A&HHE Special Issue December 2016
Reflections from outside the comfort zone: Digital self-representation, vulnerability and pedagogy
Sonja Vivienne
Flinders University
Abstract
This essay describes three intertwined modes of being – teaching, advocating and nurturing – in which I demonstrate vulnerability as a strategy for thinking through the complexities of digital self-representation. In the first mode I am a digital media researcher and lecturer, in the second I am a community arts worker and media-maker; and in the third I am a parent engaging with a teenager around access to and uses of digital platforms. As digitally mediated contemporary life entangles previously separate spheres like work/leisure, family/friends and politics/passion, personal values regarding privacy and publicness also shift. For marginalised people with stigmatised identities, social acceptance is conditional and bigotry hides around every corner. Beyond stigma, even powerful white men can experience vulnerability through personality (for example, mental illness) or association (for example, an illicit love affair, or a vulnerable loved one). I argue that, for most people, the demands of everyday digital praxis reinforce a need for self-study and storytelling to empower and learn across a range of contexts. What is appropriate to share with whom? What benefits outweigh the risks of over-sharing? Many of us gain the basic skills of digital engagement by unintentionally breaching boundaries that reveal vulnerability. For my part, I experience vulnerability by virtue of personality (anxiety), association (parenting kids who need to defend their ‘abnormal’ family structure) and identity (I am queer in orientation to gender and sexuality). The agonistic relationship between vulnerability and authoritative is core in each of these domains and something I wrangle on an ongoing basis. I am not, however, unique. Vulnerability is not wholly different now that it is mediated and amplified by digital means. After all, ‘learning from one’s mistakes’ was an aphorism a long time before digital cultures invented #fail. Nevertheless, I argue that feeling self-conscious, off-balance, or unsettled, whether in front of a class or online, is an opportunity to critically engage with our digitally augmented selves, and build upon what bell hooks calls ‘progressive pedagogy’ to expand participatory teaching/learning practices for lives that are increasingly and inevitably permeated by technology.
Keywords
Vulnerability, social convergence, digital self-representation, pedagogy, facilitation, community, sharing, personal experience, self-study
Introduction
My task as a teacher of screen and media is to support students in developing critical literacies that shed light on power, a task that has a solid history in humanities disciplines. One of the ways I can make power and discourse visible is through sharing my own experiences. However, as bell hooks highlights, this practice is not always well-received:
There has been such a critique of the place of experience – of confessional narrative – in the classroom. One of the ways you can be written off quickly as a professor by colleagues who are suspicious of progressive pedagogy is to allow your students, or yourself, to talk about experience; sharing personal narratives yet linking that knowledge with academic information really enhances our capacity to know. (hooks, 2003: 148)
In contrast to hooks, my background in community development is fundamentally oriented around the sharing of experiences.[1] Personal stories can acquire authority when they are framed as ‘narrative’ and either way they should be acknowledged as a subjective means of communicating a message to an audience. However, speaking modes as lecturer and facilitator are different and this has led me to question how one adapts participatory practices at the margins to a cohort of Australian university students and a classroom environment that is accustomed to demonstrations of infallible expertise.
While creative arts and humanities disciplines are traditionally well suited to anti-oppressive teaching styles and to storytelling as pedagogy, this alignment is in stark contrast to prevailing concerns in higher education. These are framed by neoliberalism with a focus on individual skill acquisition and GPA success. As a lecturer, my fee-paying students expect me to ‘hold the floor’ with eminent proficiency that is the antithesis of participatory practice in which one ‘holds a space’ for participants to learn and grow. Experimenting with classroom dynamics is risky when students are empowered with tools to evaluate teaching practice, and when management regards these assessments as decisive measures of educative (and economic) value. Conversely, in a community storytelling space, trust is often developed (and measured) through sharing personal vulnerabilities. Parenting, meanwhile, at least in my current experience, demands a constant dance between authority (‘do it because I said so’) and transparency (‘I’m not always perfect’). Sometimes offering a quiet cuddle while listening to the latest tirade is the best offering. Listening is in fact a core and underrated skill in both community facilitation and academic teaching.
