Relational Evolution

1 Cold Rice, Hot Topic — Rethinking Evolution from the Margins

In May 2025, Nature reported on a study that many hailed as a “landmark” in evolutionary biology. Conducted over more than a decade, the research showed that rice plants exposed to cold conditions for several generations acquired a stable tolerance to freezing temperatures — without any detectable changes to their DNA sequence. The adaptive trait was passed on through changes in epigenetic markers: molecular tags that regulate how genes are expressed, without altering the genetic code itself.

The rice plants had, in effect, inherited a new capacity not by mutating, but by modulating the expression of what was already possible. What made headlines, however, was not just the discovery itself, but how it was framed. “The study adds to evidence challenging the dominance of ‘natural selection’ as the sole adaptive force in evolution,” Nature reported. To some, this seemed to suggest a quiet revolution: evolution without mutation, inheritance without genes, adaptation without Darwin.

But what, exactly, is being challenged here — and what is being misunderstood?

As with many scientific breakthroughs, this study’s significance lies not only in its results but in what it invites us to reconsider. Yet to ask what this discovery means is to enter a space where biology and philosophy converge. What kind of thing is an adaptation? Where does variation come from? Can evolution be understood not only as a process of random mutations filtered by environmental selection, but as something more relational — something in which organism and environment co-participate in the actualisation of traits?

This series takes the rice study as a departure point for rethinking some of our inherited assumptions about evolution. It does not seek to discard natural selection, but to contextualise it. Nor does it argue that epigenetics overturns Darwinian evolution, as some popular accounts might imply. Instead, we ask: what happens when we stop treating genes as the sole site of evolutionary change, and begin to see adaptation as an unfolding within relationships — between organism and environment, past and future, potential and instance?

The cold-tolerant rice study is striking, not because it contradicts evolutionary theory, but because it exposes the limitations of a still-dominant narrative in which adaptation is framed as the gradual selection of random genetic variants. That narrative, often identified with the “Modern Synthesis” of mid-20th century biology, has long struggled to accommodate the plasticity, responsiveness, and situatedness that living systems exhibit. Evolution, we’re learning, is not only about what survives — but about what emerges, and how.

In the posts to follow, we’ll explore how epigenetics reshapes our understanding of variation, inheritance, and selection. We’ll look at how evolutionary biology is already moving beyond the gene-centric paradigm, and how a relational ontology might help make sense of this transition. Most of all, we’ll try to ask what it means to think with evolution — not as spectators watching traits compete for survival, but as participants in the very processes that shape the unfolding of life.

If rice can learn to grow cold within a few seasons, perhaps it is time we warmed to a more dynamic, relational view of evolution.

2 What Is Epigenetic Inheritance — and What Is It Not?

If evolution is typically understood as the selection of genetic variation, then epigenetics has arrived as something of a conceptual disruptor. In recent years, it has become a buzzword not only in biology but in popular science, psychology, and even wellness culture. Amid this proliferation of meanings, it’s worth pausing to ask: what do we actually mean by epigenetic inheritance? And just as importantly: what don’t we mean?

The rice study that sparked this series showed that cold tolerance could be passed from one generation to the next without changes to the DNA sequence. Instead, what changed were epigenetic markers — molecular tags (such as methyl groups) that affect whether specific genes are expressed or silenced. Crucially, these tags were heritable: they persisted across generations even when the original environmental trigger (cold stress) was removed.

This kind of inheritance challenges the narrowest reading of the “central dogma” of molecular biology, which once held that information flows one way: from DNA to RNA to protein. It also complicates the standard evolutionary account in which new traits arise through random mutations that, if beneficial, are retained through natural selection.

But epigenetic inheritance is not magic, nor is it a wholesale rejection of evolutionary theory. Rather, it invites us to broaden our framework. The question is not whether genetic change matters — clearly, it does — but whether all meaningful biological variation must be genetic in origin.

Epigenetics opens a space for adaptive plasticity: the ability of organisms to modulate their gene expression in response to environmental cues, in ways that can be passed on to offspring. It reintroduces the environment not just as a selective filter acting on random variation, but as a participant in the actualisation of variation itself.

Yet here is where we must tread carefully. To say that epigenetic changes are inherited is not to say that the environment can programme an organism’s traits at will. Nor does it mean that we have discovered a neo-Lamarckian mechanism in which acquired characteristics are routinely passed on. Most epigenetic marks are not stably inherited; many are reset during gamete formation or early development. What makes the rice study exceptional is precisely the durability of the observed changes.

We should also resist the temptation to think of epigenetics as somehow more “intentional” than mutation — as if the environment were purposefully sculpting traits in response to need. Evolution remains an emergent process, not a directed one. What epigenetics shows us is not that organisms consciously adapt, but that the boundary between organism and environment is more porous, and more responsive, than a strictly gene-centred model allows.

In this light, epigenetics may be less a repudiation of Darwinian evolution than a refinement — a gesture toward a more relational account of variation and inheritance. It suggests that evolutionary novelty can arise not only through randomness filtered by selection, but through context-sensitive modulation of existing potential.

Where genetic inheritance assumes a largely stable archive of possibility, epigenetic inheritance shows us how that archive can be dynamically interpreted. It is not the script that changes, but the reading of it.

In the next post, we’ll explore this idea further by asking: What counts as variation? And how might our assumptions about randomness, causality, and novelty be shaped by the models we use?

For now, the takeaway is this: epigenetics doesn’t replace the genetic model — but it helps us reframe the story of evolution as a more entangled, co-emergent process. One in which life does not simply adapt to its conditions, but evolves with them.

3 What Counts as Variation? Rethinking Evolution’s Raw Material

In classical evolutionary theory, variation is the fuel of change. Mutations — random changes in DNA — introduce novel traits, and natural selection acts on these traits to shape populations over time. From this perspective, variation is a kind of background noise: unpredictable, unstructured, and external to the processes that filter it.

But what if variation is not just random input, but relational output? What if what counts as “variation” depends not simply on chance, but on the ongoing interaction between organism and environment — and on the frameworks through which we interpret that interaction?

Let’s return to the rice study. The researchers didn’t observe a new gene, a mutation, or even a hybrid genotype. Instead, they observed a change in gene expression patterns — a difference not in what was present, but in how it was activated. This shift produced a functional difference (cold tolerance), and that difference persisted across generations.

