Enchanted Network’s “Discursive Landscapes” framework examines how language patterns, narrative structures, and shared meaning-making constitute “landscapes” that shape what community can perceive, imagine, and coordinate around. Rather than treating discourse as simply describing reality, the framework positions language as actively constructing collective understanding and delimiting coordination possibilities—certain actions become thinkable or unthinkable based on available narratives and conceptual vocabularies. Drawing on Indigenous wisdom traditions emphasizing relationality and enchantment, the work challenges Western rationalist paradigms treating knowledge as objective information exchange, instead exploring how stories, metaphors, and collective sense-making create worlds. The framework offers tools for deliberately shifting discursive landscapes to enable regenerative coordination patterns currently rendered impossible by dominant narratives valorizing extraction, individualism, and mechanistic control.
Key Highlights
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Discursive Landscapes Concept: Framework treats language and narrative patterns as constituting collective “landscapes” that shape what community can perceive and coordinate around, positioning discourse as actively constructing reality rather than neutrally describing it.
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Indigenous Epistemology: Work draws on Indigenous wisdom traditions emphasizing relationality, reciprocity, and enchanted ways of knowing, challenging Western rationalist paradigms that dominate coordination thinking in both traditional organizations and Web3 spaces.
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Language as Constraint and Possibility: Analysis shows how available vocabularies and narrative structures delimit coordination options—certain actions become literally unthinkable when lacking conceptual frameworks and language to articulate them.
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Re-enchantment: Framework explores recovering enchanted relationships with world and each other beyond mechanistic paradigms, arguing that genuinely regenerative coordination requires different ontological foundations than extraction-oriented modernist worldviews.
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Narrative Transformation Practice: Rather than purely analytical critique, work offers practices for deliberately shifting discursive landscapes through storytelling, metaphor work, and collective meaning-making that opens new coordination possibilities.
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Complexity and Emergence: Framework integrates complexity thinking to understand how discursive landscapes emerge from distributed meaning-making rather than being designed by central authorities, yet can be deliberately influenced through pattern interventions.
Practical Applications
This framework enables narrative transformation work:
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community recognizing how dominant coordination narratives constrain possibilities can use discursive landscapes framework to understand what worldviews currently shape their governance, identifying where language limits imaginable coordination patterns
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Facilitators and organizers can employ narrative practices deliberately shifting discursive landscapes, using storytelling, metaphor, and collective sense-making to open spaces for regenerative coordination patterns currently unthinkable within extractive paradigms
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DAO designers can interrogate what discursive landscapes their governance mechanisms assume and reproduce, questioning whether blockchain coordination inadvertently entrenches mechanistic, individualist narratives despite decentralization aspirations
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Educators can use framework to help students understand how language and narrative shape possibilities for collective action, developing critical literacy about how dominant discourses naturalize certain coordination patterns while rendering alternatives literally unimaginable
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Social movements can strategically work to shift public discursive landscapes as part of broader transformation efforts, recognizing that changing what’s politically possible requires changing narrative structures shaping collective imagination
Connection With SuperBenefit
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Enchanted Network’s discursive landscapes framework challenges SuperBenefit to examine what narratives and worldviews coordination primitives inadvertently encode and reproduce, demonstrating that governance mechanisms aren’t neutral infrastructure but embed particular understandings of human nature, value, and relationship—showing that genuinely regenerative tools might require fundamentally different discursive landscapes emphasizing enchantment, relationality, and emergence rather than inadvertently perpetuating mechanistic control paradigms through different technical means.
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The framework’s integration of Indigenous wisdom traditions offers important counterbalance to SuperBenefit’s primarily Western coordination theory foundations, suggesting that effective primitives for regenerative governance might require drawing on epistemologies that resist commodification and extraction rather than only critiquing capitalist coordination within Western rationalist paradigms—demonstrating that transformation may require not just better mechanisms but different ways of knowing, relating, and making meaning together that current discursive landscapes struggle to even articulate.
Related Concepts
- Community - Local and network organizing
- Coordination - Mechanisms for collective action
- Governance - Decision-making and leadership frameworks
- Culture - Values and practices shaping coordination
- Sustainability - Regenerative community approaches