This website is an access point. A living record. A place for us to document projects as they are in the midst of unfolding. A way for us to remember what it is we are doing and why it is we are here.
For more detail about what holds the work together, read on.
Axiology is a philosophical term meaning: the study of value.
Functionally and methodologically, a person's axiology is the place where one's beliefs about what is good, what is valuable, and what is beautiful come to form the conversation between that person's intentions and their actions.
In life, axiology is about the everyday experience of how who we are stems from what we do, and how what we do emerges from who we are. Contextualized within the time and space of our existence, it is our axiology that offers answers to the practical and existential questions of: why? and to what end?
In research, "axiological assumptions refer to the often unexamined, unrecognized, or mistakenly universalized values that influence our work: Personal or disciplinary assumptions about what is good and bad, right and wrong, and more or less valuable, worthy, desirable, and beautiful" (Peers, 2018).
Axiology Clinic is a place where we make art, generate research, and cultivate axiological interventions related to the intertidal space where the water of intention meets the land of action.
We ask:
What comprises the ecology here?
What is the conversation between what we do and who we are?
What might we do to support individual and collective alignment between value, action, and intention such that all beings may flourish by interrelating in integrity?
There are many, many ways to word the overall aims of Axiology Clinic.
Perhaps the most direct is this: We presume the simple (but not easy) idea that by virtue of our existence, we each and all belong.
We belong to ourselves and we belong to each other.
We all belong here on this planet. We all belong in this time. We all belong to the individual, familial, communal, collective, social, and political spaces we've inherited and that we are actively co-creating.
In this way, we all participate in an ecology of belonging.
Presently, though, the inscription of non-belonging through social exclusion and internalized oppression is taking a toll on our bodies, our minds, our relationships, as well as our capacities for meaningful learning, effective occupational performance, and peaceable governance. The toll of non-belonging is especially noted in relation to folks from equity-denied groups, but also emerging in the literature is a sense of increasing alienation and sometimes violent reactions to the perception of non-belonging, or lessening-belonging by folks from dominant and dominating social locations.
Grassroots, community, and institutional initiatives toward addressing the toll of non-belonging identify critique alongside, awareness-raising, and harm-reductive policies and practices toward individual conduct and collective interrelating as imagined through lenses that include notions of justice, equity, diversity, inclusivity, and accessibility toward the redistribution of resources and opportunities. Simultaneously, there exist grassroots, community, and institutional initiatives toward addressing the toll of non-belonging through consolidations and reconsolidations of power that unite and inscribe belongingness both definitionally and materially in determining what kinds of people belong and then mobilizing individual, community, and social-political or systemic structures toward the exile and elimination of those who are deemed non-belongers.
With eyes and ears, minds and hearts attuned toward these unfurling discourses and what they have to say about the who, what, where, when, how, and why of belonging, we are interested in how to identify, acknowledge, disrupt, and ultimately supplant life-limiting impulses toward exile and elimination as brutal-but-necessary means toward affirmation with sustainable, vitalizing cohabitations. This shared interest has led to a sustained impulse of curiosity toward the axiological investments and practices that imagine belonging as inherent and inalienable. We have found significant and considerable momentum along this trajectory when turning toward the Indigenous, Black, Crip, Mad, Queer, and Trans affirming literatures that interest, excite, and sustain us. Literatures built upon epistemologies that name and value belonging (whether articulated individually or collectively) as inherent, interrelational, and interdependent.
For whatever Axiology Clinic may become, this website is a living document. A gathering place of our unfinished selves as inheritors of and contributors to the work of just interbeing.