Not every academic article sticks with you. Even when the underlying concepts resonate, the language can feel a little clunky. But, encountering Ilan Wiesel and Christine Bigby’s research on encounters struck a chord. Here was language that encapsulated so much of the spirit of our work. For a decade, we’ve experimented with fresh ways to build bridging social capital and strengthen wellbeing. That is, to cultivate trust, solidarity, and belonging between people across lines of difference. Our hunch has been that everyday interactions matter; that the path to deeper relationality meanders through shared experiences and meaningful, even if fleeting, moments. Turns out there is a growing body of research in support of this approach. Keep reading to learn more.
Ilan Wiesel is a Professor in Urban Geography at the University of Melbourne’s School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. His research “seeks to understand what a caring, just, and inclusive city might look like, and how we can achieve it in practice.” Together with Professor Christine Bigby, he has researched the role convivial encounters play in fostering meaningful inclusion between people with and without disabilities. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Q: Let’s get right into the thick of it: we’re here to talk about encounters. I’m curious for you to share a recent encounter you’ve had. Is there one that springs to mind?
Professor Wiesel: Yesterday, actually. My son is 12 years-old, and he plays Australian rules football. I won't try to explain the rules here, but it is a community league, and I had a role there as well. I was what’s called a Goal Umpire. I was waving the flags every time someone scores a goal, and I was sitting there before the game started. There was a person with an intellectual disability, with down syndrome, and he was sitting next to me. He started chatting to me, and I couldn't quite understand all of what he was saying to me, but I figured out he was interested in the flags. So I gave him the flags, and he looked at them and gestured toward the scoreboard. I realized he was trying to follow the scores and the time keeping for the previous game. So I told him how much time is left and what the score was. And we had this conversation, which was very friendly and awkward in all kinds of ways, but it was a shared moment. This is an encounter. This is what our work on encounters is all about. The question is: do these moments even matter? Is it just a friendly moment? I don't even know his name now; he doesn't know mine. We might never see each other again. It's not going to lead to a friendship. Did it change his life? Did it change my life? This is what our work is trying to understand. I think there is a change there. It is microscopic. There are these tiny, little changes that happen in what we call convivial encounters.
Q: That’s lovely. What did the moment leave you with? When you think about those microscopic changes, how would you describe the changes in you?
Professor Wiesel: It’s a great question. For me, every moment of convivial, friendly encounter that I experience in the community just gives me a sense of belonging. It helps me feel like I belong in this place where I am an immigrant, in a city where I wasn't born. So every time I meet someone new, a stranger, and have a conversation it gives me a sense that I'm actually part of this place. When people talk to me, it's really meaningful in a small way. And it adds up -- every one of those instances. I assume that would also be true for that person that I met, perhaps for other reasons. Those small moments where someone acknowledges you, speaks to you, finds interest in you: I think they matter in terms of belonging. There are also some bigger social theory ideas behind conviviality which we can talk about too!
Q: How did you come to notice encounters, or how did encounters become a subject for you to explore?
Professor Wiesel: I'm an urban social geographer so encounters are a big topic in my discipline. It started primarily from studies about multicultural cities, and particularly in the context of cultural or racial differences in cities, how we can think about a better vision for a city that's multicultural and multiracial, and how we can coexist with difference. That doesn’t mean erasing the differences, or ignoring the differences, but being able to live together in a friendly, peaceful, and respectful way. So this is what conviviality is all about. And because I was interested in disability, my thinking was: how do we transfer or translate and apply this concept to disability studies? How can we acknowledge that disability is also just another form of diversity in our cities just like race, class, and sexuality is? Could the concept of conviviality also be useful here?
Q: You describe encounters as filling a space between passive presence and relationship. Can you speak to encounters as this bridge?
Professor Wiesel: We have this narrative in disability studies, which is that people with intellectual disabilities used to live in institutions and then we de-institutionalized. We've closed down the institutions. People moved to the community to smaller kinds of independent living units, or group homes in the community, and now they're present in the community. But there is this whole literature that shows there's improvement in all measures of quality of life, except for one, which is relationships and people. It’s not that people don't have relationships, but they are confined to a very specific set of people: to other people with disabilities they live with, to paid support workers, and to family members. So it's a confined social space. I don't want to devalue this space. The relationships within those three groups are really valuable and important, but most people have quite diverse sets of relationships. So how do we find this kind of diversity for people with intellectual disabilities?