So is this “variation”? If we define variation as differences in DNA sequence, then no. But if we define it more broadly — as the emergence of new traits with potential adaptive consequences — then yes. And crucially, this broader view allows us to see variation as something that can be induced, not just stumbled upon.

This challenges the idea that variation must be random to be evolutionary. The randomness of mutation has long served as a conceptual buffer between evolution and teleology: if change is random, then it cannot be purposeful. But randomness is not the same as independence. A dice roll is random, but it presupposes a system of rules, constraints, and possible outcomes. Likewise, epigenetically induced variation is not directed, but it is structured — shaped by the relational dynamics between organism and environment.

From a relational perspective, then, variation is not a static property of an isolated genome. It is an emergent property of interaction — of the organism’s openness to contextual influence, and the environment’s capacity to actualise different potentials. This is not to say that all variation is environmentally induced, but that even so-called “random” variation is only meaningful in relation to a system that constrains and interprets it.

This insight matters because it reframes how we understand novelty in evolution. In a strictly gene-centric model, novelty is additive: new traits arise when genetic accidents build up over time. But in a relational model, novelty can also be combinatorial and contextual — arising from new patterns of activation, new environmental triggers, or new configurations of interaction.

In this view, the question “what counts as variation?” is no longer a simple matter of molecular bookkeeping. It is a matter of framework — of how we define change, where we locate agency, and what kinds of difference we are prepared to recognise.

The rice didn’t gain a new gene. But it did gain a new capacity — one that emerged through its history of interaction with a particular stress, and that became inheritable through epigenetic marking. That change is as real, and as evolutionarily relevant, as any nucleotide substitution.

In the next post, we’ll explore how this redefinition of variation affects our understanding of inheritance. If traits can be passed on without changes to DNA, what does it mean to say that something is “inherited”? And how stable must a trait be to count?

4 What Counts as Inheritance? Expanding the Evolutionary Ledger

Inheritance has traditionally meant one thing in evolutionary theory: the transmission of genetic information from parent to offspring. Encoded in DNA, this information is thought to specify the organism’s developmental programme, which unfolds (with some environmental modulation) to produce traits. The rest — epigenetics, physiology, behaviour, culture — is considered either background noise or downstream consequence.

But the rice study demands a reconsideration. Here we find cold tolerance passed from one generation to the next, not through mutation or recombination, but through changes to chemical tags on the genome. These changes alter gene expression and persist for multiple generations. The underlying DNA remains constant. And yet, something clearly has been inherited.

This phenomenon is not new. In recent decades, biologists have documented epigenetic inheritance in plants, animals, and even humans. What makes the rice study striking is the clarity of the mechanism and the functional benefit — a heritable trait, induced by environmental stress, that increases fitness and spreads. In other words: this is inheritance, in any evolutionary sense that matters.

So what counts as inheritance?

One answer is purely molecular: only DNA sequence counts, because only sequence is stable, replicable, and “digital.” But this answer is increasingly unsatisfactory. Stability is a matter of degree, not kind. Epigenetic marks can persist across generations. So can maternal effects, microbiomes, learned behaviours, and environmental legacies. If the test of inheritance is whether a trait recurs in offspring and influences evolutionary dynamics, then DNA is not the only medium.

This is the view taken by the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES), which argues for a broader conception of inheritance — one that includes epigenetic, ecological, behavioural, and symbolic systems. From this perspective, inheritance is not just about molecules, but about informational continuity — any process by which prior states constrain or enable future possibilities.

The relational turn takes this one step further: it views inheritance not just as a transmission of pre-formed content, but as a reinstantiation of relational patterns. What is inherited is not a static message, but a set of structured affordances — potentials that can be reactivated, reconfigured, and redeployed in novel contexts.

In this view, the rice plants didn’t pass on a fixed trait. They passed on a conditioned responsiveness, a readiness to activate certain patterns under certain stresses. This responsiveness was made material through epigenetic tags, but its significance lies in the relational history that gave rise to those tags — the plant’s encounter with cold, its selective memory of that encounter, and its conveyance of that memory to the next generation.

This is not Lamarckism in its caricatured form — the idea that any acquired trait can be inherited. Nor is it a rejection of genetic inheritance. Rather, it is a reframing of inheritance as multimodal: a system of layered constraints, some genetic, some epigenetic, some ecological or behavioural, all interacting to shape what becomes possible.

What matters, then, is not whether a trait is written in DNA, but whether it participates in the organism–environment dynamic that makes evolution happen. Inheritance, in this light, is not a chain of discrete handovers. It is a pattern of continuity-in-difference — a means by which the past remains active in the unfolding of the present.

Next, we’ll turn to the heart of the evolutionary process: selection. If variation can be induced, and inheritance is relational, then what exactly is being selected — and by whom?

5 What Counts as Selection? Induction, Participation, and the Environment as Co-Agent

Selection is often framed as the ultimate editor of evolution. Random mutations provide variation; natural selection winnows the results, favouring traits that confer reproductive advantage. On this view, selection is reactive — it operates after the fact, passively eliminating the unfit and letting the fittest survive.

But the rice study complicates this picture. The cold environment doesn’t simply reward plants that happen to survive the stress. It induces heritable change. It participates in shaping the very variation that it will later reward. In this scenario, selection is not an impartial filter. It is an active partner in the generation of traits.

This is not a new idea. Developmental systems theorists and advocates of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis have long argued that selection is only part of the story — that variation is not always random, and that organisms and environments co-construct one another over time. But what the rice study shows is that this mutual shaping can occur over just a few generations, and that the environment can induce heritable change without altering DNA sequence.

So what counts as selection?

Classically, selection operates on phenotypic variation — differences in traits — and promotes those variants that confer greater reproductive success. But this model presumes a separation: variation is random, selection is external, inheritance is genetic. The rice study dissolves these separations. Variation is not random, but induced. The environment is not external, but entwined. Inheritance is not purely genetic, but epigenetic and relational.

From a relational perspective, selection is not a matter of external pressures acting on isolated traits. It is the co-emergence of trait and context — the mutual attunement of organism and environment over time. Traits are not simply selected; they are made selectable by the histories of interaction that render them meaningful, useful, or viable.

In the rice case, selection is not the cold simply “choosing” those plants that happen to survive. It is the cold interacting with a responsive system — a system capable of reconfiguring itself under stress, of “remembering” that configuration, and of passing it on. This is not natural selection as a sieve. It is selection as a dialogue — a history of adjustments, reciprocal constraints, and shared shaping.

