As a white Australian who grew up on the ancestral lands of the Thunggutti/Dunghutti First Nations people, I acquired a questioning mind regarding dominant voices and fictionalised histories. This has shaped my pedagogical approach to the critical studies module I teach on the Art and Contemporary Craft BA and has enabled me to diversify content by expanding reading lists and including artists from the Global South. Following the race workshop on whiteness I was reminded of my Australian childhood context as a white person growing up in an indigenous town learning local indigenous historical ways alongside the curriculum designed through the British colonialist lens. When I moved to major global cities, I was surprised by the lack of exposure to Indigenous people and learning and early in my artistic career I felt compelled to make work about the systemic racism of Australia’s historical cultural propaganda imagery, which included the representation of Indigenous people. When my work was censored owing to my being white, I was confronted with my own ‘white progressive’ racism [DiAngelo in Amanpour & Co. 2020]. A behavioural example DiAngelo offers that echoed my racism was the separation of collective systematic racism from individual overt racism, framed as “goodness”, which DiAngelo extrapolates on in Nice Racism as causing ‘the most daily harm across race’ [DiAngelo, 2021]. The complexity of my experience attempting to draw attention to systemic racism consequentially led to my interest in the frameworks perpetuating the unconscious bias of white progressives, This context and experience informs the development of my intervention aimed at BA-level students who are white mature-aged middle-class women studying in the rural environment of West Sussex (West Dean College).
While West Dean College has an Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity Policy it only recently began collating data. There is no annual data report available online, which is an indication of the insulating structures protecting self-reflection of the impact of white dominance. The 2021 West Sussex Census revealed that 81% of the community is white and the remaining 19% ethnic diversity is primarily in Crawley (38.7 miles away from West Dean). Many of my West Dean students can be generalised as white progressives owing to being affluent and highly educated professionals. They range in faiths, which led me to initially present to my peer group an intervention in the form of a collaborative painting workshop that aesthetically explored Rekis’ (Rekis, 2023) notion of granting credibility to offer integrity that expands the maker and viewer’s worldviews. I proposed a day of activities that invited students to create “symbolic alphabets” of visible or hidden aspects of their identity. These symbols would be used to develop collaborative paintings that visually demonstrate Donna Haraway’s “Oddkin” concept [Yale, 2017] of differences acting together and Anna Tsing’s “contamination concept” [Tsing 2015] to show how identities develop under and through the exposure and impact of others. While my peers responded positively, they highlighted how the first activity creating a symbolic alphabet could be the whole workshop as it enabled the students to bring their lived experiences and background influences and offered deep self-reflection and identity exploration. After my peer group had a critical discussion about how the Channel 4 clip of the privilege walk [Channel 4, 2020] perpetuates systemic racism and shared as an alternative approach, Step Inside the Circle [Horstman, 2020] I read Thomas’ Persona Pedagogy (Thomas 2022) to consider how I might avoid “Identity Threat” [Thomas 2022, p. 1] in my intervention. Seeking further insight on how to sensitively approach sharing identities to mobilise peer-to-peer learning following my tutorial, I read the Intersectionality Walk Pack [Charles Sturt University 2021] which left me feeling deeply conflicted about instigating a cohort of white students to role-play identities that are dominated by whiteness in such an insulated environment as West Dean. On a visual level, all West Dean Fine Art teaching staff are white as are the students. Based on this extreme racial imbalance the risk of stereotyping while using Persona Pedagogy is too high. With no representation of individuals dominated by whiteness, the session would lack genuinely informed feedback vital for peer-to-peer learning and potentially further insulate an environment that avoids critiquing the implications of dominating white behaviour [Haviland, 2008].
Based on these reflections, I want the intervention to respond to West Dean’s white progressive racism in the context of their own “whiteness” by developing the student’s self-awareness and strengthening their artistic authenticity. I have developed my initial one-day practical workshop to shift focus from faith to “whiteness”. In response to my peer-group feedback highlighting the depth of the first activity of creating a symbolic alphabet, I have expanded on this idea to use it to reveal and critically analyse the impact of the racial domination of whiteness. At present the workshop includes three activity phases that are punctuated by critical reflection discussions to allow for “double-loop learning” [Thomas 2022 p.12] and respond to the power distribution across the group. Rather than use personas to create empathy towards others, the session aims to mobilise mark-making and symbols to act out unconscious behavioural gestures that can be critically reflected on, discussed and changed. To instil equality across tools and materials, the same size brushes will be distributed, and pre-mixed colours will be restricted to a tonal range of one colour and white.
