Positionality

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Before I start making sense of my PGCert work in this final stage, I am acknowledging my privileges as a white able-bodied European woman who has accessed free or affordable education and healthcare her whole life. I hold a current position as Course Leader at LCC, which provides me with power in the classroom, however hard I try, all my collaborations within this work will be in some way influenced by the power this institution bestows on me. This role also makes me complicit in the operations of an institution rooted in colonialism, exploitation and gated knowledge production.

“The structures I have benefited from have impoverished society, research methodologies and knowledge production.” (Lenette, 2024)

I am conscious of this, and have dedicated my professional and personal life to practices of generosity and care.

Dyslexia affected my self-confidence at school, so I found a quiet solace in creativity, art and making. As with many other dyslexic children (Cancer, Manzoli & Antonietti, 2016) I taught myself to externalise and draw the confused internal thoughts, I seek clarity in these drawings but live comfortably with complexity and contradiction. As academic work didn’t come easy, I built new strategies. Collaging ideas together, making-do and fixing things. As a result I see the possibilities and potentials in almost everything and everyone. I have trust and feel safe within uncertain processes. These qualities and practices have stemmed in part from my white privileges, and afford me advantages in creative research, teaching and learning.

My Research in Action puts me and my practice into the woods. A place I feel at home. I was raised in North Yorkshire, from a line of grafting and resourceful women whose influence in my life I can feel within the depths of me. The constant domestic labouring, growing food, harvesting, composting, baking and pickling were normal sights, smells and textures in my home from birth. 

It smelt good, but being born a woman into this context comes with complexity as I reflect on the compounded pressures within my intersecting personal and professional identities. “Throughout history woman have been in charge of the ongoing cyclical and vital work of care and domestic labour, and as such, men have been liberated from it” (Martínez & Pethick, 2022, p 28). I – like many women born before me – can become ensnared within the obligated care labour we perform on the basis of duty, love, or economic fragility (Herando, 2012, 136).

From a rural upbringing, to now living in a capital city. I understand that meandering through wild, uneven and unmarked landscapes is not something everyone feels the permission – or has the affordances (Macnaghten & Urry 2005) – to do. Wheelchair users for example have significantly reduced access to woodland spaces (Burns, Paterson & Watson 2008), and by law of trespass, we are all excluded from 92% of the land in the UK. The walls in place to enable this exclusion hold stories of compounded exploitation, alienation and dispossession within the UK’s colonial roots (Hayes, 2020). Proximity and access to nature and wild spaces is a signifier of the inequalities and injustices between who can live where in this densely populated and unaffordable city (Williams, 2021). While I see the trees and the woods around my London home as a place to feel safe and belong, I have friends too fearful of the local parks and woods because of the violence they witness on their streets and in their childhoods.

“Only a small amount of people can life their lives as if they face no physical constrictions and as if they have no responsibilities to other people.” (Martínez & Pethick, 2022, p 25).

I hold these many ways-of-being-and-seeing as I walk through the trees pushing, pulling and carrying my young children to school every week. I feel the trees carry my exhausted body. They listen to me as I decompress on the walk home. They encourage me to stop and breathe when the labour and load of my care work overwhelms me. The trees stay strong for my children as they climb and balance and entwine their bodies into their branches and trucks. They teach us about circularity, care and the climate. They shelter us in a downpour. They look after the birds that wake us and I think they forgive us for all the sticks we’ve taken and the berries we’ve picked.

As Course Leader on MA Design for Social Innovation and Sustainable Futures, this work comes from a desire to challenge what design education for sustainability is. Where it happens. And on whose terms. 
And to challenge the systems of exclusion inherent within the UK higher education models.

It also comes from a desire to help people slow down and remember who they are in relationship to the world.

References

  • Burns, N., Paterson, K., & Watson, N. (2008). Exploring disabled people’s perceptions and use of forest recreation goods, facilities and services in Scotland, England and Wales.
  • Cancer, A., Manzoli, S., & Antonietti, A. (2016). The alleged link between creativity and dyslexia: Identifying the specific process in which dyslexic students excel. Cogent Psychology, 3(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/23311908.2016.1190309.
  • Hayes, N. (2020). The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us. Bloomsbury Circus.
  • Hernando, A. (2013). Teoría arqueológica y crisis social. Complutum, 23(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.5209/rev_cmpl.2012.v23.n2.40880.
  • Macnaghten, P., & Urry, J. (1995). Towards a sociology of nature. Sociology, 29(2), 203-220. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038595029002002.
  • Martínez, P. et al. (2022). Artistic Ecologies: New Compasses and Tools. Zagreb, Croatia, London, United Kingdom: What, How & for Whom (WHW); Sternberg Press.
  • Williams, J. (2021). Climate Change Is Racist: Race, Privilege and the Struggle for Climate Justice. Icon Books.

Image : Beckenham Place Park Trees by Ella Britton