This also suggests a broader account of agency. The environment is not a static backdrop against which evolution plays out. It is an active participant, a co-agent in the evolutionary process. To say that cold “selects” for tolerance is not to anthropomorphise the cold, but to recognise that selection is not one-sided. It emerges from relational entanglement — from the way living systems and their environments co-constitute each other across time.

If variation can be induced, and selection is relational, then evolution is not a one-way process of adaptation to fixed external pressures. It is a process of becoming-with — of reciprocal transformation between organism and world.

In the next post, we will return to the heart of evolutionary theory: the concept of adaptation. What does it mean to adapt in a world where variation is induced, inheritance is multimodal, and selection is mutual?

6 What Counts as Adaptation? The Grammar of Fit in a Co-Created World

Adaptation is the crown jewel of evolutionary explanation. It accounts for the appearance of design without a designer, and for the apparent harmony between organism and environment. Organisms seem fit for their worlds — as if sculpted by the very forces they endure.

But what do we mean by “fit”? In classical Darwinian terms, fitness is about differential reproductive success. Traits that enhance survival and reproduction are selected over time. An adaptation, then, is a trait shaped by this process — a product of natural selection operating on inherited variation.

Yet as we’ve seen, the rice study — and the growing body of work on epigenetics, developmental plasticity, and niche construction — challenges the separability of variation, inheritance, and selection. It invites us to rethink the very notion of adaptation.

Let us pause on the grammar of the word. To “adapt” is to be adapted to, but also to adapt oneself. The first is passive; the second is active. One is done by an external force; the other is done with or through the organism’s own capacities. The rice plants do not merely receive cold tolerance as a selective gift. They actively respond, reorganise, retain, and transmit that capacity — all in relation to the environmental provocation.

This reframes adaptation as not merely a matter of fit, but of fitting-with — a dynamic attunement between organism and world. It is not just that a trait fits an environment; it is that trait and environment are co-shaped in the unfolding of evolutionary time.

The rice plants’ cold tolerance is not simply a pre-existing variant selected from a pool. It is a relational achievement — one that involves perception, response, memory, and reproduction. The trait did not exist before the stress; it emerged with it. In this sense, the adaptation is not a static outcome but a process — an unfolding of potential across instances of interaction.

This view draws attention to the semiotic dimensions of adaptation. Adaptations are not just mechanically useful; they are meaningful within the ecology of interactions in which they arise. The chemical tags that modify the ACT1 gene are not mere switches; they are signals, cues, signs in a system that interprets and responds. The organism is not a passive substrate. It is a participant in the construction of its own capacities to be affected and to affect.

From this perspective, we might say that adaptation is not simply the preservation of form under pressure, but the emergence of form through relation. It is the crystallisation of shared history — of the ways in which organisms and environments have come to matter to one another.

This also has implications for how we understand maladaptation, constraint, and change. If adaptation is not a static match but a living process, then so too is the breakdown of adaptation — not a failure of design, but a shift in relational resonance. What once fit may no longer fit, not because the trait is faulty, but because the context has transformed — or the relationship has frayed.

The rice study teaches us that adaptation is not just an outcome of selection; it is a mode of participation. The plants do not simply endure the cold; they learn with it, remember it, and pass that learning on.

In our final post, we will reflect on what this means for the theory of evolution itself. If variation is induced, inheritance is multimodal, selection is mutual, and adaptation is relational — what kind of theory do we need to account for life as a co-creative process?

7 What Counts as a Theory of Evolution? Towards a Relational Understanding of Life’s Becoming

Evolutionary theory has long been one of the cornerstones of biology, a grand narrative explaining how life diversifies, adapts, and thrives. For much of the twentieth century, the Modern Synthesis—blending Darwin’s natural selection with Mendelian genetics—held sway. It presented evolution as a process driven by random genetic mutations filtered by natural selection, with inheritance confined to DNA sequences.

But the rice study on epigenetic cold tolerance, alongside decades of research into plasticity, developmental systems, and ecological feedback, challenges the simplicity of this framework. It demands a deeper, more relational account of evolution—one that honours the complexity and entanglement of life and environment.

If variation can be induced by the environment, if inheritance operates across multiple channels beyond DNA, if selection is mutual rather than unilateral, and if adaptation is a process of participation rather than mere fit, then our theory of evolution must expand accordingly.

What would such a theory look like?

1. Multi-dimensional Inheritance:
   Inheritance is not limited to DNA sequences. It encompasses epigenetic marks, cellular structures, ecological legacies, cultural knowledge, and behavioural traditions. Each of these forms of inheritance participates in the ongoing construction of organism and environment alike.

2. Induced Variation and Developmental Plasticity:
   Variation is not solely random mutation. Organisms can respond plastically to environmental inputs, producing novel phenotypes that may be stable across generations. Developmental systems shape these responses, enabling organisms to actively participate in their own evolution.

3. Relational Selection:
   Selection is not simply an external filter but a co-creative process. Organisms and environments shape each other reciprocally over time, making traits selectable through their mutual history and context.

4. Adaptation as Process:
   Adaptation is not a static state of “fit” but an ongoing, dynamic process of attunement, interpretation, and transformation. It involves semiotic systems—signalling, memory, and meaning—that mediate organism–environment relations.

5. Evolution as Becoming-With:
   Life does not evolve as isolated entities competing in a fixed arena. It evolves through entangled histories, through becoming-with others—organisms, environments, ecologies, cultures.

This relational view does not reject the power of natural selection or genetics; rather, it situates them within a richer conceptual landscape. It invites us to see evolution not just as change over time but as the unfolding of relational patterns, the weaving of co-constitutive threads that create the fabric of life.

The rice study stands as a landmark, not because it overturns classical theory in one stroke, but because it reveals the multifaceted choreography of evolutionary processes — a dance of genes, molecules, environments, and histories.

Why does this matter?

Embracing relational evolution deepens our understanding of biology and enriches other fields—from ecology to medicine, from philosophy to anthropology. It compels us to rethink agency, causality, and the nature of living systems. It reminds us that life is not a collection of static parts but a dynamic, responsive, and co-creative process.

As we move forward, this perspective opens new avenues for research and reflection—inviting us to ask not only how life evolves, but how we, as part of the living world, evolve with it.

Relational Praxis: Action as Worldmaking

1 What Is Praxis? From Agency to Co-Agencement

If epistemology asks how we come to know, and desire asks how we come to want, then praxis asks: how do we come to act?

