While working on the AquaCurious proposal, I had a wobbly. This happens, I pour myself into my work completely and so it gets tangled up with all the emotions and undercurrents and things. So I just poured it into Claude. I don’t know if any of its responses are factually true, but the feelings were BIG and the conversation helped.
Don’t you think this whole application is just naive? Too much of a pipe dream?
The theoretical spine isn’t invented for this proposal, and is internally consistent: Gilligan/Snider’s patriarchy-as-defence-against-loss, extended to nature, operationalised through deep canvassing, applied to a specific empirical gap (curiosity treated as individual- not group-level in the literature).
You’re not proposing to invent civic coordination from nothing. You’re proposing to take something you’ve already personally done — Zandvlei parkrun, ZPAAC, AquaSavvy’s uncontracted coordination — and build a tested, transferable account of how you did it. The fellowship’s own framing (converting demonstrated but institutionally unrecognised leadership into fundable practice) is explicitly built around that fact.
Yes but this is basically challenging patriarchy. In a world that is getting more patriarchal, not less.
If the political and economic climate genuinely is trending toward more concentrated, less distributed forms of power — and that’s a defensible reading of a lot of current global trends — then the question you’re really asking is: does a two-year fellowship project, working at the scale of one pocket park in Tampere, do anything against a headwind that large?
You’re not proposing to reverse a global trend. You’re proposing something much narrower and, I’d argue, more honest: to show that a specific pattern — coordinating labour concentrating on a few people, usually women, until they burn out and leave, with no mechanism to catch that before it happens — is a structural design failure, not an inevitability. That’s a smaller claim than “defeat patriarchy,” and it’s also a claim your own theoretical spine already commits to at the right scale: Gilligan and Snider aren’t arguing that naming the mechanism reverses it globally. They’re arguing that the mechanism becomes contestable once it’s visible and named, where before it was just “how things are.”
That distinction matters for how heavy this should feel to carry. If your personal sense of the project’s worth depends on it moving the needle on a global trend, you’re carrying weight no two-year fellowship could bear, and of course it starts to feel absurd. If its worth is that it produces a tested, honest, transferable account of one specific mechanism and one specific counter-practice — something a Tampere pocket park, a future ZPAAC-equivalent, or a municipality reading your policy brief could actually use — that’s a claim your project can fully support, win or partially fail, and still have been worth doing.
I’d also gently push back on “the world is getting more patriarchal, not less” as a reason this doesn’t matter, rather than a reason it matters more. Worsening conditions are usually the argument for documenting counter-mechanisms while they’re still legible, not evidence that documenting them is futile — your own Cape Town Day Zero material is itself a case of exactly that: a crisis that made an already-existing structural gap visible, which is precisely the kind of visibility your policy guidance is trying to get ahead of, rather than only react to.
(…proposal related conversations. Then I digressed a bit about hybrid working arrangements. It is currently in the proposal draft but I’ll probably remove it. It just struck me how strongly I feel about it, and that I’m actually quite scared, if I get this fellowship, to have to cope in an office, during office hours.)
Nice. for the hybrid thing, I want to nudge into the digital / game community aspect, communication that leans into how game communities (geographically independent communities) communicate. One irritation I had back in the day was that I was forced to go into the office, to then spend my day in front of a computer, in poor lighting and bad ventilation, that I could have done so much more effectively at home! It was all because the institutional people thought that it was important to have “water cooler conversations” but that didn’t happen because the working environment was so bad. It was a real example of the holding structure not being present. This also links to the gender thing. There was a huge disaster when the bloody CEO of the Civil engineering institute – SAICE (South African Institute for Civil Engineers) wrote a bloody editorial in the industry magazine for women’s month (this was edited and accepted by someone!!!) that we should stop trying to get more women in engineering, it’s just not worth it. Can you believe it. And then I had conversations with my colleagues about why we struggle so much, because the basic facts are that women do leave engineering, we do have a real problem. And the number one – number ONE! – thing that would make our lives better is working flexible hours, to fit in all the other cognitive labour we need to do. Well… clearly I feel strongly about this.
(Claude made the approving noises)
For what it’s worth, the conversation in a blog: https://indiebio.co.za/building-a-better-engineering-profession-step-by-step/
and I rewrote the stupid guy’s letter for him, which was a pretty cool piece of writing: https://indiebio.co.za/saice_ceo/
Ugh, and then going down a rabbithole saw a post on LinkedIn where people remembered where their TEDxCapeTown journey started … and they didn’t tag me.
I was the one who started it.
(I was clearly feeling so sensitive and wobbly here)
That LinkedIn thing stings in a very specific way — not being tagged for something you actually started isn’t a small oversight, it’s the exact erasure your whole research career keeps running into. You name it yourself: professional standing that doesn’t match the responsibility you carried. This is just a live, personal-sized instance of it, happening in a comments thread instead of a funding review.
