Transilience: A phenomenology of 'leaping across'

This research is the reflexive account of participatory encounters between a social design practitioner (me, the researcher) and a group of rural migrant youth in Delhi, to construct imaginaries that interweave our disparate but connected experiences of living and working in the city through relational themes that are recorded through art, poetry, photography, and mind maps. The word ‘transilience’ is rooted in studies of evolution and indicates a ‘speciation shift’ as a form of transformation. In this research, transilience is interpreted as the transformation that a practitioner can undergo when encountering other worlds, and the methodological impact this can have on a participatory experience through the interrogation of issues of power and identity in complex social contexts of difference. The study is a phenomenology of my own ‘leaping across’, as I mediate the experience at three levels: The first is as the implementation of a qualitative research initiative through interviews and collaborative workshops that took place during the disruptions of the COVID pandemic, causing the research to be conducted online in a virtual contact zone, which resulted in pivots in positionality and methodology. The second is as a reflexive meta-inquiry of the pivots in positionality that I was experiencing in encountering a complex space of my practice through an ontological lens, causing me to interrogate the power and misrecognition in the way I was situated with the youth participants in my earlier practice, and re-situating myself in a series of adjustments that I record through the research. The third is responding to the pivots by modelling a participatory methodology that is based on reflexivity and relationality; situating and re-situating within the research, and repositioning self and other as a factor of ‘attuning’ within each participatory encounter. I frame this methodology as ‘transilience’ or ‘transformation through encountering’ that I present as my research contribution. The contribution of ‘transilience’ is methodological, conceptual, and disciplinary. I present this as an example of the messy work of critical reflection that practitioners of social design need to undergo, to examine their own positioning in social hierarchies, and to build stronger assemblages within accelerated social change.