Praxis is not simply the execution of a plan or the carrying out of a will. It is not reducible to behaviour, movement, or even choice. The term has its roots in ancient Greek philosophy, where praxis meant action that arises from ethical reflection — not action upon the world, but in and with the world, grounded in a view of what it means to live well.

In this relational frame, we begin with a different premise: that action is never solitary. It is never just mine. To act is always to act with — with others, with histories, with contexts, with ecologies, with forces and affordances that exceed and include the self.

From Agency to Co-Agencement

Modern notions of agency often carry a deep residue of individualism: the agent as a bounded subject, a sovereign chooser. In this view, action is a form of imposition — something an agent does to the world. But this framing is insufficient for the kind of entangled reality we actually inhabit.

In relational thought, we shift from agency to what Deleuze and Guattari called agencement — not agency as possession, but as arrangement or assemblage. Agencement is not what one does, but what comes together to make action possible. And when this assemblage involves multiple parties — human and nonhuman — it becomes co-agencement: the relational configuration through which something happens.

Thus, in place of the image of an isolated agent acting on the world, we have a web of interdependent forces — bodily, social, material, historical — that coalesce to make action happen. Action, then, is not what I have, but what we emerge into together.

Praxis as Situated, Participatory Knowing-Doing

Praxis, in this sense, is always:

• Situated — It unfolds within particular relational and material contexts. There is no abstract action, only action somewhere, with something.

• Participatory — It arises through involvement, not detachment. To act is to enter into relation.

• Worldmaking — Every act helps shape the world we co-inhabit. Even inaction is not neutral.

This also means that every praxis is a kind of knowing-with — an epistemological moment in itself. When I participate in the making of something (a protest, a ritual, a shared meal, a new form of care), I am not merely acting; I am coming to know differently. I am coming to feel differently. Praxis is an epistemology in motion.

Why This Matters Now

In a world marked by ecological degradation, social fragmentation, and institutional collapse, the question of how we act — and with whom — is more urgent than ever. The old metaphors of control, mastery, and intervention are failing us. What we need are ways of thinking and doing that honour entanglement, vulnerability, and co-becoming.

Relational praxis offers not a blueprint, but a posture: a way of leaning in, of being responsive, of attending to the openings that emerge in the cracks of systems.

It is not heroic. It is humble, grounded, and collective.

And it begins, always, with the question: Who and what am I acting with?

2 Acts Are Never Alone — Meaning as Co-Enacted

If praxis is action as worldmaking, then each act is not a solitary event but a node in a dense network of relations. Actions ripple outward, entwined with the intentions, responses, histories, and materialities around them.

Action as a Co-Enacted Process

When we act, our deeds don’t float free. They are embedded within—and shaped by—the webs of relationships that surround us. Consider a simple gesture, like offering a cup of tea. This act:

• Involves the relationships between giver and receiver,

• Draws on cultural meanings around hospitality,

• Relies on material objects and their affordances (the cup, the tea),

• Resonates with histories of shared moments.

The meaning of this act is not fully contained in the one who acts. Instead, it is co-enacted — brought forth in relation, through interaction and interpretation.

From Intentionality to Distributed Meaning

Traditional views of action emphasise intentionality: the idea that meaning and purpose reside in the actor’s mind. But relational praxis invites us to see meaning as distributed across the acting assemblage.

The act is not a static “thing” with fixed meaning, but a dynamic event whose significance unfolds in the relational field. This includes:

• How others respond,

• The cultural and social contexts,

• The material environment,

• The historical moment.

Meaning is not carried by the act as a “package,” but emerges in the relational process.

Meaning as Emergent and Multiplicitous

This means an act can have multiple meanings, depending on who participates and how. A protest march can be:

• An expression of solidarity,

• A site of political conflict,

• A performance of identity,

• A moment of collective joy or grief.

Each of these meanings is real and enacted through participation.

Implications for Responsibility and Ethics

Because actions are never isolated, responsibility also becomes a shared and ongoing negotiation. To act is to enter a field of co-responsibility — with people, environments, and histories.

Ethics, then, is less about adherence to fixed rules and more about attuning to the complex relational dynamics and their effects. It is about listening, responding, and being accountable to the world one acts within.

3 Action as Language — The Grammar of Doing

If relational praxis reveals action as a co-enacted process of meaning-making, then it follows that our actions have a grammar — a systemic organisation that shapes how doing communicates meaning in the world.

Actions Are Structured Like Language

Just as language is more than words strung together — it has grammar, syntax, and patterns — so too do our actions have an underlying structure. This “grammar of doing” guides how acts relate to each other, how sequences unfold, and how meanings are realised.

Consider everyday actions:

• Greeting someone with a smile,

• Offering a handshake,

• Sitting down to eat a meal.

Each of these is patterned in culturally shaped ways that others understand and respond to.

Processes and Participants: Roles in Action

In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), language is analysed in terms of processes (verbs) and participants (nouns). Similarly, actions have:

• Processes: The kind of doing — giving, receiving, moving, creating, destroying.

• Participants: The actors and objects involved in the act.

This framework lets us analyse actions for their functional meaning: who is doing what to whom, with what effect.

Actions as Meaningful Choices

Just as speakers choose words from a system of possibilities, actors choose how to perform their actions within a system of cultural and social norms. This choice:

• Shapes how an act is interpreted,

• Influences its relational effects,

• Creates potential for new meanings and worldings.

From Individual Acts to Social Practices

Over time, repeated patterns of action become social practices — shared ways of doing that structure collective life. Social practices are the grammar of collective worldmaking, shaping how groups co-create meaning and shape reality.

Implications for Transformation

Understanding action’s grammar empowers us to:

• Become more conscious of how our actions “speak”,

• Recognise the patterns we inhabit,

• Explore new ways of acting that can shift relational fields and create new possibilities.

4 The Materiality of Action — Bodies, Environments, and Tools

If action is the grammar of doing, it is not a disembodied grammar. Action always unfolds somewhere, through someone, with something. Its medium is the material world — and its meanings are entangled with bodies, environments, and tools.

Bodies: The Lived Ground of Praxis

Every action is bodily, even the most “mental” of acts. Speaking requires vocal muscles. Thinking quietly often involves posture, breath, gaze. Our bodies:

• Constrain what is possible (we cannot fly unaided),

• Extend our capacities (a gesture can embrace or reject),

• Remember patterned actions (habits, muscle memory, choreographies of work and care).

The body is not a container of meaning but a medium of meaning — a living site where relation takes form.

