Cross-Sensory Expressive Patterns: On the Continuity of Organization Across Its Changing Realizations

This paper introduces cross-sensory expressive patterns as a descriptive unit for tracing continuity across changing bodily, sensory, and material realizations. A vignette, drawn from two years of therapy with a seven-year-old autistic boy and documented in clinical notes, follows an organization identified across three activities. In each, a body part travels along a surface while maintaining contact, then moves into a pressure-marked culmination, enacted through tongue, foot, or hands. The organization becomes interactionally consequential when the therapist answers its timing, direction, and intensity through another form, and the child alters his activity in response. Variation is the medium in which continuity becomes perceptible and available for participation. Drawing on vitality, co-regulation, participatory sense-making, and developmental accounts of participation, we distinguish real-time changes in what becomes possible from broader changes in capacity. The vignette offers a developmental question: can continuity through variation alter what participation becomes across encounters and over time?