Abstract
In January 2019, at the annual Society for Social Work and Research conference, Affilia’s editors-in-chief and several members of the editorial board offered a preconference workshop entitled “Scholarship as Resistance: Critical Feminist Research and Writing.” The workshop arose from the editorial board’s commitment to fostering feminist scholarship in social work and provided a timely space to respond to recent attempts to delegitimize critical feminist scholarship in Affilia and other journals (see Park, Wahab, & Bhuyan, 2018). Focusing on feminist research and writing as a “politic of resistance,” the workshop reinforced the notion that critical feminist scholarship not only produces new and alternative knowledge but also “disrupts the usual, the accepted, the already legitimated” (Park et al., 2019, para. 1). Despite the fact that this was a preconference session requiring attendees to come a day earlier and pay an extra fee, the room was full and the audience was eager. Many workshop participants described a lack of guidance for engaging in conversations about critical feminist scholarship in their respective academic institutions and were ready for an opportunity to join a community of support to explore the workshop topics.
As a participating member of the editorial board, I developed and facilitated a module focused on self-reflexivity as a feminist methodological approach. Reflexivity is a practice that asks us, as scholars, to systematically consider power differentials within the context of research and knowledge production (Nicholls, 2009). Rose (1997) describes reflexivity as “a strategy for situating knowledges: that is, as a means of avoiding the false neutrality and universality of so much academic knowledge” (p. 306), which can “subjugate other knowledge and their producers” (p. 307). Self-reflexivity encourages us to ask questions that help us expose our hidden assumptions about our disciplinary stance (e.g., where is this work situated in the larger context of the social work discipline and/or in relationship to other disciplines), our research frameworks (e.g., what feminist theories inform my overarching project), our processes of inquiry (e.g., what questions am I asking to answer the research question and why), and our situated selves in relation to the project, questions, and community of focus (e.g., what is my racial, gender, class, ability identity, and how does it function in relation to power; Markham, 2017). Naming our positional identities as they are situated within the process of knowledge production is, therefore, an inherently political act; this centering inclusion of “elaborate specificity and difference” (Haraway, 1991, p. 190, as quoted in Rose, 1997, p. 307) is vital to critical feminist scholarship.
I led the self-reflexivity module with poetry, using a method designed to incite participants to engage deeply with their positional identities as it related to the workshop topic. As an Indigenous woman and arts-based methodologist, I know that arts-based approaches in research and teaching are powerful vehicles for exploring and engaging ways of knowing that are not often foregrounded in scholarship: empathy, self-awareness, and connection. As Leavy (2015) asserts, “The arts can uniquely educate, inspire, illuminate, resist, heal, and persuade” (p. ix). Women of color scholars have long contested the arbitrary nature of objective knowledge production by centering “theory in the flesh” (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981; Moraga, 2015), an epistemological stance that recognizes that the complex sociocultural, political, and economic circumstances of our lives produce realities that are different from those of dominant groups (Collins, 1989; Madison, 1993; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981) and, as such, deserve other forms of excavation and representation. These same scholars, in various forms, have embraced poetry and poetic analytics as these forms speak the language of our lives (Anzaldúa, 1987; Madison, 1993; Moraga, 2011, 2015).
From an Indigenous perspective, poetry is understood as a form of storytelling—an essential source of Indigenous knowledge—as it educates the body, mind, heart, and spirit (Archibald, 2008). Poetry can be an important tool for conveying meaning as it compresses the essence of lived experiences through using abstract, evocative, and sensory words (Furman, 2006; Furman, 2007; Furman, Langer, Davis, Gallardo & Kulkarni, 2007). Poetry can facilitate access to our embodied knowledge while we simultaneously abandon the dominant processes of meaning-making into which we have been socialized. Within the limited time of the workshop, we focused on creatively exploring and expressing our positional identities in relation to the idea of critical feminist scholarship as resistance.
Workshopping Self-Reflexivity Through Collective Poetics
In the summer of 1993, Kentucky Poet, Georgia Ellen Lyon, wrote a compilation of lists that detailed her life experiences (Kiyama, 2016). This compilation of lists became her first “Where I’m From” poem, beginning with the phrase “I am from clothespins, from Clorox and carbon tetrachloride” (Lyon, n.d.) and continuing with rich descriptions of sights, sounds, places, and people in abstract. This poem became the beginning of a writing exercise that has been used across diverse settings, both formal and informal, across the world (Kiyama, 2016; Lyon, n.d.). It inspires communities to reflect upon their lived experiences, past and present, concrete and abstract, and is the basis for which I developed the activity shared in our workshop. Paired with the frame of critical feminist scholarship as resistance, the exercise facilitated consideration of self within a context of contested legitimacy. During this time of persistent epistemic violence, finding tools to express that which is lived gives us, as critical feminist scholars, moments of individual and collective ease amid the barrage of daily assaults to our ways of being and knowing. It can be a particularly effective tool to resist the deliberate condemnation and erasure of our voices.
