Located in iniva on the site of Chelsea College of Arts, the Stuart Hall Library (SHL) is an excellent resource, holding collections which centre art and theory publications from the Global Majority, African, Asian, Caribbean, Polynesian, Latinx, and Diaspora perspectives. This collection is woefully underused by BA Fine Art cohorts and not well promoted to students.
For the intervention, I would like to organise a sign-up workshop designed for BA Fine Art 2nd year students. This intervention is designed to introduce a group of students to this collection, in addition to teaching diversity-conscious research skills through persona pedagogy.
Context and positionality
I am approaching this intervention as a white woman whose teaching practice spans academic and library departments. As such, I am both enthusiastic about expanding library engagement, while sensitive that this collection specifically caters to identities which were historically excluded from these institutional spaces.
At Chelsea my role on the BA Fine Art team is largely as a theory tutor, working with final year students as they research and write their dissertations. This academic year just passed, I tried to bridge my library and academic teaching by setting up the introductory 1:1’s in the library. At the end of our discussion, I demonstrated how to use the catalogue and highlighted physical resources in the collection. I found that this gave the students a sense of agency in locating references which are often mentioned in quick succession in tutorials, while breaking the first barrier to effective library use: entering the often daunting space. This is the basis for my intervention.
The historic exclusion of groups from academic libraries has led to a sustaining of what Pierre Bourdieu describes as a ‘fish out of water’ (hysteresis). This concept is explored in ‘Black People Don’t go to Galleries’ where David Osa Amadasun discusses the gallery, “traditionally seen as being a white middle-class milieu, associated with social, cultural and educational benefits” (2013). Both this sentiment and the role of cultural capital is transferable to the library space. This is expressed by Hankins et al in ‘Why Are All The Librarians Of Color? The Experiences Of People Of Color In Academia’ as a loop of exclusion which compounds as people of colour are less likely to see themselves represented either as library workers or within the collection, leading to an unwelcoming environment.
I am sensitive that by bringing a group of students to iniva, I may be unintentionally increasing the workload of the staff, most of whom are black women. This is often the case – as outlined by Reni Eddo-Lodge in ‘Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race’ (and many other thinkers, such as Shirley Anne Tate) where she highlights that the weight of educating white folk is more often than not placed on the shoulders of marginalised groups (2017). As such, one of my key concerns while designing the workshop has been to balance the workload imposed on the staff while not eclipsing the right to frame the collection in their own voice.
Persona Pedagogy, as outlined by Cate Thomas (2022), has been key in formulating this workshop. What this approach entails requires the communication of another’s lived experience which can be engaged with and understood. She writes that a persona methodology “by virtue of communicating information through a fictional human character . . . could evoke empathy” (2022). It is my intention that by thinking through the complex lived experience of individuals through the library, that we can generate an empathetic understanding of their practice and their positionality.
The intervention
This will be a sign up workshop for a maximum of 14 students for BA Fine Art 2nd year students. The choice to limit the group size is both to physically accommodate the workshop, but also to increase psychological safety through intimacy; generating a sense of togetherness.
Pre-task: watch John Akomfrah’s ‘The Stuart Hall Project’ (2013). This will be screened the week before at AV Cultures, a film series I curate.
Morning:
I will introduce the structure of the day and start a conversation about the ethics of the space, the notion of psychological safety, and the power of imagination. It is key that students feel comfortable to engage in the workshop in an exploratory way, where no one is made to feel vulnerable. While this is a skills based workshop, the exercise is speculative and requires imaginative engagement in order for it to simultaneously function as an empathy generator.
A tour and introduction will be given by a librarian from iniva who will talk about the collection, how it came to be, and how the space is used. Guidance will be given on using the library catalogue.
Students will be introduced by me to several figures whose material feature in the collection.
They are:
- Octavia Butler
- Isaac Julien
- Walid Raad
- John Akomfrah
- Marsha P. Johnson
- King Tubby
- bell hooks
Students will work in pairs to research their chosen cultural figure for the morning and assemble a digital dossier, in order to formulate a more complete and complex understanding of their identities, interests and positionality. These figures have been chosen to cover a range of disciplines, ethnicities, gender identities and having associated resources in the library.
We will discuss ways in which their positionality and their research interests/outputs intersect.
Afternoon:
Students continue in their pairs to imagine and compile a reading list for their chosen figure. I will show them the existing reading lists produced by SHL and make suggestions on how they might narrow down the list to address a particular moment in their subject’s life or career. They will be required to include the range of resources available, including special collection material, audiovisual material, journal articles, artist books and theoretical texts.
We will then regroup and share our findings. I hope that naturally, this discussion can be brought to a conversation about the power dynamic of the library/archive.