These comparative modes of being are different in many ways. Each audience has disparate expectations of me, and divergent objectives for participation. Community members participate in their own time for their own interest. Students engage with potential learning while staking a claim on potential employment. Meanwhile, my daughter flails between willingness to learn and dismissing my opinions because, as she points out, ‘You’re biased.’ There are broad distinctions in socio-economic status and social capital between students, my family and marginalised community members but these also vary depending on the particular student and/or community cohort.
While my orientation towards these three case studies is discernibly different, this essay explores the ways in which I expect my self-presentation to be consistent – that is, that my vulnerability in and of itself remains the same in different contexts. It also documents some common strategies for walking the line between expertise and vulnerability, thereby constituting a middle way between leadership in the domain of knowledge and gentle facilitation that intentionally affords space for the unexpected. In theory at least, this also accommodates awareness of the subjective nature of vulnerability. One person’s battle scars (for example, mum and dad divorced) can also look like privilege (for example, I survived a refugee camp) depending on context. But one does not belie the other.
Vulnerability embodied from community to academia via parenthood
A review of scholarly literature that employs ‘vulnerability’ as a key term reveals articles focused on the assessment and measurement of vulnerability in at-risk communities, predominantly using psychology-based methods. A small body of work has tackled the relationship between social justice pedagogy and vulnerability but avoids evocative description of the embodied experience (Knowles, 2014; Martin, 2015; Zinn et al., 2009). In contrast, my use of the term here is principally informed by my personal experience of anxiety. I regard vulnerability as an overwhelming state of trepidation that is unexpected, unavoidable and temporary. While anticipating self-revelation or analysing it retrospectively can also evoke feelings of vulnerability, it is at its most potent in the present tense. In my case I have learnt to diminish perceived risks by pinning them down and naming them as manageable units of ‘embarrassment’ or ‘loss of face’ that happen to many people sometimes. I rationalize these experiences as ‘not the end of the world’; after all, I am rarely confronted with direct abuse or physical harm. Most importantly for me, vulnerability is situated in the personal; one cannot impose vulnerability upon others but one can invite sharing by creating a safe space and modelling resilience.
I now offer some context for the community arts projects in which vulnerability has served as a tool for developing trust. Between 2008 and 2013 I facilitated a series of Digital Storytelling workshops for sexual health networks in South Australia. In its traditional form, Digital Storytelling involves 3-4 days of face to face workshop practice in which ‘ordinary’ untrained people learn to make their own 3 – 4 minute autobiographical video. They are most often composed of personal photos and are voiced in the first person, although some storytellers abstract the genre in order to preserve privacy. In this project, LGBTQIS[2] Digital Storytellers shared anecdotes about first kisses, visibility of race, class and faith, family turmoil and gender transition. Their stories were later uploaded to a website and compiled in several DVD collections for use in public service health training and education. The storytellers also contributed to blogs about everyday activism, which I define here as the unplanned sharing of personal stories in public spaces for social change. In both the DVDs and the blogs, they discussed a variety of concerns pertinent to their stories, including whether it was advisable to take your children to a marriage equality march. They carefully considered the impact of personal narratives on the other ‘characters’ in each story (including family members) and negotiated their self-representation accordingly. These negotiations often involved lengthy face to face discussion of previously taboo subjects ‘about which we agree not to speak’. Some stories were pseudonymised in order to communicate with audiences beyond intimate networks while preserving privacy. This was the case for parents of a transgender child. The parents wished to celebrate her journey and wisdom but were advised not to reveal her identity for legal reasons (viewable at http://rainbowfamilytree.com/video/blue-for-boys-pink-for-girls).
