About
title: About description: About emsenn, relationality, and this public research site.
About
My name is emsenn. My given name is Morgan Sennhauser, but I publish and work as emsenn. My preferred honorific prefix is M., and I use they, them, and theirs as my pronouns.
I am an independent Lakota theorist, mathematician, and systems researcher. My work studies relationality: the way relating itself structures mathematics, knowledge, technology, governance, land, history, and life.
The shortest version is this:
I build formal languages for relations that existing fields do not know how to see.
Sometimes that produces mathematics. Sometimes it produces essays, specifications, curricula, software architectures, public research notes, or practical advice. The form changes. The work is consistent: I try to find the objects, relations, invariants, contradictions, dynamics, and failure modes that let a domain become thinkable on its own terms.
This website is the public record of that work.
Why this site exists
I work outside the normal institutional routes. I am not writing from a university department, corporate lab, foundation program, or formal research appointment. I am writing from lived experience as a Lakota land steward, public-web researcher, systems builder, and person trying to understand what becomes possible when relation is treated as primary.
That matters because much of the work here does not fit the containers people usually use to recognize serious thought.
A theorem may appear next to a public essay. A mathematical specification may grow out of a note about artificial intelligence, military doctrine, music, land, accounting, religion, games, or the Web. A page may be a finished essay, a working definition, a formal object, a field note, or a fragment that will only make sense after nearby pages are read.
This is not accidental. The site is built as a research corpus, not as a résumé or publication list. It exists so the work can accumulate in public, retain its relations, and remain available for others to inspect, reuse, challenge, and build from.
Relationality
The central question of my research is:
What changes when relation, rather than the isolated individual object, is treated as primitive?
In social and political life, this means asking how responsibility, harm, care, governance, memory, land, obligation, and history move through relations rather than through the inherited abstractions of sovereignty, individuality, possession, and property.
In mathematics, it means asking how predication, knowledge, contradiction, time, agency, and structure can be treated not as interpretations placed on top of already-given objects, but as machinery from which objects become intelligible.
In technology, it means asking what knowledge systems, artificial agents, public websites, archives, protocols, and software infrastructures are actually doing when they store, transform, authorize, retrieve, or act on information.
I am not using mathematics as metaphor for social life, and I am not using Indigenous relationality as decoration for technical systems. I am trying to study how relation becomes structure.
Research practice
A lot of my work starts from a small mismatch.
Why does an institution’s language sound accountable while avoiding responsibility?
Why do artificial-agent systems talk as if the language model is the agent, when the real structure involves tools, memory, authorization, state change, and provenance?
Why do knowledge systems break around contradiction, when real knowledge is always partial, distributed, temporal, and contested?
Why can a fictional or ludic world remain recognizable across retellings, playthroughs, simulations, and interpretations?
Why are Laplacian constructions appearing across so many fields, and what moduli-theoretic structure is hiding under that recurrence?
From there I usually formalize the situation. I look for the primitive objects, the admissible relations, the transformations, the invariants, the closure operations, the obstructions, and the ways the structure can fail.
That formalization may become a theorem, a theory, a public essay, a software specification, a curriculum, a glossary entry, a research direction, or a practical advisory frame.
The form varies. The motion is consistent.
Current mathematical work
One current branch develops a theory of spatiotemporal knowledge.
The basic problem is that real knowledge systems are not clean two-valued databases. They are partial, contradictory, distributed, and temporal. They accumulate from many sources, change over time, disagree with themselves, and still need to support action.
This work begins from predication: claims of the form “subject relates to object under predicate.” From there it builds predication fiber algebras, bilattice-valued reasoning, hyperdoctrine structure, settling dynamics, Priestley duality, cohomology, moduli, and realizability. The goal is to describe knowledge as something that settles through time under relation, contradiction, inference, and accumulation.
Another current branch studies Laplacianization and the moduli of Laplacianizers.
The basic question is how choices of inner product, boundary operator, chain complex, and Laplacian structure produce moduli spaces. Recent notes derive stabilizer and codimension formulas for strata indexed by multipartition data, closure-poset structure for those strata, and extensions of classical eigenvalue-stratification ideas into chain-complex and multi-operator settings.
These are not isolated flagship projects. They are recent examples of the normal pattern of this site: take a domain whose structure feels under-described, formalize its relations, and follow the consequences.
Other research threads
The same pattern appears throughout the site.
In artificial intelligence and software, I study agents, tools, skills, memory, policy, authorization, provenance, executable documents, and closure-compatible state change. My agential-semiotic work treats agents not as mysterious language-model personalities, but as structured operators acting over partial states under constraints.
In information theory, I have explored stability, divergence minimization, Fisher geometry, curvature, and mutual information as ways to describe learning, alignment, coherence, and malfunction.
In narrative and game studies, I have developed categorical accounts of reproducible worlds: worlds that remain coherent across retelling, replay, simulation, and interpretation.
In public theory and institutional critique, I study how systems maintain internal coherence while losing contact with their environment; how public language performs accountability without producing remedy; and how inherited categories prevent certain relations from being seen.
In music, religion, philosophy, land work, and public-web practice, I return to the same concern: relation is not an ornament added to things after they exist. Relation is one way things become what they are.
What this site is
emsenn.net is a personal library, public research vault, and digital garden.
It contains polished essays, informal logs, mathematical notes, formal specifications, definitions, curricula, references, and working fragments. Some pages are stable enough to cite. Some are rough. Some are wrong in ways that remain useful because they show where the work was at a given time.
The site is written as a living corpus rather than a finished publication series. Pages are connected through relations, backlinks, tags, domains, and references because information is never self-grounding. Every claim lives in relation to other claims, histories, uses, and limits.
Nothing here should be read as final authority. It should be read as public research in motion.
How to read it
If you are new here, start with the polished essays and letters, then move outward into the library, terms, specifications, and working notes.
The mathematical material is often written as working theory rather than introductory exposition. It may move quickly. It may assume context from nearby pages. It may be more like a public research notebook than a textbook.
The informal notes matter too. This site does not strictly separate finished thought from the conditions that produced it. A short note, a definition, a theological aside, a software specification, and a theorem may all belong to the same line of inquiry.
The site rewards wandering. Many of the important arguments live in the relations between pages.
Work with me
I am available for limited private research and advisory work.
I am most useful to people facing problems that do not fit cleanly inside one field: artificial intelligence and governance, knowledge systems and accountability, Indigenous relationality and data infrastructure, public communication and institutional trust, land and technology, mathematics and philosophy, or other situations where inherited categories have stopped working.
Common formats include private research calls, written correspondence, field-formalization memos, expert briefings, and review of a theory, project, manuscript, system, archive, or public knowledge presence.
I am not a general-purpose consultant, agency, or implementation vendor. I am best brought in when the problem is still conceptually unstable: when people can feel that something matters, but the available language keeps making it smaller, flatter, or false.
Support and reuse
Most of this site is public and licensed for reuse because I want the work to circulate. The site is built as a public asset, not a private content silo.
Content on this site is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Reuse is encouraged with attribution.
If the work is useful to you, you can support it through Ko-fi. Support helps make it possible for me to continue publishing research, maintaining the site, and developing the mathematical and practical apparatus around relationality.
Contact
You can contact me at emsenn@emsenn.net.
I live on the North Shore of Gitchigumi, in Minnesota, on the homeland of the Ojibwe, who never ceded sovereignty.