Intergenerativity
My dear friend Peter Whitehouse and I wrote about our experiences and those of other colleagues with a concept we are calling “intergenerative community building” in a forthcoming chapter for The Sage Handbook on Social Constructionist Practices. Here is a snippet!
Intergenerative community building fosters a meaningful fusion of conversations and experiences among often disconnected sources of human creativity (e.g. generations, disciplines, or nations) that inspires new possibilities and innovative actions. It is based upon concepts of generativity that Bushe, Gergen, and Schon propose as:
processes and capacities that help people see old things in new ways, reconsidering that which is taken for granted and furnishing new alternatives for social actions.
Bushe describes generativity as:
occurring through the creation of new images, metaphors, and representations that have two qualities: they change how people think so that new options […] and/or actions become available to them (in ways that) people want to act upon them.
Intergenerativity builds on these ideas through intentionally engaging diversity with a specific focus on the relational space-in-between.
The word intergenerative signifies blending and going between many different forms of cultural creativity to create a flourishing beyond. It embraces differences as a relational resource for transformative potential. Intergenerativity can be applied to fields of endeavor from learning to health to community development. We propose our future depends on looking at the interfaces among these different social structures and cultural processes.