Environments: Action Is Situated

We do not act in a vacuum. We act with and within environments:

• A conversation in a quiet garden feels different than one in a crowded subway.

• Walking barefoot on moss elicits different movements than walking on concrete.

• Cultural, architectural, and ecological environments invite and inhibit forms of action.

In relational terms, action is always a co-response to a setting that is itself partly shaped by previous actions. We are shaped by the worlds we co-shape.

Tools and Artefacts: Mediated Action

Tools are not neutral extensions of the body. They participate in meaning-making:

• A pen guides the gesture of writing differently than a keyboard.

• A smartphone mediates attention, pace, and tone.

• Ritual tools — chalices, incense, drums — infuse action with affective resonance.

Tools stabilise certain possibilities while closing off others. They are materialised memory, carrying histories of use and the intentions of their makers.

Material Semiotics: Matter Means

To speak of the “materiality” of action is not to reduce it to physics. It is to say that:

• Matter is semiotic — it helps make meaning,

• The material world is not mute but responsive,

• Knowing and doing emerge from this entanglement with the real.

In relational praxis, action is never merely symbolic or spiritual. It is always also material — and therefore consequential, embodied, and grounded.

5 Action and Temporality — Rhythm, Repetition, and Change

Action always takes place in time, but it does not merely occur in a neutral temporal container. It shapes time as it moves through it. In this post, we explore how action carries and creates temporalities — through rhythm, repetition, and transformation.

Action Is Rhythmic

No action is isolated. It pulses. It returns. It syncopates with other actions.

• Walking has a rhythm: step, step, step.

• Conversation has a rhythm: turn-taking, pause, reply.

• Cooking dinner, chanting in protest, brushing teeth — all are temporal patterns.

These rhythms are not trivial; they coordinate life. They bind us to shared worlds, linking inner tempo to social time.

Repetition: The Time of the Usual

Much action is repetitive. This is not failure — it is fidelity.

• Habits form through repetition, and so do skills, roles, identities.

• Shared rituals rely on repetition: lighting candles, bowing, saying grace.

• Political and cultural norms are enacted again and again, stabilised by the repetition of action across time.

Repetition is how meaning becomes durable. But repetition is never mechanical — it is always relational. We repeat differently depending on context, intention, feeling.

Transformation: The Time of the New

Every repetition holds the possibility of variation. Even the most familiar act may shift:

• A habitual gesture may take on new meaning in a different situation.

• A repeated phrase may suddenly be heard differently, provoking reflection or rupture.

• A tool used in a new way — a fork as a lockpick — can break expectation.

Through subtle or dramatic variation, change emerges from the inside of repetition. This is how action makes time not just cyclical, but historical — it builds toward difference.

Kairos and Chronos: Multiple Temporalities

Action unfolds in chronos (clock time), but also in kairos (opportune time):

• A protest at the “right moment” shifts a public conversation.

• A word said “too soon” or “too late” misses its mark.

• A kiss, a refusal, a revelation — all live or die by timing.

Praxis is not merely what we do, but when we do it — how we sense the moment, how we respond with attunement or dissonance.

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In relational praxis, action is not a point on a timeline. It is a shaper of time — rhythmic, recursive, and responsive. Through action, we create the temporalities by which we live.

6 Power and Responsibility — Acting-with vs Acting-over

All action is entangled with power. But not all power is the same. In this post, we explore how relational praxis reframes power not as dominance, but as participation — and how responsibility flows from this shift.

Power-Over: The Legacy of Control

In many traditions, power is imagined as power-over:

• The power to command, coerce, or control.

• The ability to enforce outcomes unilaterally.

• A model of agency rooted in separation and superiority.

This is the power of the sovereign, the CEO, the coloniser — the one who acts on the world, not with it.

But power-over fractures relations. It alienates the actor from the acted-upon. It suppresses the unpredictability of response. It treats others — human and nonhuman — as tools or obstacles.

Power-With: Relational Agency

Relational praxis shifts the frame: from power-over to power-with.

• Power emerges not from domination, but from coordination.

• Agency is not located in the isolated individual, but in the relation itself.

• Influence happens through dialogue, resonance, co-creation.

A conductor has power not by silencing the orchestra, but by playing with its potential. A skilled facilitator empowers action not by imposing vision, but by making space for emergence.

This is a power that does not diminish others but amplifies mutual becoming.

Responsibility Is Response-Ability

If power is relational, so is responsibility. It is not simply a duty to uphold fixed rules, but a capacity to respond well in entangled situations:

• To feel what the moment calls for.

• To listen before acting.

• To anticipate consequences not just for oneself, but for the shared field of life.

In relational terms, to act is always to involve others, and to be answerable to the worlds one helps shape.

Responsibility is not a burden imposed from without. It is the ethical contour of agency in a relational world.

Ethics as Worldmaking

Relational ethics is not rule-following. It is world-forming. Every action is a wager:

• What kind of relation does it enact?

• What kind of future does it make possible?

• What values are embodied in the way the act is performed?

Power-with and responsibility-with are not idealistic opposites to realpolitik — they are the conditions of sustainable becoming in a more-than-human world.

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Relational praxis understands power not as control but as participation, and responsibility not as guilt but as attunement. To act well is to respond well — and to craft a world in which others can, too.

7 Praxis as Poiesis — Making the World With(in) Us

The journey through relational praxis has brought us here — to a view of action not as intervention in a passive world, but as an act of worldmaking. In this final post, we bring the threads together by reclaiming an ancient word: poiesis.

Poiesis: The Making That Makes Us

In classical Greek, poiesis meant “to make” — but not just to fabricate or produce. Poiesis referred to a generative kind of making, one that brings something into being. A poem is not simply written; it is brought forth. A new friendship is not engineered; it is cultivated.

In relational praxis, all meaningful action is poietic:

• It does not just act on the world, but participates in its unfolding.

• It does not merely shape external reality, but transforms the actor themselves.

• It does not assume a finished self, but co-emerges with the world being made.

To act, then, is to be made — not just to make.

The World Within the Act

Every act — no matter how small — carries a worldview:

• The gesture of a hand either welcomes or excludes.

• The tone of a voice either dignifies or diminishes.

• The design of a system either enables or obstructs.

There is no neutral action. Every doing is a kind of saying. Every saying carries a grammar of value. To act is to perform a stance toward the world — and to make that stance real.

Co-Making, Co-Becoming

In this sense, praxis is always with:

• With others, whose responses shape and reshape what action means.

