Plenary Session

Plenary : Keywords
Friday, September 11, 12:30-2:00pmET

The RHM Symposium plenary sessions have always been centered on conversations, thus, plenary speakers were asked to give a 2-3 minute overview of their keyword. Participants were then randomly assigned to break out rooms where dissuasions continued.

Clicking on the keyword will bring you to the plenary speaker’s overview and then a summary of the breakout discussion. The summaries were created from notes taken during breakouts that started with generative questions provided by the plenary speakers, from the Zoom chats, and (when available) the live captioning. Thank you to Justiss Burry for the work on creating these summaries.

Panelists:
Takeaways from Plenary 

Following are some key ideas that the group discussed after everyone came back together from the breakout rooms.

  • Embodiment is constantly discussed across many of keywords here, so we shouldn’t want to get away from trying to define this term and what it means in RHM.
  • We are currently in a hellscape of sorts with how the world is currently–this will inevitably shape our research and how we approach our work.
  • In every session, other keywords were employed in order to examine the interconnectedness of these terms in RHM work.
  • As scholars in RHM, we can consider how refusing to use a term may help our work as we consider ethics in all that the keywords encompass.
  • Generosity is a good way to think about bringing the keywords together. We should be generous with our thinking while considering outliers and their aggregation while accepting that we will leave things out (positive deviance); embodiment will always play a role, particularly in a shifting culture; consider generosity with regards to what data can be/is and accepting that it is not just our standard conceptualizations of evidence; theory building does not need to be confined to what we have historically imagined/created; community is grounded in generosity and vulnerability, and RHM provides the space for thinking/evaluating/dreaming with others who can help us grow in our work.
  • We’re doing this [the symposium] because it helps all of us as scholars think through what we need to do next. Right now the world is so complex (hellscape) so what can we do in this time and do some things that bring us joy?
    • Part of the joy here is in the work – both scholarly and engagement.
    • This space gives us a space to think and grow – so keep thinking and growing.