IP unit 2: Reflective Report

Mwala Káa – Nevermind in Newa language.

An act as though to allow boiling water to simmer down. To accept.

Keepa Maskey (MAPS, 2022-24)

Introduction

I am currently making a film called Changes in light about decolonising library spaces. I am working in collaboration with librarian Marilyn Clarke, who brings her lived experience as a queer person of Jamaican heritage to the project. One of the fears I bring to this work, and my work with global majority students within the white spaces of academia, is that despite my anti-racist intentions, my residual racism remains evident. Robert Jenson describes this fear so clearly when he asks,

‘[w]hat if non-white people look at us and can see it? [..] What if they can look past our anti-racist vocabulary and sense that we still don’t really know how to treat them as equals?’ (Jenson 2005:7).

I recently presented some research at Cambridge University and I was the only white person in the room.  As a teenager, I used to waitress in these exact rooms for the white, male fellows. Here, my white privilege intersected with my single-parent, working-class background (I can pass easily as middle class until I meet the middle class). I had simultaneous, confusing glimmers of insight into what it is to be outside the normative frames of reference, whilst also at the centre of Oxbridge privilege.

In a project called Circling (again) working with people with chronic pain – I ended one session by running as fast as I could because I needed to relish the fact that I could.

One of my students has recently shifted from ‘she’ to ‘they’. If I forget, I feel disappointed with myself and then resentful if my menopausal fog is perceived as a cis-gender lack of care.

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One of the risks of doing the kind of positional reflection above within teaching contexts is that students of colour may be called on as race experts (Garrett 2024, Sadiq 2023) and feel that other elements of their identity are less valued. In the 2nd cohort of MA Performance: Society (MAPS), a black student, who embraced post-racial perspectives, made it clear that they were not interested in focusing on racial agendas within class. I wanted to bring intersectional EDI work into the room, but recognised the energy this can require from racialised minority students. I am also aware of how damaging avoidant behaviours can be, such as those articulated in the ‘Room of silence’ documentary (Sherrid 2016) where tutors’ reticence to engage with race-based work is seen to reinforce the whiteness of the space. My solution, drawing on embodied pedagogies (Clughen 2023), pedagogy of discomfort (Boler 1999, Head 2014), and critical pedagogy (Helguera 2011, Billings, 2019) was to let the materials, anecdotes, and movement practices lead to positional reflection. The intervention I reflect upon in this writing hopes to work in the same way, bringing issues into relief through materials and lived experiences rather than an issue-led approach.

Context

MAPS is a low-residency course focused on socially engaged practice. In its first year, only one student used English as a first language. Language brings intersectional issues to the fore, privileging certain knowledges over others. A student called Robert Deguzman wrote that ‘western vocabularies [relating to social practice] do not have any purchase in my local intellection and are not part of our way of doing and seeing’ (Deguzman 2024). He went on to use Filipino words/concepts to articulate his relationship, as a member of the Filipino diaspora, to socially engaged practice. The word Pakikipagkapwa, for example, challenges individualist notions of Western subjectivity by offering a definition of self tied to a recognition of one’s place with others.

It’s challenging when courses like MAPS, which aim to offer inclusive and situated learning opportunities, still rely on knowledge that pertains to be universal and detached from lived intersectional experiences. As Garrett observes, simply decolonising reading lists does not disrupt the structures of whiteness (Garrett 2024:10), and academia continues to marginalise through its privileging of certain knowledge forms, particularly those rooted in written, Western traditions that often devalue embodied or experiential knowledge.

As a dance researcher, my practice is embodied, yet its validation depends on its articulation in words. While I use performance and visual practice in my teaching, the course’s primary mode of exchange remains English and word-based, reinforcing the exclusions the course seeks to dismantle. I cannot change MAPS unit descriptions and criteria. What I can change is whether students feel their ways of knowing can find a place of value within these unit frames. 

Ways of knowing 

I plan to build on Robert’s work, influenced by the In Other Words project (Ilie n.d),  by developing an intervention called Ways of knowing. Ways of knowing is a shared course dictionary that contains multiple ways of knowing that work to re/define socially engaged art from a decolonial and inclusive perspective.  The dictionary will hold different understandings of what social practice can be and is, for people on the course. It will be used in consecutive cohorts as a future resource for each new year.

Belonging

Ways of knowing could be used at the start and end of the course to build a sense of community. Students would add a word to the dictionary from their preferred language (regional, ideolects, slang, colloquial, formal, patois, private, technical) that resonates with their approach to socially engaged practice.

Challenging and enriching accepted ways of knowing

Students would be invited to examine key words within the unit description through the lens of their intersectional positionality. They could then offer words, images, or performances from their own socio-cultural lived understandings that resonate, challenge, and enrich the forms of knowledge foregrounded within the unit.