• With histories, which echo in our patterns and inheritances.

• With futures, which are seeded in the affordances we create or foreclose.

Relational praxis calls us to be craftspersons of possibility. To act not for dominance or display, but for resonance. For co-flourishing. For the patient shaping of more livable worlds.

An Invitation

We end this series not with a conclusion, but an invitation:
To see your next act — however ordinary — not as a unit of productivity, but as a poietic gesture.

What world will it bring forth?
What relation will it renew?
What self will it call you to become?

The answer is never yours alone. It is made with, and always in the making.

Relational Epistemology: Knowing as Participation

Why Relational Epistemology, and Why Now?

Prelude to a Participatory Turn in Knowledge

We are living through a moment of epistemic reorientation. The cracks in the old edifice are showing. From climate collapse to quantum entanglement, from AI-generated meaning to decolonial scholarship, the question of how we know — and who gets to know — is no longer safely tucked away in the margins of philosophy. It is erupting across disciplines. At stake is not simply a new method, but a new metaphysics: one that rethinks knowledge as a relational act.

This series is an invitation to consider what happens when we stop thinking of knowledge as a substance — as something that can be possessed, transferred, or stored — and start thinking of it as a relation: emergent, situated, participatory.

A relational epistemology begins not with the knower, nor with the known, but with the dynamic between them. It foregrounds encounter over extraction, process over possession. And it does so not as a theoretical luxury, but as a practical necessity in a world where the consequences of our ways of knowing are no longer containable.

Why now? Because the dominant epistemologies of modern science — forged in the image of objectivity, separation, and control — are no longer adequate to the entangled realities they helped reveal. Knowing-as-detachment cannot help us navigate a world constituted by relations. We need a different grammar of knowledge: one that can make sense of intra-action, co-becoming, and the ethical demands of participation.

In what follows, we will sketch the outlines of this relational turn. We will explore what it means to move from substance to relation, from knowing-about to knowing-with, from observer to participant. We will ask what becomes of knowledge when it is treated not as a thing to hold, but as a field of resonance — an unfolding of shared potential between knower and world.

Relational epistemology is not a rejection of science. It is a deeper commitment to its task: to understand the world in ways that remain open to the world’s unfolding. But it is also a reckoning — with the violence of disembodied knowledge, and with the colonial grammars that made conquest appear as comprehension.

What we are proposing here is both radical and ancient. It is a return to the wisdom that knowing is a form of participation. And it is a gesture toward what comes next — an ethics of entanglement, and a science that knows it belongs.

1 What Do We Know When We Know?

“To know is not to grasp a thing, but to participate in a becoming.”

Knowing as a Relational Act

In modern life, we often speak of knowledge as if it were a possession — something you have, something you acquire, something you can hold on to. Knowledge is treated like an object: discrete, transferable, measurable. But this is not the only way to think about knowing.

This series begins from a different premise: that knowing is not possession but participation. To know is not to hold something in the mind, but to enter into relation with it. It is not a static state, but a dynamic becoming-with. Knowledge, in this view, is a process of co-emergence between knower and known.

The Epistemic Myth of Separation

Much of the scientific and philosophical tradition has leaned on an ideal of objectivity — the knower as a detached observer, a neutral spectator peering in on the world from some epistemic nowhere. But this image is itself a fiction. All knowing takes place from somewhere, and every act of knowing implicates the knower.

Relational epistemology begins by acknowledging this: that there is no view from nowhere, and no knowledge without relation. To ask What do we know when we know? is to ask not just about the content of knowledge, but about the relation that gives rise to it.

Knowing as a Mode of Being

To know something is to let it affect you, and to be affected in return. It is not just to register a fact, but to undergo an experience. In this way, knowledge is inseparable from life. It is not a passive reflection of what already is, but a participatory event that helps bring the world into being — and the knower along with it.

This does not mean that anything goes. But it does mean that knowledge is not outside the world. It is one of the ways the world unfolds.

From Representation to Participation

This series sets out to reframe knowledge not as representation but as relation. We will explore:

• How knowing co-arises with being

• How objectivity can be redefined as intersubjective coherence

• How meaning emerges not in things but in relations between things

• And how this changes our understanding of science, experience, and ourselves

Rather than asking what the world is, we will ask what it becomes in relation to us. This does not reduce reality to subjectivity — but it insists that reality is never independent of relation.

A Shift in Grammar

To help make this shift, we will turn to relational metaphors and models — including ideas from systemic linguistics, quantum theory, and ecology. Where conventional epistemology favours nouns, substances, and categories, relational epistemology foregrounds verbs, processes, and becomings.

Just as we no longer think of an organism as in an environment, but as part of it, we will treat knowledge not as about the world, but as of it — as a mode of participation in its unfolding.

Toward a Relational Epistemology

This is not a denial of truth, but a repositioning of it. Truth is not that which is free from perspective, but that which is coherent within a relation. And as we will see, this view does not make knowledge less rigorous — it makes it more accountable, because it acknowledges the place of the knower in what is known.

In the posts that follow, we will unpack this framework step by step. But we begin here, with the simple question: What do we know when we know?

And with the tentative answer: We know the relation. We know the becoming. We know the participation.

2 There Is No View from Nowhere

“All knowledge is from a place, by a body, through a history. There is no clean window onto the world.”

The Illusion of Detachment

The classical ideal of knowledge assumes a kind of purity: that the knower can withdraw from the world, erase their particularity, and see things as they really are. This is the image of the detached observer — standing outside the world, unmoved and untouched, recording its truths from a privileged distance.

It is a powerful image, and it has served the rise of modern science. But it is not how knowing works.

Every act of knowing is embedded in a context: physical, cultural, linguistic, historical. What we know is shaped by who we are, where we are, and how we have learned to attend. There is no such thing as a neutral gaze.

Situated Knowers

To say that knowledge is situated is not to say it is arbitrary. It is to say it is relational. The world we know is not the world in itself, but the world in relation to us. This does not mean that the world is a projection of the mind — but it does mean that every knower brings something to the relation.

The tools we use to know — our concepts, our categories, our grammars — are themselves the products of our histories. And these shape what we can see, and how we can see it.

The Observer Is Inside the System

This truth becomes particularly evident in quantum mechanics. The observer is not an external party but an active participant in what is observed. Measurement does not merely reveal the state of a system; it contributes to that state.

But this is not just a feature of physics. It is a feature of all knowing. The observer is always inside the system they seek to understand — not perched above it, but entangled in it.

