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Framework for exploring the scholarly workshop:

Lizards in ecosystems

Individual

I’m imagining this framework being visually represented as a lizard. Long tail, short belly, big eyes and variable length tongue.

Past

The past has a tail as long as the living memory of the individual. Longer lives might have curled up tails that represent how people might spiral into their beliefs. Like a water slide or toilet. The lizard keeps growing forward away from the end of the tail (the start of the tail? The furthest identity formation memories).

The tail is strong enough to wag the lizard. There’s not a lot of deep thinking going on in the tail. It’s the sort of quick twitch limb that reacts to a moment. Terminology used to describe the sort of thinking that could happen in the tail: Type I thinking (Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow), quick-and-easy, cognitive heuristics, lightning round fill in the blanks, localized intelligence. Rather than relying on the far away head to figure out a reaction to a behavior (or something someone said), it just pulls up the strongest association the being has with that situation/person/behavior/speech thing.

The tail is made up of identities. Different ones might arise to awareness in different contexts or during different periods of life. Quick-twitch reactions might tap into any one of those identities or combinations thereof. Depending on how closely we hold those identities is how strong that reaction might be if that identity is misinterpreted or misunderstood. Identities could be raised internally (e.g., wave that rainbow flag in pride!) or externally (e.g., when someone else brings up your; race, gender, disability status, etc.). Identities can also be yanked by the tail, such as when making assumptions about someone’s experiences / characteristics based on quick-twitch categorization of the most identity(ies) that are most salient to the assumer’s tail.

Most lizards, presumably, do not enjoy having their tails yanked. If you ask nicely, a lizard might enjoy some tail touching, but you probably shouldn’t assume either way. Also, asking might feel like the lizard now has to opt out, and opting out is notoriously trickier than opting in. Maybe wait for the lizard to let you know if they want to bring their tails into an interaction.

Tails may be more or less sensitive depending on how interactions with them have gone in the past. Emotionally charged negative interactions (interactions that cause harm / discomfort / trauma) can alter the tail to respond to touches by revisiting those emotions. Proceed gently and with kindness.

Nursing a hurt tail takes up energy that could otherwise be devoted to other things such as digesting an experience (something happening in the present) or looking ahead to a potential future experience to aim at.

Ideas for exploration:

• How do individual’s (intersectional) identities show up in conversations about scholarship?
  • What do people think about their tails?
• In what circumstances do people
  • Want their identities to be part of the conversation?
    • Want them tail touches
  • Not want their identities to be part of the conversation?
    • DO NOT TOUCH THE TAIL!
• How do people describe their experiences of unwanted / harmful tail touches?
• How do people describe what sort of tail touches they welcome, if any?

Present

The present lives in the lizard’s belly. Whatever the lizard is experiencing right now and in the recent past ends up in that belly. The roundness of the belly depends in part on how thoroughly the lizard devours the experience and how much of it they digest. Maybe the lizard likes to savor one sort of experience at a time and have it in its fullness with all the nuanced flavors. Maybe the lizard crams a bunch of different flavors and textures in there at once and experiences little bits of each.

It partly depends on preferences, habits, and distractions.

Preferences reflect the sort of experiences that people find most rewarding or the most rewarding ways in which experiences can occur. Lizards might like to only eat leafy greens and cheesy puffs or they might rather have grubs grubs grubs.

Habits are behaviors that tend to get repeated because they were rewarded. Lizards might lick a particular color of cheesy puff and discover their purpose in life, which encourages them to lick more of that color cheesy puff in the future.

Addictions are a variation on habits that bring the lizard out of their optimal state such that they focus more on a particular habit at the expense of doing other things that they might actually prefer to be doing. Nomming those cheesy puffs rather than managing the fly population or engaging in other activities that might be more useful or delightful.

Distractions are things that capture some of the energy that might otherwise be used for digesting the present experience. They might arise internally, like when the lizard starts thinking about that other lizard who has a lovely orange throat flap (dewlap). They might arise externally, like when a fly buzzes by. They could be occurring within the immediate context or they could be happening elsewhere that’s accessible through technology (perhaps by befriending a spider and using their web?).

Belly-based challenges could occur when

• Preferences around the same thing (object, event, behavior, etc.) are oppositional
  • Like if the grubs grubs grubs keep eating the cheesy puffs, so they can’t exist in the same space
  • Differences in preference can create conflict when not all preferences can be satisfied
• Habits are difficult to align
  • Like if one lizard only fills their belly while the sun is up and another doesn’t rise until the sun has set
  • The more discrepancies in habits that harder it is to create structures and plan events / activities
• Distractions make it harder to absorb nutrients
  • Like if the lizard is eating them tasty grubs but is also reenacting a scene from that movie in which Johnny Depp plays a lizard
  • Worse yet if another lizard wants to talk about the subtle flavors that could be coaxed from the grubs with a particular kind of preparation

Ideas for exploration:

• How might different preferences be negotiated within a shared space?
• How do people feel about habits?
  • Altering habits?
  • Forming new habits for the duration of the workshop?
• How might ongoing distractions be incorporated?
  • Can resource allocation be optimized such that stress isn’t building up around unmanaged distractions and there are enough resources available to devote to scholarship?

