Carlo Pareti
Enabling Boundaries: Generative Encounters in Social Innovation Education
This graduation project investigates how Social Innovation students at Breda University of Applied Sciences come to locate themselves as practitioners – in the space between a growing awareness of systemic urgency and the capacity to act in situated, contextual ways. I call this the gap between urgency and agency: the moment when critical consciousness about what needs to change does not yet translate into a sense of where and how one might enter.
The argument running through the project is that this gap asks for enabling boundaries – conditions specific enough to orient a student’s practice without foreclosing what that practice might become. A field with no edges gives a student nothing to enter, and one that is fully mapped leaves no room to act. Enabling boundaries hold that middle ground, and designing for them is the pedagogical work this project takes on.
The practical project is the Performatory Archive – a participatory collection of Social Innovation projects, co-created with students through Participatory Action Research across iterative facilitated sessions. What carries the pedagogical weight of the Archive is the facilitated encounter with it – making a card, moving through the collection, talking with an alumni. The archive does not help students understand the field from a distance. It is the occasion for an encounter in which they begin to locate themselves inside it. Two dialogical tools – the Archive Canvas and the Social Innovation Game – are made to support those encounters.
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