The first phase focuses on developing students’ symbolic language using mind-maps, and Venn diagrams to create symbols. The second phase focuses on impact (dominance and dominated) using collaborative timed exercises inviting each student to begin painting one of their symbols and pass to the left, to respond to another student’s painted symbol with a painted element of their own. The final phase focuses on changing the behaviour of gestures to evoke different symbolic interactions. Each phase risks an “Identity Threat” and students will be reminded not to disclose the symbolic meaning as “not knowing” is vital to the behavioural gestures displayed in the activities. An example of the Hobo Code Alphabet [Berensohn, 2023] will be used to demonstrate how the symbols can represent a range of private messages. Students will be asked to note the stages or interactions that evoke discomfort, which will be discussed in the critical reflection stage. The discomfort related to power dynamics revealing themselves will initiate the reflective discussions which I have structured based on DiAngelo’s method of receiving feedback gracefully, reflecting, and changing the behavioural gesture. The discussions will focus on using the discomfort and inequalities demonstrated in mark-making as metaphoric social behavioural thoughts and actions. An example of this might be guiding the students to identify where their mark-making has dominated or has been dominated owing to not valuing the mark of another’s, resulting from an attitude of “knowing” importance (being told), rather than granting credibility to offer integrity to the unfamiliar and unknown. Another example might be guiding the students to identify an overlooked mark that can be highlighted without dominating it or creating marks that support the marks of others without drawing attention to their mark-making.
The idea of the session is partly for the students to gain knowledge of themselves, based on what they think they know, what is revealed through their gestures, how their gestures interact with others to create collective gestures, and how they adopt gestural changes to change the behavioural gesture and attitude. The outcome will include a series of collaborative paintings responding to whiteness vicariously through identity. The nature of the collaborative paintings shared authorship aims to visually protect against “identity threat” while allowing a critically reflective analysis of white identity politics by addressing and holding feelings of discomfort through the compositional techniques and methods applied. I plan to run the workshop on the level 6 programme that includes a cohort of returning deferred students joining a continuing cohort of students in October / November and run it again with the level 5 programme, including any necessary changes on reflection.
Within my practice I am interested in the power of “not knowing” and how it grants space for gestures related to unconscious or unspeakable emotions to visually surface, which are rarely verbally coherent. More specifically, I am interested in the methodologies and gestural actions that are developed by marginalised artists to counter inequality, which contribute to identity frameworks. I intend to further explore this through a reading suggested in my peer group, On Not Knowing: How Artists Think by Fischer and Fortnum (2013).
Action Plan:
I will propose the session during the August planning meeting with my West Dean Course Leader for inclusion in my 2024-25 Level 6 Theory through Practice programme. The session can be an ice-breaker for the joining groups and also a precursor to developing their attitude towards approaching their dissertations. I will also propose it be included in the Level 5 2024-25 programme within the Art & Society module, which will support and inform their independent studio project.
Reference List:
Amanpour & Co. (2020) Excerpt from Robin DiAngelo’s 2018 interview with Michel Martin about White Fragility [Online]. Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx-gUfQx4-Q [accessed May 23 2024]
Berensohn, R. (2023). The Hobo Code: Their Secret Symbols Explained. Available at https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a25174860/hobo-code/ (accessed July 20, 2024)
Brown, A. D. (2021) Identities in and around organizations: Towards an identity work perspective. Human Relations 75 (7), pp.1205-1237.
Channel 4. (2020) The School That Tried to End Racism. [Online}. Youtube. 30 June. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I3wJ7pJUjg
Di Angelo, R. (2019) White Fragility (London: Penguin Random House)
Di Angelo, R. (2021) Nice Racism (London: Penguin Random House)
E-flux Readers. Issues. Contamination. Available at https://www.e-flux.com/readers/330686/contamination (Accessed May 23 2924)
Fisher, E and Fortnum, R (2013). On Not Knowing: How artists think. Black Dog Publishing: London.
Haraway, D. (1998). Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies Vol. 14 No. 3 (Autumn 1998) p. 575-599. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066(Accessed 21 Mar 2024)
Haviland, V. S. (2008) ‘“Things get glossed over”: Rearticulating the silencing power of whiteness in education,’ Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 59, No. 1, January/February 2008.
Thomas, C (2022). Overcoming Identity Threat: Using Persona Pedagogy in Intersectionality and Inclusion Training. Social Sciences 11: 249. Available at: researchoutput.csu.edu.au/en/publications/overcoming-identity-threat-using-persona-pedagogy-in-intersection
Thomas, C and McKinnon, C.M. (2021). Seeing and Overcoming the Complexities of Intersectionality. Charles Sturt University, Australian National University. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349068774_Seeing_and_Overcoming_the_Complexities_of_Intersectionality (accessed June 18 2024).
Tsing, A. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press.
Rekis, J. (2023). ‘Religious Identity and Epistemic Injustice: An Intersectional Account’, Cambridge University Press, Issue 38, pp. 779-800, Available at: 10.1017/hyp.2023.86
Yale University (2017). Donna Haraway, Making Oddkin: Story Telling for Earthly Survival. Available at: youtube.com/watch?v=z-iEnSztKu8 (Accessed 20 Nov 2023)
Wells, C. (2023) West Sussex County Council. JSNA. Public Health and Social Research Unit. Census 2021: Ethnicity, language and religion. Available at chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://jsna.westsussex.gov.uk/assets/pdf/census-briefing/WSX-census-21-ethnicity-briefing.pdf (accessed June 13 2024)