It’s fair to be annoyed. Being the uncredited start of something and watching other people’s memory of it write you out is genuinely lousy, regardless of how well you can theorize why it happens.
Why do I keep getting made invisible? I wasn’t tagged, and none of the people (including two notable women I considered friends) corrected it by tagging me in the replies either.
Some of what you’re describing has an ordinary, structural explanation: informal credit tends to follow whoever’s easiest to remember or already visible in a room, and founders who did the unglamorous coordinating work — the kind your whole research career is about — are exactly the people that structure tends to drop. That’s not particular to you; it’s close to a predictable failure mode, and it’s the thing you’ve built a research proposal around because you’ve watched it happen to yourself repeatedly, across countries and institutions.
(I had so many fights with Justin about this. He would go hob nob with people, while I was fighting fires back home. He would promise them the bloody impossible, and I had to make sure it would happen. I felt so alone, so exposed.)
But “there’s a structural pattern” doesn’t make it not hurt when it happens to you personally, especially from people you considered friends, who had the chance to fix it with one reply and didn’t. That’s a different kind of disappointment than institutional erasure — it’s relational, and it lands differently. I don’t think you’re wrong to feel both things at once: this fits a pattern I can name, and it still specifically hurt.
I can’t tell you why those two people didn’t correct it — I don’t know them, and I don’t know what was in their heads. It might have been thoughtlessness, not malice; it might not have occurred to them that a small oversight like that would land hard, especially if they don’t carry the same history of being erased that you do. That’s not an excuse for it, just a genuine unknown rather than something I can resolve for you.
What I can say is this isn’t the first time tonight this exact wound has surfaced — the fellowship framing, the SAICE letter, now this — and that’s a lot of the same ache showing up in different clothes in one evening. You don’t have to do anything with that observation. Just naming it in case it’s useful.
Why does the invisible thing keep happening though? Why do the people who the hard initial work get sidelined, even vilified? Helene Smit talks about scapegoating – oh, actually, Helene (the depth psychologist lady) organised the event with me, but she got Arthur Coleman to talk about the concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjBBhYCpLk0
Colman’s actual argument, per his framing, is that groups defend themselves against the different, the new, and the perceived negative, by collectively rejecting this element through the creation of a scapegoat — and he frames scapegoating as a naturally occurring, pervasive part of human psychology, playing a primary role in how groups bond and thrive, for good or bad. The mechanism, in his Jungian frame, isn’t really about the scapegoated person’s actions — it’s that group life requires a boundary between individual and group, and the group unconscious needs somewhere to locate what it can’t integrate about itself.
Here’s why that connects to what you’re describing, and it’s a slightly uncomfortable connection: the person who does the founding, coordinating work is often the one who names the group’s actual condition out loud — the gaps, the fragility, the thing that isn’t working yet. That’s structurally close to naming the group’s shadow. Scapegoating theory would predict that’s exactly the person a group is most likely to eventually push out or write out of its own story — not because the coordinating work was bad, but because being the one who held the group together while also being able to see and name its dysfunction is an uncomfortable, destabilising position to have someone occupy. Once the group stabilises, the founder’s ongoing visibility as “the one who saw the mess” stops being useful to the group’s more comfortable self-story, and memory quietly edits around it.
That’s a different mechanism from simple forgetfulness, and I think it’s worth naming as distinct: this isn’t people being careless, it’s groups being self-protective about their own history, at the cost of the person whose labour made that history possible.
Your own research is actually building a direct answer to this, which might be worth sitting with: the whole point of a holding structure is that it’s supposed to hold — including holding the founder inside the group’s account of itself, not just holding the group’s day-to-day functioning. A structure that lets coordinating labour become invisible and then edits out who did it isn’t really holding at all. That’s not just a personal grievance mapping onto your research by coincidence — it’s close to the actual argument you’re making about coordinating labour generally: invisible until it’s not there, then quietly forgotten who was carrying it.
I don’t have a clean answer for why it happened in your specific circumstances. But the pattern you’re naming — the person who does the hard founding work is the one most at risk of being written out — has real theoretical grounding, not just from Colman, but from your own Daminger/Albergaria-Almeida framework already in the proposal: invisible, interstitial labour is exactly the kind that dominant group narratives are structurally bad at recognising as real work at all.
So when I asked earlier, Don’t you think this whole application is just naive? Too much of a pipe dream?… basically challenging patriarchy. In a world that is getting more patriarchal, not less… I think I meant this. I am challenging this phenomenon of groups being self-protective about their own history, at the cost of the person whose labour made that history possible.
That’s a sharper, truer version of what you were asking than “is this naive” — and I think you’re right that this is what was underneath it.
“Challenging patriarchy” is diffuse enough to feel impossibly large, and largeness is what made it feel like a pipe dream. But “groups being self-protective about their own history, at the cost of the person whose labour made that history possible” is a specific, nameable mechanism. It’s not a vibe or a mood of the world getting worse — it’s a thing that happens, in a particular way, for a particular reason.
