A Simpler Wording Than ‘Positionality’ for Community Arts Facilitators
Many community artists around me avoid academic terms, that’s what got translating them to everyday language.
Recently I participated in a very engaging conference organized by Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Germany, with presenters mostly from UK (including a Welsh whom I pronounced her name incorrectly), Ontario Canada, and Germany.
Note: Community Arts is a term often used to include various forms of community-based participatory forms including music, dance and theatre.
I like the format of the conference. Participants watch the presentations on YouTube (highly recommended), we then enter zoom, and are put into separate rooms for discussion before convening to meet the presenter. For me, the theories and discussions went really well with the concurrent Asian Pacific Community Music Network conference based in HK, and I will probably have 2 pieces to write about it.
Finally getting to ‘Positionality’
This term came up in numerous discussions throughout the conference, but I would recommend these two videos by Dr. Kathleen Turner (Arts Practice Research: Exploring the identity of the Community Musician through song and story), and by Dr. Lee Higgins and Dr. Sarah-Jane Gibson (Where Ethnography and Community Music Connect: The Importance of Relationships) that focus on it.
Below is my own reflection of the idea of ‘Positionality’. I am writing it with ‘how do we train community artists’ in mind. And if I have not mentioned yet, my practice is highly integrated, and my own research has been to look for concepts and skills that are common among multiple art forms.
Less Scholarly Terms
During the discussion in the conference, I was thinking of how to bring this somewhat complicated concept to the facilitators and stakeholders we work with in Hong Kong, where critical engagement with the practice is still in its infancy.
As a result, I might skip this term altogether and say it in another way: Positionality is an awareness of ‘who i am’, ‘who they are’ and how that affects ‘how we are together’.
For Newcomers to the Practice
Flowing from the first idea, is that the people at the conference seem to have done at least a few dozen hours of facilitation. Whereas for audience who are much newer to the practice, they may not even be aware of tensions as a result of positionality. Therefore, I would use a more down to earth way to explain this tension.
If I were to speak with practitioners with intermediate experience, but are only beginning serious reflection of their work, I would probably say something like this to bring them into the wider discourse:
Positionality is an understanding of the positions (including social, cultural, political, economic, gender…) that is held by the facilitators, participants and various stakeholders in a community arts setting, and how that might affect the dynamic of the activity.
And for those showing strong interest, we can then talk about issues specific to our context.
(Readers should not feel that these are definitions of ‘positionality’, as there are likely nuances have been missed).
Positionality’ is contextual
Concepts such as positionality are powerful tools that give shapes and names to the problematic ways we may relate to others. But it is different in its manifestation in various settings. Unfairness in our society has been around from the very beginning, but it is slow for us as scholars to ‘demonstrate’ or even ‘proof’ it to a wider society that may or may not choose to acknowledge it.
Meanwhile, facilitators and various frontline workers deal with it everyday; often unwillingly or simply unaware that they are a part of evolving and new kinds of prejudice, power relationships, cultural appropriation. What tools do we have against the ever changing faces of injustice and inhumanness lurking in our systems, actions and daily imagination?
From the discussions in the conference, which resonate with so many other writings and sharings by experienced practitioners, I suggest the following professional attitude in overcoming ‘positionality’:
(Self)awareness, be respectful and have a kind of confident humility that turns ignorance into a opportunity to find connections.