Presence is the idea that people are just living in the community, in group homes, but they don't actually have a lot of interaction with other people or a lot of relationships with other people outside of that space that we spoke about. Participation can be understood as people having those relationships -- meaningful relationships or friendships with people who are not family members or not paid support workers.
Encounters are that space, maybe, in-between. They are not fully formed relationships. They can be quite fleeting interactions you have with a stranger, but it's not presence either. It's not passive; it’s not just being in the community. You actually do interact with other people. So it's that in between space that can lead to relationships. It could be that an encounter with a stranger will turn into another encounter and then another, and then over time, it's a relationship. As Christine Bigby and I always say: every relationship starts with an encounter. There's no relationship without an encounter. Even a mother and a baby encounter one another for the first time as strangers. And every love relationship starts with an encounter. Not every encounter will turn into a relationship, though. So that's one way of thinking about encounters as the starting point for a relationship. But I also think they matter in their own right. Just by having that interaction with a stranger, and a positive interaction where you feel acknowledged, respected, recognized.
Q: That's been a big shift in our own work over the last decade, is recognizing encounters are an end in and of themselves, not just a means to another outcome. So often we devalue things that are fleeting. We say that interactions only matter if they lead to something long lasting. We don’t see the ways in which ephemeral moments add up, over time.
Professor Wiesel: Yes
Q: But, I’d love to talk about the opposite of convivial encounters. There are non-encounters, and then there are what you call exclusionary encounters. Can you speak to the difference between those two? What are the effects of these interaction types?
Professor Wiesel: Yes there are these categories: exclusionary encounters versus convivial encounters. And I know they're very blunt categories, but the reality is that encounters can have these different aspects. They can be convivial and exclusionary, friendly and conflictual at the same time. Non- encounters are one of the most interesting concepts. I think we started writing about non-encounters, and then the concept was developed by other people in the field quite beautifully. A non-encounter is when you actually expect a convivial moment. If you go to a football match, like I went with my son, and you see all the parents there having convivial moments with other parents and strangers from the other team, it’s a very friendly atmosphere. So if there's someone sitting there on their own and not having that, that would be a non-encounter; they would not experience something that you'd expect to experience. There is also an argument that some non-encounters are just normal; that this is what life is like. When you go into the city, you don’t want to interact with every single person you meet, and that's totally fine. So a non-encounter is only problematic when you'd expect there to be some kind of interaction, and it's not happening. And then an exclusionary encounter is where there is an encounter, there is an interaction, but it’s not convivial, it’s not positive. It could be condescending or patronizing, even violent. It makes a person feel like they don't belong.
Q: I’d love to talk about this idea of expectations differentiating an encounter from a non-encounter. Some of the folks we meet with intellectual disabilities, perhaps because they've been institutionalized in formal and informal ways, have stopped expecting positive social interactions, or perhaps any interactions at all. What happens when people have internalized a poverty of expectations?
Professor Wiesel: I think that is a question of whose expectations are we talking about? If there's a person with an intellectual disability and, for all sorts of reasons, they just don't want to interact, I don't think there's any reason to impose a convivial encounter on anyone. But there's an issue that you raise around people having quite low expectations about what they can expect when they come to a place like a community centre, or to an art project, or to a community football match. Our hope is that, over time, if they experience positive encounters that their expectations will change. I don't think there is any other remedy to low expectations other than encounters happening over time and building that expectation and people learning that there is something really positive that can happen and starting to look for it.
Q: Let’s chat methodology. How do you study encounters? What's your process for doing that? Can you describe a little bit about the field work behind this?
Professor Wiesel: I love this question. The methodology is always dodgy, in some ways. This is the problem with observational research: it's always very interpretive. You go to a place and you observe whatever you see and you take notes, but so much of it is your interpretation of whether the encounter was convivial or exclusionary. I try to describe each encounter I see, whether it’s friendly or not. But even then, I might write down that someone looks to be enjoying an interaction when deep down maybe they're actually hating that interaction.
