Encountering: reimagining organised encounters through radical relationality

Sociological and social science researchers increasingly seek to explore the potential of facilitating organised encounters between conflicting social groups, hoping that such meetings might promote positive social change. Today, a large body of practice relies on these orchestrated interactions to try to reduce conflict across social, religious, and cultural differences. However, we argue that this growing literature tends to assume bounded conceptions of groups, narrow views of power, and linear ideas of temporality. Drawing on emerging developments in relational sociological theory, we foreground using the verb encountering (as a dynamic process of relating) rather than encounter (as a discrete event) as an alternative framework for researchers as they facilitate, manage, and interpret these orchestrated meetings. Advancing radical relationism in this way, we argue, sheds new light on the multifaceted, emergent dynamics of such meetings, enabling a more complex and deeper understanding of how they work. Thus, radical relationism, via the idea of encountering, provides an alternative framework for conducting sociological research on what has come to be known as organised encounters.