Interpretive Frame
This essay introduces the emergent self as an ongoing process shaped through experience, interpretation, and response rather than a fixed identity to be discovered or achieved. Drawing on sensemaking across personal, relational, and structural levels, it situates this site as a living inquiry into how selves are continually formed within—and against—the worlds they inhabit.
The Self as Process, Not Product
Modern culture often speaks of the self as though it were a possession—something one has, protects, refines, or perfects. Identity is framed as stable, coherent, and ideally consistent across time. Yet lived experience suggests otherwise. People change, not simply because they choose to, but because they are acted upon by events, relationships, institutions, and cultural narratives that require ongoing adjustment and reinterpretation.
The emergent self begins with a different premise: that identity is not a static core but a process. We are continually becoming through what happens to us, how we make sense of those happenings, and how we respond in turn. The self, in this view, is not discovered once and for all—it is formed, disrupted, revised, and re-formed over time.
This understanding resists both rigid essentialism (“this is just who I am”) and simplistic voluntarism (“I can be anything I choose”). Instead, it recognizes that human agency unfolds within conditions not of our own making.
Experiences, Interpretations, Responses
My doctoral research emerged from a sustained engagement with this question of becoming—specifically, how individuals make sense of experiences that disrupt identity and dignity. In that work, I identified a recurring process through which participants navigated humiliating events: experiences informed interpretations, interpretations shaped responses, and responses generated new experiences. This recursive dynamic became what I later named the Experiences–Interpretations–Responses (EIR) cycle Dissertation Final Version June….
The EIR cycle is not a therapeutic technique or a prescriptive model. It is a descriptive framework that illuminates how meaning is constructed over time. When something happens—especially something disorienting or harmful—it does not enter consciousness as raw data. It is immediately interpreted through existing narratives, beliefs, social positions, and expectations. Those interpretations then guide responses, which themselves shape future conditions and possibilities.
Crucially, the cycle is not neutral. Interpretations are never formed in a vacuum. They are shaped by power, recognition, exclusion, and the availability—or absence—of alternative meanings. To understand the emergent self, then, requires attention not only to inner life but to the social worlds in which that life is embedded.
Micro, Meso, Macro: Levels of Emergence
One of the central insights of my research was that sensemaking operates across multiple, interrelated levels. The emergent self cannot be understood solely at the psychological level, nor solely at the level of social structure. It emerges at the intersection of at least three contexts:
- Micro: personal experiences, emotions, bodily realities, and self-understandings
- Meso: relationships, communities, institutions, and everyday interactions
- Macro: cultural narratives, systems of power, ideologies, and historical conditions
An experience of humiliation, for example, may be felt intimately and personally, but its meaning is inseparable from cultural norms about worth, bodies, productivity, or morality. Likewise, a response that appears individual—withdrawal, resistance, adaptation—often reflects broader patterns of social inclusion or exclusion.
The emergent self, then, is always situated. To make sense of who we are becoming requires movement across levels, resisting the temptation to reduce complex human experience to a single explanatory frame.
Lenses as Tools for Sensemaking
Because no single perspective can adequately capture this complexity, The Emergent Self treats theories not as doctrines to be defended, but as lenses to be used. Each lens reveals certain patterns while obscuring others. Used together, they expand what can be seen and named.
Among the lenses that will appear across this site are:
- Social constructionism, which foregrounds meaning-making and relational reality
- Symbolic interactionism, which attends to identity formation through interaction
- Feminist theory, which surfaces power, embodiment, and lived experience
- Systems theory, which traces feedback loops and unintended consequences
- Conflict theory and structural analysis, which expose inequality and domination
- Integral and multi-level frameworks, including Wilber’s AQAL model, which invite integrative thinking
These perspectives are not ends in themselves. They are tools for understanding how selves emerge within complex, often contradictory social worlds—and how alternative responses might become possible.
The Emergent Self as a Collective Project
Although the language of “self” can suggest individuality, this project is not about self-absorption or personal optimization. The emergent self is always formed in relation—to others, to institutions, to histories, and to imagined futures. What we become is inseparable from the meanings made available to us and the recognitions we receive or are denied.
This site, then, is best understood as a sensemaking project rather than a platform for definitive answers. The articles gathered here—across diverse topics and lenses—are contributions to an ongoing inquiry into how people navigate uncertainty, disruption, power, and possibility. Some essays will be more theoretical, others more applied; some will engage contemporary issues directly, others will step back to examine underlying patterns.
What unites them is a commitment to understanding becoming as an active, unfinished process. The emergent self is not a destination. It is what unfolds when experiences are taken seriously, interpretations are examined critically, and responses are made with awareness of their consequences.
This essay provides a conceptual foundation for the inquiries that follow across the site’s various lenses and topics.
References
Green, R. K. (2015). Fat persons finding meaning in their experiences of humiliation: An interpretative phenomenological analysis (Doctoral dissertation, Fielding Graduate University). ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
How to Cite This Article
Green, R. K. (2025). The emergent self: Sensemaking as an ongoing human project. The Emergent Self. https://theemergentself.com/the-emergent-self-sensemaking-as-an-ongoing-human-project/
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