But let me get more concrete. One of my favorite moments of observation was when we went to a community centre in a small rural town in Australia. They had a dance club. We had spent years trying to find those real convivial encounters. A lot of the encounters we observed were not convivial. They were quite exclusionary or non-encounters. And at that moment, I actually saw what I felt was an amazing convivial moment. Everyone in this dancing club was dancing. Most of them were people without disabilities. But there was this one couple, a man and a woman, both with intellectual disabilities. They were dancing with each other, but as part of this wider group. And this just was a beautiful moment to me. It was non-verbal. It was all just them dancing, but they were part of this wider group and doing a thing together. So that was just my observation, my interpretation, and I stand behind it. But we also did interviews. We spoke to the couple, but we also spoke to other people in the group and the teacher. And we got very different perspectives, as well. We learned that after the dance everyone else goes and has biscuits and tea. But, the couple don't. The driver comes and picks them up and takes them back to the group home. And one person we interviewed thought it was because of administrative issues at the group home. But, another person told us that the couple was eating all of the cookies and there were some issues around that. So you get very different stories about the same thing that you've observed and a completely different perspective.
Q: That's fascinating. It’s very similar to the mixed methods we use in our practice as well. And it sounds like these convivial encounters were a little more exceptional and harder to find. Can you speak to that? Is there any comparative research that tells us the quantity of convivial interactions for people with and without disabilities?
Professor Wiesel: I don't have an answer to the comparative question because I don’t think there is comparative research. There is a lot of research on encounters, but it doesn’t quantitatively measure the number of encounters. I would say we haven't found a lot of examples of encounters that we felt were convivial. There was this dance class I mentioned. And there were a handful of others like a clean-up event at a local park. There were also a few exclusionary ones in our research, but they were not the majority. There would be these moments where you'd see people behaving in quite patronizing ways. We’d also see people avoiding encounters altogether. These are the non-encounters. They're pretty common. But, also common were just these subtle forms of social recognition -- people passing by and just giving a little nod. I wouldn't say this is a convivial encounter, but it is a gesture of recognition. It says we are both here and part of this community. We saw that. And that is positive.
Q: And were you able to get a sense of what was different about the conditions in the convivial encounters that seemed to tee them up?
Professor Wiesel: Yes. There's a literature, especially in geography, that says conviviality often happens in spaces where you have activities that are quite structured and usually bring together people from diverse social backgrounds working together on something, on some kind of shared purpose. This creates the conditions for conviviality more than just passing by a stranger in the street. We saw that these were the things that were happening in a dance class, or a clean-up event. There was a shared purpose. And that created conviviality.
Q: How do you think you build the shared purpose? Because you have to do so in intentional ways. And presumably you have to build the communities’ willingness and capacity to run events that attract people with and without disabilities?
Professor Wiesel: Yes, and that was a follow-up project we did. These encounters have to be in mainstream spaces. So not in the sort of specialist places that are just for people with disabilities. And you need this shared purpose or common activity. I have a question about whether competitive activities can do that because in some ways they are shared and they create an atmosphere of doing something together. But, the competition part can be quite exclusionary for people with disabilities. So I put a question mark there. We know there are some places in the community where shared purpose happens more. For instance, a lot of public libraries. We know librarians are trained to think about diversity because libraries are no longer just places where people just borrow books. They have become sort of living rooms for the community. There's neighborhood houses or community centres. Often staff are usually trained to think about issues around diversity. So we need more places like these, and more funding for them. It’s good for everyone, not just people with disabilities.
Q: We were speaking earlier about one of the barriers to funding community centres being individualized funding for people with disabilities, which is the policy now in Australia. Can you speak to that tension?
Professor Wiesel: In Australia, we have what's called the National Disability Insurance Scheme. It was a wholesale restructuring of all the funding provided by the federal government to disability services. A very high percentage of that funding now goes directly to individuals with a disability, and they can choose which services they use the funding for, which is a great thing in so many ways. It gives people control over how they use their funding. But, there is a catch. If you don't fund services directly, how do you build that library in ways that will be truly inclusive. And there's an answer. The answer is: well entrepreneurs will come, and they will build libraries, and people with individualized funding will come and use the library, and that's how it will fund the library. So that’s the theory, but we don't see it happening in practice. And libraries wouldn’t be funded by NDIS. They wouldn't be able to get access to those individualized funds. So there's an issue around how do you make funding for spaces that support convivial encounters and inclusive practices?
