everywhere in the US. Just less visible for some of us; less discussed. Easier to look away from if you had that option. More actively hidden.

I became convinced we were walking a path where those dynamics would only intensify. That conviction has been borne out in ways I wish it hadn’t. And it’s that conviction, that we’re living in a world where selfish and narrow interests are pulling us toward increasingly tragic outcomes, that still spurs me to write.

4. More About That Lens

It’s no surprise, then, that I write from a charged and somewhat haunted place. There is a deep ethical (if not spiritual) dimension to my motivation, and my voice doesn’t sound like myself to me unless I hear that dimension reflected. That intensity, though, has been tempered by my training in Community Psychology, which gave me a more technical vocabulary and a viewpoint that’s incredibly useful for synthesis.

I’ve organized some themes that tend to recur in my thinking, in rough order from the more academic to the more idiosyncratic and ethical, to help flesh out this haunted-technical lens:

1. Context matters. Lives unfold within settings that shape so much that it is hopeless to try to understand anything without appreciating the big picture.

2. Well‑being is ecological. It lives across people, organizations, communities, and systems, not within people. A corollary here is that humans are relational. If you want to understand someone, look at their connections to others.

3. Complexity is the nature of things. Fear of complexity is one of our society’s signature obstacles to understanding. The difficult trick, which we can’t afford to give up on, is to make things easier to understand without flattening them. Clarity is slippery. It’s important to know what frame you’re using. And, when in doubt, I’m more comfortable zoomed out.

4. You can’t separate yourself from your work. The folk singer Dar Williams has a great line: ‘When you live in a world, it gets into who you thought you’d be.’ The world puts ideas in us. We make them ours; but in making them ours, we change. And then the idea passes through, now something different than either what the world gave us or what we thought we were making. Personally, I’ve had to give up on the hope that I can step back from my thinking far enough to know what’s good and what isn’t. I’ve learned to think of my ideas as hopeful, and their worth as not up to me.”

5. We can’t take meaning for granted. In sociology, an idea I love is that facts are accomplishments. We produce understanding socially, together. Without stewardship, it can be quickly lost. This is part of why I sometimes resist using simpler language for complex ideas. I believe that words are keys that open doors that we may not see until we hold them. Words carry lineages; they can be read like the rings of a tree. When a distinctive term exists, using it honors that history and invites others into it.

6. Sounding good can be a trap. The world is full of institutions and networks that are eager to see you satisfied with your own resonant phrasing. That doesn’t mean we’re being encouraged to understand or act right. But it feels good to sound good, and this can make it really hard to know when we’re on the right track with our thinking.

And the biggest one:

7. Nobody can predict the future. That sounds trite, but it’s not. It’s the condition under which we live, and it’s easy to forget. Reality is unspeakably complex. The ethical weight of our existence in a fraught and struggling world can feel suffocating. We know we owe the future something, but it’s not always clear what, especially when caring for ourselves and our loved ones already feels like a full-time job. I believe it’s okay not to know. Often, we can’t know.

5. So What’s the Point?

The point is that we’re stewards of something we can’t fully understand. This requires humble vigilance: careful attention to what we’re entrusted with, protection of what we don’t comprehend, a commitment to steward possibility rather than imposing narrow personal visions. Our job is to protect what enables futures we can’t yet imagine.

Think about what you’d do if you had to take care of a friend’s aquarium. You don’t know a thing about saltwater fish; you’re alone, and the internet is down. So what would you do? You’d watch carefully, move gently, and start keeping notes: what you observed, how things seemed to be going, what you tried, and what happened. Not because you know what it means, but because someone who does might need that record later.

In view of the complexity of the world, the fragility of meaning, and the inscrutability of the future, I believe we ought to live more like that than we often do. This blog — being transparent, working things through, putting them in writing—is part of that humble vigilance for me.

Speaking of which: although I sometimes pretend otherwise, I hope I am not writing into a void. Margaret Atwood said the only way to write the truth is to imagine your other hand following behind, erasing it. I feel that impulse now: the urge to qualify, to hedge, to apologize in advance. But let me just say it. I’m writing for anyone circling similar questions about mattering, stewardship, how we live in a world we can’t fully understand but have to care for anyway. If that’s you, I’d love to hear from y ou. Even if we can’t predict the future, I suspect we’re going to need each other.

Version: 10/3/2025

Up Next: About Levels, then Organizing Constructs and Multidimensional Mattering

Concepts and Language

1. Introduction

2. About Levels

   A failure to account for levels is why I think so many big problems are so paralyzing, and why so many good ideas fail. Here I define my approach to levels of social reality, why they’re so important to me, and how I think about them. This concept is central to so much of what I discussed, and not quite in line with the way the topic is normally used. I think it’s necessary to start with it.

3. Language, Compression, and Accessibility

   I want to reflect in a bit more detail on the choice of language and the definitions of key ideas. Essentially a living glossary with justification.

Mattering

1. Organizing Constructs and Multidimensional Mattering

   What kind of ideas area needed to think about taking care of each other across levels and in all of the complex, diverse ways we need? This is an idea from my dissertation, underdeveloped there, but which has stubbornly insisted on its usefulness since.

2. Mattering and Community Thriving

   Defining community thriving as a function of both effectiveness at producing well-being and sustainability across time clarifies a lot of complex questions about the nature of communities and our responsibilities to each other. I’ll try here to flesh out why.

3. Mattering as Sources, Signs, and Subjects of Significance

   Mattering is often treated as a psychological state, but it is also a field of social possibility. A cross-level perspective can help us understand how mattering is awarded and denied, and how different possibility spaces are created and maintained.

4. Three Loose Ends

   Are Mattering and Fairness reciprocal? What about when mattering hurts, or haunts? And do we sometimes foreclose it early?

   For both theoretical and pragmatic reasons, my published work has glided over some thorny questions. If I had stayed in academia, I might have explored these further. Instead, I want to release them to whoever is working on it now.

5. Belonging vs Mattering

   Mattering and belonging seem like synonyms, and while authors are beginning to try to tease them apart, I think they’re different in ways that run deeper than has been documented. I think these differences have tremendous implications for collective care and liberation.

6. Belonging, Mattering, and Mental Health

   I explore the implications of the differences between mattering and belonging on mental well-being in community settings. This blog will prefigure a chapter I’m currently writing for publication.

   Likely Bonus: Growing Community through Mattering

   In April, I gave a talk at a local nonprofit where I connected my emergent love of gardening to my work on mattering and community. I may try to adapt that here to a short piece.

Epistemic Stewardship

1. Epistemic commons, stewardship, and the raw materials of meaning

   Here I’ll introduce three novel concepts that have weighed heavily on me lately. The gist of it is: what does it mean to work together to make meaning possible? What ethics does this suggest? What should we pay attention to?

2. Collapse, Care, and Meaning

   I’m not the first person to write about these things, and I don’t expect I’ll be the last. But I want to give my own take, which draws heavily from the threads I’ve outlined here.

3. Mattering and Memory: Reflections from South Florida, South Africa, and St. Louis

   Museums as spaces where narrative is reclaimed as an act of epistemic anchoring and mattering. Civic rupture when antimattering is inscribed. Collective insistence, cross-level narratives, omissions, and reckoning.

4. Living Stewardship: Mattering, Hosting, and Games

   Game designer Yoko Taro, at the climax of Nier Automata, makes players answer, “Do you agree that games are not just silly little things?” Here’s where I’ll explain why my answer could only be “No”. (Spoiler: I believe that games, more than any tool or medium I know, put us directly in contact with the raw materials of meaning. The connection may be as direct to caregivers and thinkers as flight simulators are to pilots. )

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