Fields of Encounter and the Generation of Meaning
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Encounters among heterogeneous participants may generate meanings, relationships, practices, and changes in the conditions of subsequent participation. This discussion develops a generative–relational account of encounter fields as historically evolving configurations of spatial, material, interpretive, practical, and normative conditions. It distinguishes co-presence from interaction, participant-level interpretation from relational coordination, and situated consequences from field-level transformation. Encounters can become recursively consequential when their effects alter future possibilities for participation, including situations in which participants retain different interpretations and objectives. The inquiry also examines unequal capacities to access encounters, circulate meanings, and influence their conditions, together with vulnerabilities spanning human, computational, nonhuman, and ecological processes. A provisional formal representation describes encounter-field states, situated events, history-dependent transformations, and participant-indexed reachable possibilities. The discussion outlines an empirical programme combining spatial observation, longitudinal inquiry, participatory design, and agent-based simulation. Generative capacity is treated as a problem concerning historically conditioned changes in relational possibilities, with meaning, coordination, power, and normative evaluation retained as analytically distinct objects.
DOI: 10.17613/f4h4x-fz655
Author: Wanhong HUANG
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225620988
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