ABSTRACT
The epigram comes from an interview that the author conducted with Perry during a day in which people hung out together as part of the project studying young people's social and spatial interactions. Perry's life was contextualized by cerebral palsy. Spatial competence is a concept that comes out of environmental and cognitive psychology in the 1970s and is used primarily to discern how well young people function in particular environments. Dispensation is a term that the author uses to suggest a connection with space that is simultaneously an affordance and an indulgence, which in tandem with the notions of participation and competence. Dispensation relates to concepts that arose from the beginnings of cognitive and environmental psychology in the 1970s and the work of Roger Barker on ecological psychology and James Gibson on environmental affordances. The author not in a position to say much about the soul, but the notion of public sensibilities certainly resonates with Jacques Ranciere's political aesthetics.
