Late last year, a call went out for presentation, workshop and dialogue proposals aligned with this intention. Over thirty proposals were submitted by the community and these were then grouped into three separate sessions, each reflecting one of the three primary movements of Theory U:

 

Sensing (Tools & Methods; Co-sensing Experiences)

Presencing   (Inner Work, Earth Connection, Crossing Thresholds) 

Enacting (Stories of Social Change; Applied Research; Monitoring & Evaluation)

 

Eighty-eight participants and presenters joined the first session from Germany, South Africa, the UK, Israel, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, the US, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Sweden, Canada, Spain, Romania, Turkey, and Italy. 

 

Ten sessions were offered in the first gathering covering a diverse range of topics and drawing from a variety of disciplines and research traditions:

 

Hartmut Hübner Self-check: A tool for assessing individual and collective communication culture.

Lukas Herrmann Boiling Down the Social Field

Tree Carr Transforming Death: A Historical Journey Through Catharsis

Damian Friel How framing and relational contexts can mediate outcomes in altered states of consciousness within mental healthcare

Danielle Shani and Dana Selinger-Abutbul Co-Sensing into a New Model of Research

George Pór Enliven Large-Scale Emergence: Interconnecting transformative projects

Merritt Juliano Contemplative Interconnection: Sensing and Sense-making Through Poetic Imagination

Daniela Veneri The artistic language as a vehicle to shed light on inner resources and deeper levels of awareness.

Uri Yitzchak Noy Meir Toward a praxis of wholeness: limits and possibilities of Social Presencing Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed

Adi Vickers & Sonal Kavia What can emerge when educators gather to look inward?

 

Participants took part in two 45-minute sessions of their choosing. In the closing remarks, they expressed appreciation for the insights, stimulating questions, learning and community. One participant commented that they were taking from the session a remembering “to use all of my senses in being present and reaching new understandings”, which mirrored several comments about the significance of embodied knowing. Another person noted “common threads of action in disparate places”. Yet another commented on “the need for joint collaboration”.

 

It was the hope of the holding team that these sessions would be experimental sharing spaces to explore emerging ideas, practices and concepts in engagement with peers - supportive learning spaces where colleagues gather to learn together, act as critical friends, and enable each other to evolve our work through feedback and dialogue. As co-host Jessica Bockler said, “we want to live our questions together.” In this first gathering, we believe we did just that.

 

If you would like a glimpse into our last session, you can find a recording of the opening of the session here. Please note: because the sessions are taking place in parallel breakout rooms, we are unable to record the individual sessions themselves. 

 

Two more Research Community of Practice gatherings will be held on February 25th and March 11th. If you would like to receive updates around these and other upcoming research events and opportunities, please sign up for our email list here.