Trying to pinpoint, how our values manifest in every action or inaction we take – is like chasing pieces of eggshell in a raw egg mixture. You know they are there but extracting them is a messy business, elastic viscous threads remain attached as one lifts pieces of eggshell out, trying to separate them from their environment.  

I am committed to the idea that multiple, authentic, and contradictory perspectives are operating in all situations. I am committed to being responsive, and response-able (Barad, 2007) to people, situations, objects, resources, and social and cultural practices and more. I take my values: respect, integrity, and kindness, with me into my entanglements with the arts. My life has been, and continues to be, a practice of reading one thing through another, long before I knew of Karen Barad’s thinking about diffraction. Barad, frames the practice of diffraction this way, 

of reading diffractively for patterns of differences that make a difference… not as an additive notion opposed to subtraction…I mean that in the sense of it being suggestive, creative, and visionary. (Barad, 2012, pp. 49–50) 

Underpinning the way, I want to operate in the world, professionally and personally, is the concept of radical hospitality. Radical hospitality has its roots in theology and extends beyond making the stranger welcome by meeting their immediate needs, into understanding the value and weight of the reciprocity inherent in all exchanges. We are all effected and affected by each other and by all sorts of things, material, conceptual, cultural, and personal all of the time. The gift of the stranger is that they bring both their skills and knowledges to the encounter and the gift of potential disruption. Disruption prevents us from becoming complacent and unresponsive, disruption enlivens us. The stranger gives us a fresh start in each encounter – there is no burden to maintain a particular face nor to carry the responsibility for the stranger indefinitely. For me, encounters with strangers, more than any other encounters, carry within them the possibility of threshold encounters, thresholds that if we pass through them hold the promise of transformation. I’m not sure if that’s true for other people. Hence why, after twenty years working in art galleries and museums, I am still response-able to encounters with strangers, for which I now use the language of Donna Haraway to describe as world –making (2016), or worlding (Heidegger, 1971). Both world -making and worlding turn the noun world into a verb to indicate that we make the world anew in each encounter. 

Working in audience engagement in art galleries, I am always thinking about how to increase the opportunities for art encounters to create threshold moments and transformative experiences for audiences, often through simple activities that have been carefully selected and framed to foster deeper engagement with the art object. It is hard to make a leap when there is nothing to push off from, therefore, in my interest in fostering transformative experiences I see planning, preparation, and organisation, as important in process-driven, performative, pedagogic activity, indeed these things become the scaffold, from which we push off into the unknown. I am using the term pedagogic to refer to any situation where we learn from each other, not to refer to formal or school-based learning. One puts all the mechanics of the encounter in place and once the audience arrives the unfolding of the encounter is no longer in your control, although you remain one of the players, alongside each of the other participants, including the objects, the architecture, the participants, what went before and more … One hopes to bring into being encounters that carry, the unpredictable, the unexpected and the transformative. I am completely committed to understanding and theorising how to create threshold crossing encounters in art galleries and museums, where people begin to think in ways that they did not imagine before crossing the threshold. I am interested in thinking about these encounters as being on a plane of immanence – where we recognise that we are all bringing each other and all things into being in each encounter – where there is no above or outside of – there is simply the same plane on which we all exist and each element is worthy of, and has a right to, its place in that existence. 

I am made hopeful by encounters in art galleries that bring us into deeper and more meaningful and more resonant connection, through the twin conduits of art and other people, with the space of the social imaginary. Philosophically, I will defend the right of each stranger to their place and their perspective in and on the world. I try to follow Barad’s advice to live my life thinking diffractively seeking ‘patterns of differences that make a difference … not as an additive notion opposed to subtraction… (but) in the sense of it being suggestive, creative, and visionary’ (Barad, 2012, pp. 49–50). I often fall short of my ideal, but I remain true to my values-based mission to encounter alternate and sometimes provocative ideas from a position of grace. I take my vales of respect, integrity, and kindness into reading situations diffractively, attempting to be alert when I am privileging ideas that fit more easily with my current world view, whilst also being able to respond to a call to action to act ethically in the world.