In the second week of learning about Intercultural Knowledge and Practices in the first semester of my MoDDD course, a few concepts stood out in our learning and teaching material.
The first argument I highlighted was the importance of recognising our subject positioning in our actions, research and practice and being perceptive to how this affects the dynamics in the work we are doing. We learned about this in a lecture conducted by Kathryn Hegarty titled Learning and Unlearning – Locating the Self (2016). As Hegarty (2016) explained, subject positioning is a psycho-emotional process that actively acknowledges our particular socio-cultural aspects; what Warde (1994) calls the tribes which influence us in many different ways. Nadarajah (2007) refers to it as a reflexive capacity of making sense of the self, which aligns with the importance Hegarty gives to asking questions not only to others but also to ourselves and in regards to our actions.
The above is important to realise and continuously question because our subject positioning shifts, and because it is from within this subject positioning that we go on to create narratives through our work and conversations. Kathryn Hegarty's lecture emphasized how narratives have great power in creating our reality and realities of others, and quotes Tomlinson (1999: 17–18) who has called "people's ongoing life-narratives, the stories by which we chronically interpret our existence." It can therefore be dangerous when we create narratives of others without realising and questioning our subject positioning as well that of the people involved. While self-narrative is a way we cope with our lives and can also be how we can work our way through our issues and challenges, certain narratives can create determinism and have great detrimental effects as they go on to be accepted as universal truths.
In fact, the idea of universal truth is an important concept that stood out to me this week. I tend to agree that it is hard and sometimes detrimental for any theory to be considered universal. As was pointed out in Hegarty's lecture (2016), we need different truths to explain different phenomena, especially since truth is framed through lenses of power and lived experience. We are all involved in power relations and have particular lived experience(s), which is why diversity is also so important in creating truths that work together rather than in opposition to each other. The main concept here is awareness and inclusivity in our work, and knowing that to paint a large truthful picture we need many diverse people in the field(s).
A final point that I want to bring up from this week's material that also up in the previous weeks is the idea of subjective and objective or qualitative and quantitative methodologies.
"Frequently too, I am drawn into these conversations as a fellow citizen, or as a person from the outside by these people. And most often, they also locate where they are at by comparing with where I am at. Research methodologies are never "objective", but always located and informed by particular and also shifting social positions, historical moments and their accompanying agendas." (Nadarajah 2007, pg. 125)
While this links in too the subjective positioning in our work, it also highlights something important to emphasize, in my own opinion and worldview. While we may think that we are being completely objective about something, this is probably never the case. For example, there has been a common understanding in the past that quantitative methodologies are objective while qualitative ones are subjective. However, even in how we decide to measure data, what to measure and the correlations we make are unavoidably subjective and qualitative. There is still much I'd like to learn about this subject, and I do not think I fully understand or can explain it yet, but this has been my trajectory and slow discovery for a while.
I will wrap this up with a quote that Hegarty (2016) attached in her presentation:
"You will not help anybody by your good intentions...
If you have any sense of responsibility at all, stay with your riots here at home...
I am here to entreat you to use your money, your statues and your education to travel in Latin America. Come to look, come to climb our mountains, to enjoy our flowers, come to study. But do not come to help." (Illich, 1968)
I love this quote, I think a lot of us here and there still need to outgrow this 'hero' mentality. I think there is danger in thinking we are so much more 'evolved' than others or other places and going into a place or community to 'help' or 'modernise' and through a place of our own ignorance create more damage than good. Let us instead realise that there is strength in diversity, acting from an idea of common humanity. It is partly also why I am in the Master of Disaster, Design and Development course; to find a responsible, sensitive way I can be better through my work and action for the people that it would affect.
How do these concepts and arguments relate to your understanding of working with intercultural knowledges and practices?
I think the concepts, ideas and theories that we learned this week are so crucial and beneficial for intercultural knowledges and practices. First off subject positioning is an important aspect of reflexivity when working within intercultural knowledges and practices. Recognising how through our perspectives we might be seeing, understanding and theorising what we engage with is important in any of our work, but especially so in intercultural situations as the narratives we come across can be so starkly different than ours.
This awareness of our positioning has such a tendency to make us realise that if we have these particular worldviews, biases, narratives, then so do other people. A recognition of these different perspectives I find to be one of the fundamental points to intercultural knowledges and practices - knowing that we all have our own perspectives we are operating from, and we need to be open to others. It is not enough to have good intentions, we also have to put in good practice, be respectful and realise that we are all in the end a common humanity made of diverse narratives all working together.
Have your perspectives on the ‘self’ shifted in any way following your engagement with the learning materials from the three weeks? (the self here can be the individual/student/practitioner or taken together).
I often feel like my perspective on the 'self' is constantly shifting and changing, and sometimes it is an unsettling place to be. I can't say that I currently can perceive it exactly as it is, but this shifting happens the more I learn and the more I question how my external conditions and worldview affect how my self is expressed. It is an axiom of mine that deep down our self is the same self as others, but through our lives and filters (worldviews), we go about our lives carrying, living with and living through so much more. Due to this, through our experience of living in the world, we all have different challenges, realities, worldviews. I think through this module, I have been realising that my 'self', as self-aware as I'd like or think to be cannot replace or create universal truths, only pieces of truth that are open and built with and on other truths, rather than as an opposition to them.
One of my first (of a growing accumulation) of people that have affected my worldview, Basarab Nicolescu (2010) states in his theory for a transdisciplinary reality how different laws and theories, as well as the subjective/objective dichotomy, is not a dichotomy at all but different levels of reality that feed each other. Through reading, conversations, learning and listening, it has become more apparent how subject and object are not divided at all but inextricably intertwined, a play of fluctuations and relations. I think understanding object-subject interplays can do a lot to make our work more human.
Thumbnail Image:
Figure 1: Self-Portrait
References:
Ivan Illich. (1968). To Hell With Good Intentions. Retrieved from https://www.uvm.edu/~jashman/CDAE195_ESCI375/To%20Hell%20with%20Good%20Intentions.pdf
Hegarthy, K. (2016). Learning and Unlearning – Locating the Self. Lecture, RMIT.
Nadarajah, Y. (2007). The outsider within: Commencing fieldwork in the Kuala Lumpur/Petaling Jaya corridor, Malaysia. International Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 109-132
Nicolescu, B. (2010). Methodology of Transdisciplinarity–Levels of Reality, Logic of the Included Middle and Complexity. Transdisciplinary Journal Of Engineering & Science, 1(1). DOI: 10.22545/2010/0009
Warde, A. (1994). Consumption, Identity-Formation and Uncertainty. Sociology, 28(4), 877-898. Retrieved August 8, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/42857774
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