“Where you stand depends upon where you sit.”
-Nelson Mandela
“We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”
-Anais Nin
Self-reflection can help you better understand culture's impact on your life and work. Examining how, why, and where you are situated in relation to your work, also known as positionality, can reveal how it might influence your perspectives and behaviors.
As an individual, your culture, beliefs, value systems, and moral stances inform your ways of being, knowing, and doing, and this is fundamentally present in and inseparable from how you approach others and your work.
When you practice self-reflection, you pay attention to how you understand and make sense of your experiences and build knowledge. In turn, you notice the effect of your positionality on every step of a project and in every process.
One way you can practice self-reflection is by acknowledging and sharing your identity in a positionality statement, specifically in relation to your projects.
Positionality refers to your position in relation to the project or program you are working with. This includes the subject content you are examining, the population you are focused on, and the artistic mediums or research/evaluation methods you are implementing.
Your positionality is often shaped by race, place, culture, ethnicity, social class, age, gender, sexuality, language, religion, politics, and lived experience. It is important to note that some aspects of positionality are fixed (such as race) while others are subjective (such as political affiliations).
Our positionality is constantly evolving, as is the language we use to describe it.
A positionality statement is a written or oral declaration of awareness of your socially constructed position and the role that this position plays in the production of knowledge.
This is a testament to what you know and what you can and perhaps cannot know.
All these parts of yourself fundamentally impact your practices and presumptions. Your values are the foundation for:
No person, regardless of their role, can be 100% objective. Whether an artist or subject, student or teacher, researcher or participant, evaluator or end-user, funder or grantee, you filter what you see through the experiences you have had.
Your perspective, positionality, and background will affect the following:
It is an ethical duty to attend to your role(s) intentionally and mindfully in this process by establishing your positionality at the onset of a project and continuously engaging in self-reflection throughout the process.
By questioning, critically reflecting on, and stating your positionality, you can strengthen the validity of your methods and attend to the ethics of the process.
Use the following resource as a guide to examine your positionality.
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