These experiments with networked storytelling and social change eventually unfolded into a PhD research project. The stories from the ‘What’s your story?’ DVD found an accessible home in a website, the ‘Rainbow Family Tree’, with repurposed graphics from film funding submissions. In a small text box on the welcoming splash page, I declared my intentions to reflect upon the wisdom and learning of the community in scholarly form. I used affirming language in the hope that it would reassure participants of their status as co-researchers (see Vivienne et al., 2016) rather than subjects of a study. I framed my hypothesis around everyday activism and queer efforts to catalyse social change. I privileged anecdotes that detailed the situated contexts of storytellers. Most importantly, I acknowledged the vulnerability that is implicit in sharing a stigmatised self-representation in public. In workshops and in scholarly writing I located myself as a fellow storyteller who had experience of the unexpected ramifications of self-exposure.
When it came to articulating my thesis, my supervisors advised me, in the clearest possible terms, to avoid too much ‘navel gazing’. I would learn more (and be listened to by people who count) if I rendered my exploration in the traditional form of a scholarly thesis rather than a practice-based creative production and exegesis. This is advice I understand better in retrospect. My various nominalisations include ‘mature-age’, ‘early-career researcher’, ‘queer’, ‘feminist’ and ‘scholar’. Their intersections already designate me as a suspicious person who is predisposed to over-emphasising the personal and intuitive. Why additionally burden myself with the much-critiqued mantle of auto-ethnography?
The reason for the intertwining of my modes of being in this essay should now be evident, as the focus of both my community work and research is digital citizenship and online self-representation. My interest in these broad cultural landscapes influences my teaching of theory in media policy and screen production. My experience of parenting is also shaped by these interests in several ways. First, I acknowledge my daughter’s insights into the youth cultures of Tumblr, Instagram and YouTube. However, while I privilege her expertise, this does not negate my own. Negotiations over screen time and access to content are invariably well-informed on both sides. Second, much of my online sharing (along with community advocacy) is grounded in our ‘unconventional’ family structure and fluid identities. In becoming a parent I stumbled my way through explanations of separation, donor conception, death, birth, gender, sexuality, anxiety and depression. Sometimes we discuss the economic theories that underpin pocket money. I have discovered that, when all else fails, admitting that you are vulnerable as a parent and that you’re making it up as you go along can be a shared ‘learning opportunity’.
Queer (dis)orientation
My online advocacy is represented on social media across a variety of platforms that connect networks of school mums, pink parents, scholars, students, health workers, educators and a queer community of diverse genders and sexuality. I am open in most aspects of my self-representation and have made several digital stories that feature my family engaged in the gay marriage debate. In one of these, ‘Marriage is So Gay!’, my girlfriend and I attend a mock gay wedding with excited kids in tow. The event was followed by a march to Parliament House, and we were accompanied by a vehement group of street preachers. Burned in my memory forever are the words ‘Have you told your daughter you’re going to burn in hell?’. Someone called the police. Along with the violent fracas, my daughter was captured crying on national television.
Being queer still connotes vulnerability in a world where acceptance is not guaranteed. However it also offers privileged insights. My understanding of post-structuralist and queer theory helps me see complexity and messiness rather than binaries. I do not believe that knowledge is finite or concrete. There are always multiple ways of orienting oneself to the same problem. I draw on Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology alongside methodologies grounded in a commitment to social change:
Bodies that experience being out of place might need to be orientated, to find a place where they feel comfortable and safe in the world. The point is not whether we experience disorientation (for we will, and we do), but … what we do with such moments of disorientation, as well as what such moments can do — whether they can offer us the hope of new directions, and whether new directions are reason enough for hope. (Ahmed, 2006: 158)
Ahmed describes many ‘reasons for hope’ in the form of resilience, survival and regeneration of norms. However, it is the ‘moments’ of disorientation that resonate with me, as experiences of vulnerability. What possibilities for shared learning occur at these junctions? Are they opportunities to reconsider embodied experience or theory from different perspectives? What pedagogies and research methodology afford exploration of vulnerability and otherness? How do strategies translate across contexts: university, community development and the family home?
When working with marginalised communities I favour Participatory Action Research (PAR), which is a mode of ethnographic enquiry in which a community determines objectives for change, with researchers facilitating these goals through cycles of action-reflection-analysis. It is used often in development contexts as a means of speaking back to the power vested in international aid agencies (Tacchi, 2009). Participatory workshop processes also have some utility in university classrooms.