Q: Yes, that is a familiar story here, even without individualized funding. You're speaking to the value of community centre staff, trained in working with diversity, enabling convivial connections. But, we also know that staff can sometimes be a barrier to convivial encounters. Can you speak to the difference between staff roles that support versus stand in the way of people with disabilities having convivial encounters?
Professor Wiesel: Staff play a huge role in encounters because a lot of people with intellectual disability, not everyone, but a lot of people will have a support worker with them. And often when they go to a community space, they will come in groups, because they come from a group home, and a support worker will come with all the residents of the house. So staff practice makes a huge difference. The positive practices that we've observed were where staff had it at the front of their mind that part of their role is to facilitate encounters, even fleeting interactions, between the people they support and other members of the public. It can be done in small ways, through introductions, by starting a conversation, by helping a person start a conversation, by assisting in communication. Sometimes a staff member who knows a person can help be the interpreter, and that can just help the encounter become even more convivial. So there's all kinds of really good practices that we've seen support workers do and do really well. A lot of them very intuitively do it.
We've also seen quite negative practices where staff intentionally prevented those encounters from happening. They literally moved people away from strangers, physically preventing them from having an interaction with another person. Sometimes they did it because they wanted to get on with whatever business they were doing; they had an errand to do and they didn't want the person to stop and have another conversation. But I think they were also just not sure about their own skills in managing social situations. It might be a bit difficult if there's miscommunication, or if that person is seen as behaving in challenging ways. So staff were literally preventing encounters. Christine Bigby and I developed a tool for support workers in any organization to use to think about encounters.
Q: What can disability organizations and community organizations do to support convivial encounters? Are there management practices, or is it cultural?
Professor Wiesel: I think organizations need to prioritize encounters as a goal, and they need to train their staff so that it is embedded in the practice and culture. It starts by acknowledging that these fleeting interactions are important. And looking at how staff record activities. We’ve seen staff record activities that were just between people with disabilities as ‘community inclusion’ or ‘community participation’ even when it is not. So getting clear on what it is and isn’t.
The other area for development is building partnerships between disability organizations and community spaces like libraries or sports clubs. How do we change mainstream culture? I think it’s the encounters themselves that are going to change society. There’s no education, really, or advertisements on TV that will really change practices. I think people have to go out and meet other people, experience it, and their attitudes will change. So it builds over time, but I am optimistic. I do think younger people are a lot more open to these things because they went to inclusive schools. So we already see a generational change.
Q: Lastly, you mentioned that your current work is on relationships. Can you give us a preview!
Professor Wiesel: It’s funny because we started the encounter work as almost a contrast to the relationship focus. Everyone was talking about relationships, and we were saying, let’s look at momentary encounters and their value. Now, I’m going back to relationships. Relationships matter. There's a lot of psychology research saying the number one determinant of wellbeing is the relationships people have. We tend to think about relationships in terms of friendships or family and intimate relationships, but there's a whole gamut of relationships in our lives that matter, and maybe that's what's missing, especially for people with disabilities. The relationship you have with your worker or the owner of the cafe that you go to every day. And so this is a new body of work we are building, trying to understand the wider gamut of relationships.
Our encounter work came from the literature on conviviality. But in recent years, I've been reading a lot about feminist care ethics, and it really inspired me to think quite differently about relationships and the concept of care. So in disability studies, I think care is a problematic world, right? We try to avoid even using the word care, but I want to bring a different care theory into looking at these relationships.
Q: Very cool, and it tracks a similar journey we’ve been on both theoretically and experimentally! Last year, we ran an experiment called Flip, Twist and Stretch with our partner agency, posAbilities, which was all about reflecting on and re-imagining relationships between support workers and people with disabilities.
Professor Wiesel: Oh, that's so interesting. I’ve been thinking a lot about care ethics, and there’s also this concept of careful justice, which tries to bring justice ethics and philosophy and care ethics together, which really speaks to me. In the context of interpersonal relationships, it's bringing together both power and care. I think for people with intellectual disabilities this is really significant, because there's such an uneven distribution of power in relationships. But also acknowledging that relationships are not just about power, they're also about care and all these other emotions and effects that happen. If we just reduce it to power, then we will miss out on the humanity of it all.
Q: Wow -- that’s been our critique of power too. I’m so thrilled to learn more about your work and research! Thank you so much for making the time. What a treat to meet a kindred spirit.