Please see Unit 2 Intervention plan post for more detail about the aims, form, and logistics of this intervention.

Reflection 

The original name of this intervention was In our own words. However, after noting Sadiq’s (2023) point about the way diversity is often homogenised within EDI work, I changed it to Ways of knowing to invite a multiplicity of experience and reduce a binary sense of polarity between student and institution.

Following tutor feedback, I expanded the emphasis from nationality-based language to other forms, such as queer slang, to invite a wider intersectional approach. I also expanded from solely language-based to practice-based entries in response to my peer group feedback. This creates more choice as an agent for inclusion, enabling neurodivergent students and those with specific learning differences to engage in multiple ways.

Current student feedback indicated the importance of avoiding a centre/periphery model where the unit keywords dictate the responses. This led to a version where students choose any words that are key to their situated practice.

‘‘I am also interested in this [intervention] not only as an artist, but also as a Ukrainian because my country was colonised by a neighbouring empire and this issue is echoed in the current war. ‘(Mariia Proshkovska, MAPS 2023-2025)

I currently have one Russian student and two Ukrainian refugees in the class. There is a risk, as Mariia’s feedback suggests, that focusing on different languages foregrounds difficult political contexts such as these. My sense is that it’s better to find space for these tensions within this contained practice, rather than not acknowledge them.

There is also a danger of exoticism in this intervention – where words in different languages come to represent an entire culture or are instrumentalised as a way of bringing western understandings into relief (Spivak 1988). One way of offsetting this is by keeping the resource moving and growing and inviting the students to decide how they want to use it.

Evaluation

As part of starting this work, I would ask the students how they would know if it was working. This discussion would allow us to work out ways of measuring it together.

I would be interested in whether this work increases the range of references and terminology in the classroom: if terms from different cultures became commonplace rather than ‘interesting’ in the work.

I would also want to ask students directly if this work affected their sense that their socio-cultural lived experiences were valued on the course.

Conclusion 

To refer back to the white fear I mentioned at the start, I am aware of the seductive power of mastery (Singh 2018) and how easily this kind of intervention becomes a display of my anti-racism rather than an act of anti-racism. I find Bradbury’s question ‘[h]ow do white people gain?’ (Bradbury 2020: 246) useful here because it helps me start from acknowledging my positionality in the space as a given I need to work from and with.

I wish I had started this kind of intervention earlier with the MAPS course, as my sense, from their reaction to it was that languages were an untapped resource that would have helped democratise the classroom.   As Odeniyi’s work (2022) on multilingualism and pedagogy makes clear, the linguistic diversity of students should be seen as a pedagogic resource. Sometimes, in my anxiety and ego as a teacher, I have a tendency to dominate the space and stay with what I know well: this would have helped.

References

Billings, S. (2019). Critical pedagogy. Salem Press Encyclopedia. Salem Press.

Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. Routledge.

Bradbury, A. (2020). A Critical Race Theory framework for education policy analysis: The case of bilingual learners and assessment policy in England. Race Ethnicity and Education, 23(2), 241–260. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2019.1599341

Clughen, L. (2023). ‘Embodiment is the future’: What is embodiment and is it the future paradigm for learning and teaching in higher education? Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 61(4), 735–747. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2023.2215226

Deguzman, R. (2024). Performing migration and memories of the ocean [Unpublished MA thesis, UAL].

Garrett, R. (2024). Racism shapes careers: Career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2024.2330861

Head, N. (2014). A “Pedagogy of Discomfort”? Experiential learning and conflict analysis in Israel–Palestine. Politics, 34(3), 263–274. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9256.12042

Helguera, P. (2011). Education for socially engaged art: A materials and techniques handbook. Jorge Pinto Books.

Ilie, C. (n.d.). In Other Words project. Institute of Other Ways. Retrieved May 26, 2025, from https://www.iowdictionary.org/project

Jensen, R. (2005). The fear of white people. In The heart of whiteness: Confronting race, racism and white privilege. City Lights Books. Retrieved from http://www.citylights.com/CLpub4th.html#4499

McIntosh, P. (1990). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Independent School, Winter 1990.

Odeniyi, V. (2022). Reimagining conversations [Podcast]. UAL Decolonising Arts Institute. https://www.arts.ac.uk/ual-decolonising-arts-institute/publications-and-podcasts/reimagining-conversations

Sadiq, A. (2023, March 2). Diversity, Equity & Inclusion: Learning how to get it right [Video]. TEDx Talks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4wz1b54hw

Sherrid, E. (Director). (2016). Room of silence [Documentary film]. Rhode Island School of Design. https://vimeo.com/161259012

Singh, J. (2018). Unthinking mastery: Dehumanism and decolonial entanglements. Duke University Press.

Spivak, G. (1988). ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ In Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271–313). Urbana: University of Illinois Press

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