Objectivity Reframed

What, then, becomes of objectivity?

Relational epistemology does not reject objectivity, but redefines it. It is no longer the fantasy of a view from nowhere. It is the practice of accountable positioning — of making visible the standpoint from which knowledge emerges, and the relations that sustain it.

Objectivity becomes less about detachment and more about transparency. It means recognising one’s own embeddedness, and cultivating intersubjective rigour: that is, coherence and consistency across perspectives, rather than erasure of perspective itself.

Knowing-in-Relation

There is no view from nowhere — and that’s not a flaw, it’s a feature. It is what makes knowledge dynamic, plural, and alive. We do not uncover a pre-given world, but participate in the unfolding of one.

This does not collapse truth into relativism. It calls us to a deeper responsibility: to recognise the world not as a fixed object to be mastered, but as a shared becoming to be navigated — together, from where we are.

3 From Substance to Relation

“What if the fundamental units of reality are not things, but relationships?”

The Legacy of Substances

Western thought has long been shaped by a metaphysics of substance. From Aristotle to Descartes to Newton, the world has been imagined as composed of discrete, self-contained entities — things with properties, existing in a neutral backdrop of space and time.

In this view, relations are secondary. A substance can exist on its own; relationships are merely add-ons, accidents of interaction rather than constitutive of being.

But this model begins to break down under closer scrutiny — not only in modern physics, but in biology, cognition, and language. What emerges instead is a vision of reality in which relations are primary.

Fields, Not Particles

Quantum field theory, for instance, tells us that particles are not little marbles flying through space. They are excitations of fields — disturbances in a fabric of relational potential. The identity of a particle is not intrinsic; it is defined by the relational structure of the field in which it appears.

Even mass, energy, and charge are not properties of isolated objects but expressions of relational dynamics. What we call a “particle” is a brief coherence in a larger web — a ripple in the relational sea.

Biology Without Essence

The same shift is echoed in biology. Organisms are not machines made of parts, but processes sustained through ongoing interaction. Life is not a thing, but a pattern of relations — metabolic, ecological, semiotic. A cell only functions in relation to its environment. A species only exists within an ecosystem.

Identity in such systems is not fixed, but fluid — a matter of belonging, co-regulation, and structural coupling.

Language as Relation

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) makes a similar move. It treats language not as a code, but as a social semiotic system: a network of meaning potentials realised in contexts of use. Words do not carry meanings in isolation. They mean in relation to other meanings, and within situations of dialogue.

Meaning is not transferred from speaker to listener like a parcel — it is co-constructed in a field of relation.

Reality as Intra-Action

The physicist-philosopher Karen Barad proposes a powerful term: intra-action. Unlike interaction, which presupposes separate entities that then relate, intra-action suggests that entities emerge through their relations. Boundaries are not pre-given — they are enacted through specific configurations of relational process.

From this view, reality is not made of things that interact, but of relations that materialise as things.

The Relational Turn

To move from substance to relation is not merely to adopt a new vocabulary — it is to reconfigure the ontology on which our epistemology stands. It invites us to see the world not as populated by objects with intrinsic natures, but as a living matrix of interdependencies and co-becomings.

And if what we know is relational, then so too is how we know. Knowledge becomes not an act of extraction, but of attunement — a way of entering into the dynamics of the world as a participant, not an outsider.

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4 Meaning Is Not Carried, but Brought Forth

“Meaning is not in the signal, but in the encounter.”

The Container Metaphor

In everyday talk about communication, we often treat meaning as if it were a substance — something contained in words and transferred from one mind to another. This is the conduit metaphor: language as a pipe, messages as parcels, understanding as unpacking.

But this model misrepresents what meaning is and how it arises.

In relational epistemology, meaning is not carried; it is brought forth — enacted, not extracted. What a text, a gesture, or a sound means depends on how it is taken up in a given context, by a given participant, drawing on a history of shared semiotic potential.

Meaning, in other words, does not lie in the form. It emerges with the form in use.

Enacting Meaning: A Second-Order Reality

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) provides a powerful framework for this. Language is a semiotic system, a network of meaning potentials that are actualised through use. The spoken or written text is not a container of meaning — it is an instance, the semiotic actualisation of a specific selection from the meaning potential.

And crucially, the text is not the end of the process. It must be interpreted — that is, instantiated again by a receiver who brings their own meaning potential to the act.

What this means is that meaning is not a first-order property of physical signals. It is a second-order phenomenon — a construal, a co-constructed semiotic reality that emerges in the relation between a meaning potential, a material form, and a participant.

The Participatory Act of Knowing

This relational view resonates deeply with the enactivist tradition in cognitive science. According to Francisco Varela and colleagues, cognition is not the internal representation of a pre-given world, but the bringing forth of a world through embodied action.

Perception is not passive reception, but participation. Meaning arises in the relation between perceiver and world — not in either alone.

Just as a text must be instantiated to mean something, so must a world. Reality as lived is not simply perceived; it is enacted.

Beyond Objectivity

This doesn’t mean “anything goes” or that meaning is purely subjective. On the contrary, meaning is relationally constrained. It is shaped by social systems (like language), by material affordances, and by the histories of meaning-making that precede each act.

What it does mean is that knowledge is not the mirroring of an independent world, but the co-arising of world and knower in the act of knowing.

Objectivity, then, is not neutrality or detachment, but accountability to the relations in which one participates — linguistic, social, ecological, ontological.

From Meaning Transfer to Meaning Participation

To shift from the conduit metaphor to a relational epistemology is to change how we think about understanding itself. It becomes not a transmission, but a transformation — not delivery, but dialogue. Not what does this mean? but how is meaning being brought forth here — and by whom, and for what?

Meaning, in this view, is always in the making.

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5 The Observer as Participant

“We never observe from nowhere. We are always already in the world we seek to know.”

The Illusion of Detachment

The classical image of the scientist is that of a detached observer: an individual who stands apart from the system they observe, measuring, recording, and explaining without interfering. This ideal, inherited from Enlightenment rationalism, underpins the notion of objectivity as distance — epistemic cleanliness, untouched by bias or embodiment.

But this image is misleading. Observation is never neutral. It is always situated, always shaped by the means of observation and by the position — conceptual, physical, historical — of the observer. In practice, observation is intervention, and knowledge is not passive discovery but active participation.

