But here’s what excites us: social construction offers us rich, hopeful socio-relational resources for this moment. It reminds us that our personal lives, our public engagements, and our political realities are not separate domains but interconnected threads in the same social tapestry. It is a reminder that what we deem as macro and micro spheres are intricate entanglments of our social processes and performances. They are our embodied understandings of being human, constructed from within our everyday participation.  When we understand that all meaning emerges through the activity of relating, that our identities and institutions are continuously constructed through our interactions, stories, and processes, we realize our collective power matters and we can reshape what seems fixed or broken.

This Symposium is our invitation to practice what we value—to live the very socio-relational approaches we champion in our organizations, our therapeutic work, our educational spaces, and our community building. By gathering together—being together, in person—we’re not just talking about better social lives; we’re actively co-creating them. Every conversation becomes a small act of world-making. Every relationship becomes a laboratory for new possibilities. Every interdisciplinary encounter expands our understanding of what transformation and growth can look like.

Join us in this experiment in relationality. Come ready to be surprised by what emerges when caring, thoughtful people gather with intention, curiosity, and hope for better social lives.

A symposium is by definition an actionable gathering, where reflective conversations and relationships take center stage. This Symposium serves as a gathering, community, and an accelerator for actionable hopefulness when faced with divisions, uncertainty, exhaustion, and confusion. We will explore the joyful possibilities of engaging together and the resulting emergence by orienting to what arrives from the care, curiosity, and critically creative engagement of our interactions. Furthermore, we will consider how to extend these practices to the larger spheres that overlook the epistemic nature of social processes even as they seek “useful resources” to create social “order.”

Reimagining our Personal, Public and Political Lives is the inaugural theme for the symposium which focuses on the socio-relational processes by which we create our worlds. The symposium invites reflective conversations on how our worlds are constructed and how we can participate in creating a better world. The social processes of collective participation, conversations, engagement, connections, language, meaning-making and knowledge construction shape—and are shaped by—our understandings of education, community, business, finance, politics, health, environment, arts, religion, well-being and more. These situated understandings are socio-relational accomplishments that arise from our everyday interactions with each other and our environments, contributing to our sense of living meaningful and equitable lives.