Post-workshop:
It would be great if the reading lists could be added to the SHL public reading lists on their catalogue. Students will be able to sign-up for a free membership to the library and be able to enjoy this calm, more inclusive space at their leisure.
Considerations: hopeful outcomes & potential challenges
Outcomes:
- Students should feel more confident in using (any) library or archive spaces for their own research. I want to frame the SHL as a collection which can be widely utilised not just for research specific areas, but as a collection which can help formulate a diverse reading list. I want to ensure that the students are made aware of the wide range of resources, opening up a conversation about different ways of engaging with research, reiterating that anything you engage with critically is research.
- Students will develop knowledge about their chosen figure and speculatively associated ideas through engaging with physical material
- Students will have participated in a peer learning exercise through role-playing which has the potential to develop a more empathetic understanding of different experiences in different contexts while not making individuals feel vulnerable.
Challenges:
- How to overcome the risk of stereotyping that can come with using the persona pedagogy methodology? Thomas writes: “One limitation of a persona approach (and living the lived experiences of others) is the potentially a stereotypical view (or assumption) that individuals with similar characteristics face the same barriers, issues and complexities” (2022). I hope this risk has been reduced by using real people (as opposed to fictional characters) and by dedicating half the workshop to researching this individual to better connect with the nuances of their identity and by addressing an intersectional approach.
- How to get a diverse range of students to sign up? One of the motivations of the intervention is to show non-white students that there is a dedicated space – intellectual and physical – in which their cultural and racial background is reflected and discussed in an academic context.
- Reinforcing the action of critical reflection. In Thomas’ framework, she reiterates that with the absence of this critical mode, “individuals are unable to explore their own positionality and that of others, and unable to learn new ways of thinking and doing” (2022).
Reflection:
When I first encountered Persona Pedagogy, I was sceptical. On the one hand, I have a firm belief that fiction is itself an empathy generator and use my platform as the organiser of the film series as a tool to engage with diverse experiences. However, through developing this workshop, I have come to understand the importance of foregrounding intersectional positionality in these conversations. A discussion of intersectionality, as outlined by Kimberly Crenshaw in ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’ (1991) is an important ingredient in Persona Pedagogy exercises as it can build solidarity and deepens an empathetic understanding.
Developing this exercise has prompted me to really consider the idea of cultural capital and its role in social mobility. I have often taken for granted that my early introduction to cultural spaces has greatly contributed to the formation of my identity – socially, professionally and intellectually. While Bourdieu’s work was key in this field, he largely addresses this in male white working class contexts while omitting discussion of the way in which this is compounded in POC working class communities or women. Here, Amadasun’s article (mentioned above) and ‘What’s Race Got to Do With It? Disrupting Whiteness in Cultural Capital Research’ (2023) has been useful in unpacking this phenomenon.
Bibliography
Amadasun, D.O. , Black People Don’t Go to Galleries: The reproduction of taste and cultural value. Available: https://mediadiversified.org/2013/10/21/black-people-dont-go-to-galleries-the-reproduction-of-taste-and-cultural-value/#:~:text=Tiredness%2C%20financial%20pressures%20and%20a,to%20avoid%20the%20gallery%20visit.
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 June 2024]
Bordieu, P. 1984, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts.
Chateigné, Y., Füchtjohann, D., Hoth, J., Miessen, M. & Schmid, L. 2016, The archive as a productive space of conflict, Sternberg Press, Berlin.
Chiang, S. (2016) Inclusive Pedagogy: Research & Practice Contributing to Policy. University of Edinburgh. [Online]. Available at: https://www.ed.ac.uk/files/atoms/files/electionbriefing7-inclusive-pedagogy-15-05-16.pdf
Crenshaw, K. 1991, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”, Stanford law review, vol. 43, no. 6, pp. 1241-1299.
Haraway, D. 1988, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 575-599.
Hooks, B. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
Gabriel, D. and Tate, S. (eds.) (2017) Inside the ivory tower: Narratives of women of colour surviving and thriving in British academia. London: UCL IOE Press.
Richards, B. N., Ceron-Anaya, H., Dumais, S. A., Mueller, J. C., Sánchez-Connally, P., & Wallace, D. (2023). What’s Race Got to Do With It? Disrupting Whiteness in Cultural Capital Research. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 9(3), 279-294. https://doi.org/10.1177/23326492231160535
Thomas, C 2022, ‘Overcoming identity threat: Using persona pedagogy in intersectionality and inclusion training’, Social Sciences, vol. 11, no. 6, 249. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci11060249
Williams, B. (2017) ‘Where Are All The Librarians Of Color? The Experiences Of People Of Color In Academia: Rebecca Hankins and Miguel Juárez, Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2015.’, Journal of Access Services, 14(1), p. 41. doi: 10.1080/15367967.2017.1289093.