From Objectivity to Intra-action

In quantum mechanics, this participatory role of the observer becomes unavoidable. To observe a quantum system is to disturb it — not by accident or technical limitation, but in principle. The system does not possess definite properties until a measurement is made, and that measurement is not a revelation of a pre-existing state, but a co-production of observer and phenomenon.

This is what Karen Barad calls intra-action: not interaction between separate entities, but the entangled co-constitution of meaning, matter, and measurement. The observer is not outside the system; they are a condition of its emergence as a phenomenon.

The Observer in Language

Systemic Functional Linguistics offers a semiotic analogue. Meaning does not pre-exist its expression in language, waiting to be encoded and decoded. Instead, language construes experience — it makes meaning possible by shaping what can be said, thought, and known.

When we interpret language, we do not recover meaning; we re-enact it. The reader or listener is not a passive recipient but a co-instantiator of meaning. What is meant depends on what is said and how it is taken up. In other words, the observer of meaning is a participant in its formation.

Observation as Meaningful Action

In both physics and linguistics, then, we find that observation is not a view from nowhere but a relational act. It involves choice: what to attend to, how to frame it, what to bring forth. These choices are shaped by social, cultural, and historical contingencies — by systems of meaning that both enable and constrain our knowing.

To observe is to act meaningfully — and to take responsibility for how our acts participate in the reality they bring forth.

Participation as Epistemic Responsibility

Relational epistemology does not deny reality, but repositions it. It is not out there, waiting to be mirrored, but arises in and through our relations with it. These relations are not arbitrary, but structured — by language, by embodiment, by history, by matter.

Knowing is not about standing back, but about stepping in — not about removing ourselves from the frame, but about becoming conscious of how we are always already within it.

And with this comes a shift in the meaning of objectivity: from detachment to responsibility for participation.

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6 Knowing-with, Not Knowing-about

“To know something is not to hold it at arm’s length but to live with it, respond to it, and become changed by it.”

From Representing to Relating

Traditional epistemology treats knowledge as representation: to know something is to form an accurate mental or linguistic model of it — a picture in the mind that corresponds to a reality outside it. This picture is presumed to be objective, transferable, and detachable from the knower.

But relational epistemology proposes a different metaphor. Knowledge is not a mirror of nature, but a relation with it. It is not a passive likeness of what is, but a process of becoming with. To know is not to depict, but to participate.

Knowing with

This shift from "knowing-about" to "knowing-with" draws attention to the mutuality of knowledge. We do not come to know by standing apart from what we seek to understand, but by entering into dynamic relationship with it — by responding, adapting, co-emerging.

This is evident in ecological science, where knowledge of an ecosystem cannot be abstracted from one's situated involvement with it — the rhythms of the land, the practices of care, the long attention to pattern and change. Indigenous knowledge systems have long recognised this: that to know a river, for instance, is not to measure its flow, but to live with it, fish it, drink from it, speak of it, and listen to it.

Knowing-with is not a metaphorical flourish. It is an ontological orientation.

The Linguistic Analogy

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) provides a powerful lens for this orientation. In SFL, meaning is not encoded and transmitted; it is instantiated — brought forth in context, shaped by the co-deployment of a shared potential. This means that language does not carry meaning from one mind to another. It makes meaning possible by furnishing a terrain on which meaning can be enacted.

To understand a text is not to extract the author's intention, but to enter the same semiotic space and re-live the meaning as one's own — with one's own systems, histories, and interests in play.

Just as meaning is always co-instantiated, knowledge is always co-emergent.

Knowledge as Co-becoming

Relational knowing is not additive — it is transformative. When we know with, we are changed by the encounter. Our understanding grows not by accumulation, but by reconfiguration — of our concepts, categories, identities, and actions.

This kind of knowing cannot be owned. It is not a possession, but a practice — one that takes time, attentiveness, and vulnerability. It is grounded in response-ability: the capacity to be affected and to respond in ways that honour the otherness of what we know with.

Rethinking Objectivity

To know with is to acknowledge that we are never outside the world we seek to know. We are of it, with it, through it. Objectivity, then, is not the erasure of perspective but the deepening of relational accountability — the ethical commitment to let the world matter in how we speak, act, and inquire.

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7 Knowledge as Ethical Encounter

“Every act of knowing is also an act of relating — and thus, of responsibility.”

From Epistemology to Ethics

In the classical view, knowledge is ethically neutral: we ask whether it is true, not whether it is good. But relational epistemology insists that the two cannot be separated. When knowing is a form of participation, then every act of knowing is also an act of positioning — a stance we take toward the world and those within it.

To know with something or someone is not simply to grasp or observe, but to enter into relation — to be changed by that relation, and to be accountable to it.

What We Choose to Know

There is an ethics in what we choose to pay attention to, to inquire into, to bring into focus. Do we treat the world as resource — as a stockpile of objects to master and manipulate? Or do we encounter it as presence — as a community of beings to respect and respond to?

In scientific discourse, it is easy to forget that the questions we ask shape the kinds of answers we can receive. The framing of inquiry is already an ethical act — it determines what is rendered visible, and what remains excluded or silenced.

The Matter of Method

Relational epistemology invites us to reframe method itself as an ethical question. How do we approach what we wish to know? Do we isolate, control, and reduce in order to predict and possess? Or do we attend, accompany, and engage in order to understand?

This is not a call to abandon rigour. On the contrary, it is a call to deepen it — to hold ourselves responsible not only for the accuracy of our claims, but for the consequences of our knowledge practices.

Language, Meaning, and Care

As we have seen throughout this series, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) shows that meaning is not passed along but brought forth — co-instantiated in relation. In such a model, understanding is not achieved by decoding, but by enacting: by participating in a shared potential for meaning.

This view reminds us that language is not neutral. It is a semiotic ecology — a living system in which meanings are cultivated, maintained, and transformed. How we mean is always a question of how we live together.

Relational Accountability

To know relationally is to accept that we are not separate from what we know — and that knowledge binds us to the world in new ways. With knowledge comes response-ability — the ethical capacity to respond with care, humility, and attentiveness.

In Indigenous epistemologies, this is not an abstract idea but a lived ethic. Knowledge is relational, and relation implies obligation: to the land, to ancestors, to future generations. Knowing is not a right; it is a responsibility.

The Closing Move

Relational epistemology does not end in certainty. It ends in co-becoming: in the recognition that we know only through our participation in the world, and that this participation is ongoing, unfinished, and open-ended.

In the final account, to know is not to own a truth, but to live in truth — to let the world transform how we see, how we speak, and how we act.