A DIY (DIO) Healing Dictionary
of Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Social Being
tools for prefiguring wise, social, and democratic community
inclusivity, power, agency, and social anarchist aesthetics
This dictionary is a work in progress and part of the larger DIY Ph.D. – Prefiguring Learning for the Ecocene performance. In the course of research, I realized that part of healing will be creating a lexicon and redefining words. In part because "The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House" - Audre Lorde. And in part because I often feel that others use words differently and mean different things by words than I do. These redefinitions are crucial to reconceptualizing learning as done for wisdom. And for imagining different ways of being together. As time goes on, the dictionary will open up to collaboration. I look forward to that. For the moment, I give you...
Art
\ ɑːt \
(noun): an intentional, reflexive experience with perspective
Often multi-modal, multi-sensory, and/or multi-dimensional.
Can be a communal, reciprocal, or parallel experience.
Artist
\ är′tĭst \
(noun): 1. a person who co-creates and communicates intentional, reflexive experiences with perspective 2. a person who interacts with and processes the world primarily through aesthetic experiences, i.e. art
Context
\ kŏn′tĕkst″ \
(noun): a combination of place, time, space, circumstance, mindset, and outlook
Culture
\ ˈkəl-chər \
(noun): a shared experience of the past, present, and future
(adverb) culturally: feelings about a shared experience, can be shared or projected feelings
(verb): how that shared experience is interpreted and used to define, organize, manage, and motivate a group
Can be place-bound in a confluence of time, geography, and/or people.
Often expressed as shared memories, objects, rules, artifacts (arts, architecture, planning, everyday objects, food, etc.), behaviours, beliefs, language, ideals (imaginings), and values.
Can be created intentionally or unintentionally.
Is co-created, though not necessarily equally or with equity.
Cultural Memory
\ kŭl′chər-əl ˈmeməri \
(noun): a shared, lingering impression of the impact of a shared experience. Can be a memory of the past, present, and/or future.
Is co-created, negotiated, and managed through selective forgetting. Though not necessarily equally or with equity.
Can be, and often is leveraged in the struggle for freedom; to be free or to repress freedom.
Freedom
\ frē′dəm \
(noun): the capacity to imagine how things might be elsewise, with the flexible support to try, and the hope of possibilities
(adverb) freeing: the state of imagining possibilities; relieved of the restraints of the singular, opened to the multitudes of potentialities
(verb) to free: 1. to imagine, illuminate, share, and explore potentialities 2. to flexibly support, facilitate, or otherwise encourage exploring potentialities
Often conflated with related concepts of autonomy and agency. Is social as much as personal.
Memory
\ ˈmeməri \
(noun): a lingering impression of the impact of an event, experience, or interaction. subject to shift, morph, and/or transform as understanding and/or perspective of the impact does
Often found in combination with selective forgetting.
Mother
\ ˈmʌð.ɚ \
(noun): a person
(adverb): giving care, needing care within specific actions, often denied or not given. e.g. Motherfucking or Smothering
(verb): mothering: giving care, needing care
Nostalgia
\ nŏ-stăl′jə, nə- \
(verb): 1. the act of creating, imagining a "better" past/other context that we would feel valued and flourish within 2. Imagining a past/other through creative remembering and forgetting; collaboratively and singularly
We nostalgia past place/other to compensate for, soothe, escape a current context; usually one of neglect, abuse, abandonment.
We also nostalgia to alleviate feelings of shame, guilt, loss, and alienation as a result of the above.
Unfortunately, the act of nostalgia minimizes agency (personal and collective) and flattens the complexity of relationality and context.
Valued
\ ˈvæljuːd \
(adjective): feeling seen, heard, held, and tangibly cared for