Future

Future encompasses factors that are projected forward in time such as goals, plans, and hypotheticals. The eyes of the lizard, which mostly point sideways but can sort of look forward, gaze at potential future experiences to create or ingest. The tongue can dart forward to sample the future but can only give a taste. Really strong tongues that are honed to explore with precision are more likely to pull the lizard towards a particular future.

The lizard’s head is also for dreaming and exploring hypothetical scenarios. It can create all sorts of potential futures and plan experiments within them. If both eyes are directed towards the same future and the tongue is strong and precise enough to grab onto it, the lizard can move with confidence towards that future. However, lizards don’t really control futures and can, at best, shape their environments to increase the likelihood that a particular future will unfold.

Head-based challenges can occur when:

• The eyes don’t track together, so the lizard is exploring multiple possible futures without honing in on a particular one
  • Having too many unconnected goals or visions for the future can make it challenging to manifest any particular one by scattering energies that might otherwise be focused
  • Dreaming of changes to a bunch of different systems can be inspirational, but without connecting those dreams in a way that makes them approachable en masse the lizard might try moving in too many different directions to get anywhere
• The eyes are bigger than the stomach, so the lizard is looking at futures with massive scope
  • One lizard cannot create the sort of structures that would support large complex changes that would facilitate the desired future
  • It’s fun to dream big but one lizard has limited impact on their environment and requires other lizards to want the same future in order to get there
• The tongue isn’t able to grasp onto a future and slides right off when deployed
  • Futures can be slippery things and it helps to have a strong tongue and precise aim so the lizard can hold on to a future long enough to manifest it
  • Lizards who are likely to give up on plans or goals when they encounter resistance or face challenges are unlikely to succeed

Ideas for exploration:

• What are the most vivid (well defined) goals that people have for their institutions?
  • If there’s not one overarching goal, how can disparate goals be connected?
• How do people envision moving towards their goals for a new institution?
  • What does that movement look like over the next year?
    • The next 5 years?
    • The next 10 years?
• What sorts of other people are needed to fill in the gaps in what the lizard is able to do independently?
  • Who needs to be involved?
  • What sort of skills are relevant?
  • Where might those beings be found?
  • How might they be recruited?
  • Why would they be interested in joining forces?

Ecosystem

The ecosystem describes the context in which the lizards exist. Lizards do not exist in a vacuum, apart from those unfortunate souls who were launched into space or sucked into a canister along with dust and small bits of food. Lizards and their contexts are interconnected such that lizards may impact the state of their ecosystems and ecosystems may impact the state of their lizards.

Ecosystems (contexts) may consist of:

• Structures, which provide guidance for how an ecosystem may be navigated
• Resources, which allow for consumption, creation, and transformation
• Environments, which pose both challenges and opportunities

Structures

Structures refer to things that:

• Have an order
  • Walls, rooms, roads, plumbing, etc.
• Provide an order for other things
  • Rules, schedules, traditions, rituals, grammars, etc.

Structure challenges:

• Finding a balance between
  • Providing so much structure that creativity is limited
    • how rollercoasters are designed so that everyone has the same amount of terror, relief, and delight at around the same times
    • lizard-related: setting up an elaborate set of rooms and tunnels and having one-directional traffic guide lizards from room to room on a schedule and in a strict order (like primary school!)
    • creating too many rules and restrictions allows for a very limited scope of what can be created
      • useful for churning out identical objects on an assembly line
  • Providing so little structure that creativity is all over the place
    • how oceans provide so little structure that beings can swim in them, plot elaborate attacks on yachts in them, and provide virtually unlimited possibilities for exploration
    • lizard-related: living in a wide open expanse of desert where it’s not readily clear where to go or what to do at any given time
    • decision fatigue and possibility overload may make it harder to pick any particular course of action
• Rules create opportunities for hierarchies to emerge
  • Rules can be selectively followed
  • Advantages are conferred to those who can reap benefits from the rules without adhering to their constraints
  • Rules without consequences may collapse for lack of structural integrity

Resources

Resources describe the things available to the lizards that they could employ in service of furthering their goals.

Resources could be:

• Internal:
  • ideas germinated in a lizards mind
  • knowledge from previous experiences, encounters,

Environment