In preparation for the activity, I shared my personal “I am from” (Beltrán, 2016) poem with the workshop participants. This was both my way of modeling abstract poetic expression of the situated self and an invitation into a type of vulnerability that was nonnormative in the academic space of the conference in which we were participating. My intention was to disrupt the usual conference space, destabilize the customary expectations of how one participates in that space, and inspire consideration of poetics as an entry point to self-reflexive inquiry. We began by listening deeply:
I Am From
Collective Self-Reflexivity
As I transitioned out of reading my poem, I informed participants that they would be writing their own versions of the “I am from” poems to practice one aspect of self-reflexivity: exploration of positional identities and values. I noticed (and heard) some discomfort with the idea of stepping into an abstract creative space and out of the expected didactic conference pedagogical space. I approached this hesitation by inviting participants to write their poems in groups. Self-reflexivity is inherently relational; identities are understood to be situated, that is, existing in relation to systems and processes in and through which they are constructed. Utilizing a self-reflexive poetic activity with individuals ingroups provides a concrete way to demonstrate this relational process. As we articulate our own positional identities in the poetic abstract and see them juxtaposed to others’, we situate ourselves in relationship to those others as well as the complex influences of power and oppression that shape identities and give them meaning.
With the topic and context of the workshop as foundation, I led a brief activity using four simple self-reflexive prompts: (1) I am from, (2) I am from (type of music), (3) I refuse, and (4) I am going. Each prompt was designed to elicit specific reflections in relationship to identity and experiences that shape our being in the world (I am from), music or sound that evokes sensory memory or transporting memory (I am from—type of music), refusal of that which we seek to resist (I refuse), and vision for future or transformation (I am going). In groups of three or four, participants were instructed to write down their poetic responses to the prompts within a 1-minute time frame. Upon completion of the first prompt, each participant passed their paper one person to their left to respond to the subsequent prompt. We repeated this for all four prompts. At the end of the exercise, each individual had a unique poem that captured the poetic reflections of all members of their small group. As volunteers shared their poems with the group, there was a notable lightness in the room: snaps of appreciation, laughter, side conversations, and applause.
After discussing the impact of the exercise, Affilia’s editors asked if participants were willing to contribute their poems toward an editorial. I transcribed all of the small group poems and immersed myself into a process of weaving them together to tell a cohesive story reflective of the space we created and shared in the workshop. The collective poem below presents selected poetic responses from the small group poems, arranged in the same order we used in the exercise (I am from, I am from—type of music, I refuse, and I am going):
I Am (We Are) From
The collective poem reflects both unique individual identities and a shared space and process of a diverse group of feminist scholars. In its final form, the poem is a response to attempts to delegitimize critical feminist epistemologies and methodologies. Through a creative and unified reiteration of who we are in the world as critical feminist scholars, we created a counternarrative in a space of contestation. We centered our deeply situated and subjective lived experiences, poetically expressed as resistance to epistemic violence, and as a number of workshop participants wrote, “I (We) refuse to be silenced.”
Self-reflexive poetic techniques provide an entry point for consideration of the situated self as a critical feminist methodological approach. These techniques can invite scholars to creatively excavate and express depth and breadth of their lived experiences. Through this exercise, we practiced one way to turn our gaze toward ourselves and to name/claim our positional identities. It gave us an opportunity to try on a different way of thinking and doing and to practice the process of identifying, externalizing, and creatively expressing the situated self. Through transparent acknowledgment of our own situated positional identities, we can illuminate and embrace the expansive complexity of lived experience and, therefore, resist the naturalized norm of “neutrality, objectivity, and universality…as necessary to legitimacy” (Park et al., 2018, p. 5).
While each participant was asked to name their identity experiences, sensory memories, resistance, and vision individually, passing the paper for each prompt created poems that combined these individual expressions into collective expressions. As the energy shifted in the room after the activity, we were reminded of both the joyful and radical possibility of creativity to transcend the status quo of knowledge production as well as the rare opportunities that exist to utilize these kinds of tools in a space of support. This bittersweet coexistence of both the lack of opportunity and the transformative possibilities of creative critical feminist methods undergird the need for these approaches to be foregrounded and supported.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
I would like to begin by honoring the land and the original Indigenous people of San Francisco, CA, the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. We are grateful to have facilitated this workshop on those lands and in the spirit of resistance and healing. I extend my gratitude to the editors in chief of Affilia: Women in Social Work, Yoosun Park, Stephanie Wahab, and Rupaleem Bhuyan, for your editorial support, for seeing the value in these methods, and for trusting me to share our powerful workshop experience in this editorial. I thank my soul sister and colleague, Gita Mehrotra, for her feedback and support on this piece and her leadership as a critical feminist scholar. I also acknowledge and thank University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work doctoral students, Antonia Alvarez, Lisa Colon, and Xochilt Alamillo, for sharing their insights on the use of poetic self-reflexivity in scholarship. Finally, I thank poet and educator, Mark Gonzales, for the creative inspiration that led to the prompts used in the activity described in this editorial.