Sublime

Change is inevitable; your job as an observer is to find out where and how it will occur. The answers to that question can often be surprising.

In the second step, Gillian uses these facts to try to imagine how things could be different. She tries to hear what isn’t said and why. She imagines alternatives to what she is observing. It is through this process that she arrives at insights about what she is seeing. What would that conference in 2004 look like if it were structured to serve a d

When everyone is talking about a new trend, what are they not talking about? These social silences show us what matters. We can never truly know what happens in a place or a context unless we also know what doesn’t happen.

As an anthropologist, she knew all too well that unspoken codes of culture serve those in power. Bourdieu calls what isn’t said—what is socially silent—“doxa.”

“Good observers look for doxa,” Gillian explained. “What isn’t said and what is hidden in plain sight. It is a kind of chip in your brain or X-ray vision that you get when you look at the fam

“The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions.” —Claude Lévi-Strauss