This exercise was created by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective as a way to practice your diffractive reasoning. It goes against the idea of a single, coherent and self-transparent identity (the Cartesian subject) and invites you to see yourself as a dynamic being with contradictory thoughts and emotions (we become the prism ourselves). You can use diffractive reasoning to understand inner reality with much more nuance.

On your own bus, there are passengers you know and passengers you don’t know. There are passengers who are drawing your attention, others who want to hide from you. In this space, any encounter between individuals will be an encounter of “buses”. The point of this worksheet is to learn to observe and sit with the people on your bus, without judgement.