Fish Bowl: from a facilitation method to a Situated practice

A Fishbowl is typically a facilitation method or format, a structure for dialogue that emphasizes visibility, rotation, and participation.

But when it’s used with role play, embodiment, and critical reflection, it exceeds the level of mere “method” and becomes a practice in the fuller sense: a repeated, situated, and reflective way of engaging with the world.

From a Harawayian perspective

For Donna Haraway, practice is about situated doing: a mode of “worlding,” of thinking-with and becoming-with others.
A Fishbowl, like explained in A Fishbowl with Baltic Sea Critters, absolutely fits this:

• It performs natureculture relations.
• It invites response-ability; participants must respond to and with more-than-human others.
• It enacts learning by doing, not abstractly theorizing.

From Haraway’s lens, the Fishbowl is a naturecultural practice: a form of situated speculation or worlding experiment.

From Guattari’s ecosophic view

For Félix Guattari, practices are ways of producing new subjectivities; new relations between the three ecologies (mental, social, environmental). A Fishbowl with Baltic Sea Critters can be seen as an ecosophic practice; an experimental assemblage that connects the three ecologies through performative engagement.