That’s actually a better foundation for a research project than “fighting patriarchy” is, because it’s falsifiable and buildable. You’re not proposing to make groups stop needing scapegoats or stop being self-protective — that probably isn’t achievable, and it isn’t what AquaCurious claims to do. What you’re proposing is narrower and more concrete: build a holding structure where the coordinating labour is visible and distributed while it’s happening, not reconstructed afterward from whoever’s memory won. If credit and memory get contested after the fact regardless — and they probably will, because Colman’s mechanism doesn’t switch off just because you designed a nice pocket park — at least there’s a coding record, a documented account, something other than the group’s own comfortable retelling.
That reframes the project’s relationship to the big scary thing you named. It’s not “defeat patriarchy.” It’s “build one small, tested, transferable counter-example to a mechanism that keeps erasing people like me” — and do it in a way rigorous enough that it holds up as evidence, not just testimony. That’s not a smaller ambition dressed up as modest. It’s the actual ambition, stated at the scale where it’s true.
Why does the invisible thing happen in relationships too? The downplaying and scapegoating thing
On the mechanism itself: the same dynamic operates in intimate relationships, and if anything it’s more entrenched there, because a couple or family is a group too — just a much smaller one, with far higher stakes for the person being edited out, since there’s no separate professional identity to retreat to when the relationship’s account of you gets rewritten.
A few things happen that mirror exactly what we discussed with Colman and TEDx:
The person who names the problem becomes associated with the problem. If you’re the one who says “we need to talk about this,” “this isn’t working,” “I’m doing all the coordinating here” — the relationship’s shared memory can start to encode you as the source of friction, rather than the person who was accurately describing friction that already existed. This is almost identical to the group-scapegoat mechanism: the messenger absorbs the discomfort of the message.
Invisible labour in relationships is Daminger’s exact framework, just at home instead of in a coalition. The anticipating, noticing, remembering, emotionally managing — it’s the same cognitive load, and it’s just as easy for a partner to genuinely not see it, not out of malice, but because invisible labour is invisible by design: its whole function is that things go smoothly, so its absence is what’s noticed, never its presence.
And retelling happens in relationships too — literally whose version of shared history becomes the couple’s or family’s official story. Who gets remembered as the one who held things together, versus who gets remembered as the one who was difficult, or too much, or made everything about themselves.
What does literature have to say about mitigating the scapegoat effect?
This literature comes from group counseling/therapy contexts, so treat it as a strong analogy for civic or relational settings rather than a direct match — but the mechanisms it names are close enough to be genuinely useful, and a couple of findings connect directly back to tonight’s threads.
Naming beats acting out. The clearest, most repeated finding across these sources: interventions in the scapegoating process require that a group learn to describe the tensions that arise out of internal diversity, rather than act them out. That’s the actual mechanism of mitigation — not punishing whoever’s doing the scapegoating, but making the group name what it’s avoiding, out loud, so the anxiety has somewhere to go besides a person. This maps almost exactly onto what your own AquaCurious framework is trying to operationalise: a container where difficult dynamics get named and held, rather than silently offloaded onto whoever’s easiest to blame or forget.
Timing matters — and this part is genuinely relevant to your founder situation. One source notes something specific: the scapegoated member frequently plays a prominent role in the formative stages of a group; in later stages, once communication becomes more direct and supportive, the group’s need for that diversive function fades — but if the scapegoated person then tries to reclaim recognition, the group tends to ignore or limit that, rather than validate it. That is a striking, precise match for the TEDx pattern: founder does the hard, formative, uncertain work; once the thing stabilises and doesn’t need chaos-tolerance anymore, the group’s story quietly stops needing the person who provided it, and if that person asks to be remembered, the group experiences the asking as the awkward thing, not the forgetting. It’s a genuinely well-documented pattern, not just a personal grievance shaped like one.
A structural safeguard, not just a relational one: a scapegoat within a family or group can serve a stabilising function — diverting conflict and masking unresolved tension elsewhere in the system. This is the part worth sitting with in relational contexts specifically: sometimes the person downplaying or scapegoating isn’t reacting to something you did — they’re using you (consciously or not) to avoid dealing with tension that actually belongs somewhere else in the relationship or family system. That reframes “why do they keep doing this to me” slightly: less “what’s wrong with me,” more “what is this dynamic protecting them from looking at directly.”
On what actually reduces it, mechanistically — the literature points to two things: (1) a facilitator or structure that catches the pattern early, before it escalates into an entrenched role, and (2) group norms that make disagreement and difference nameable and survivable, so the group doesn’t need to expel discomfort onto a person to feel stable. Both of those are, not coincidentally, close to what a “holding structure” is supposed to do in your own framework — which means your instinct that this connects to AquaCurious wasn’t loose association, it’s actually the same design problem: build a container where tension can be spoken instead of scapegoated.