However, as universities increasingly require students to gain entrance through demonstrable social and economic capital, they have become less accessible to disenfranchised people. I position myself tentatively as ‘first in family’ because while my parents were not uneducated, they didn’t much care for books, lofty ideals or philosophy. One dropped out of pharmacy to join the Air Force, while the other became the only white collar worker in the family as a home economics teacher in North Queensland. Their career choices inevitably reflect the gendered pathways of their times, limitations and possibilities that persist today. My experiences of disorientation in a university context are not unique. Hence, I am interested in maintaining a place for, and awareness of, the ‘other’ in my classrooms.
In community development, it has long been best practice to acknowledge the different perspectives of participants, who frequently arrive feeling vulnerable, uncertain and in need of affirmation. In contrast, many young students, freshly scarred from high school, arrive with an expectation of being ‘filled’ with knowledge. The privilege they might feel at having gained entrance to higher education, is nevertheless fragile and staunchly defended. They typically resist active participation or self-exposure. This reaction to a levelling of classroom hierarchies is described in dialogue between bell hooks (‘writer, teacher and insurgent black intellectual’) and Ron Scapps (‘white male philosopher, comrade and friend’):
When we try and change the classroom so that there is a sense of mutual responsibility for learning, students get scared that you are now not the captain working with them, but that you are after all just another crew member – and not a reliable one at that. (hooks, 2003: 144, quoting Scapps)
Clearly, the differences between working with students (not always privileged) and community activists (not always marginalised) can require a recalibration of vulnerability as pedagogy.
Hooks also sheds light on the relationship between a teacher’s sexuality and their presence in the classroom. While she focusses on the erotic frisson of shared knowledge, Jonathon Alexander describes how being ‘out’ in the classroom sometimes equates with vulnerability:
I have marked the effect of my open queerness as a series of bodily sensations. Indeed, for nearly half a year after I first came out on campus, I would wake up every morning, a slight tension in my back and shoulders, and wonder, “What have I done to myself?”. Surely part of my concern arose out of very real fear for my body, particularly as openly gay men are frequently the objects of assault; indeed before I left Colorado in September 1988, I had been the victim of a death threat, which made the murder of Matthew Shepard the following month all the more frightening. (Alexander, 2003: 162–63)
Alexander continues with interview excerpts from former students who analyse the discursive and relational aspects of being taught by an openly queer teacher. Some young women thought that their engagement with Alexander was more ‘professional’ because they didn’t have to worry about ‘pleasing’ him, and were relieved in the knowledge that they would not have to deal with unwelcome sexual advances. Other young men noted that their teacher’s sexuality was significant because expressing homophobia in the classroom might effect their grades.
I am selective in what I share with my students and obviously only offer insights that are pertinent to the topic. For example, when discussing digital storytelling and methodology I position myself within the queer community of my study. Teaching media policy, however, I may draw attention to the effects of social surveillance on Facebook by highlighting how tricky it is for a young trans person to retrospectively homogenise their timeline. Because I broach these issues of gender and sexuality incrementally and with care, my vulnerability is also contained. Unlike a situation in which a third party unexpectedly outs me to homophobes, it is not a situation that invokes fear. I discuss the distinction between rehearsed and precipitous vulnerability later.
Selective sharing in time and space
In my capacity as workshop facilitator I sometimes share another digital story of familial conflict. This one is penned to my sister and explores our oppositional identities as lesbian single mum and married Christian police officer. Rewatching it can be embarrassing and I always feel a little unfair. We’ve all moved on now and she would be embarrassed if she knew that I was speaking of it in public.
Following a screening an audience member sometimes asks about what impact the story has had on my relationship with my sister. Depending on the climate of the workshop space, I share my guilt about trumping my sister’s vulnerability with my own. Is it ethical to represent her as the antagonist when she has no right of reply? However, even these post-screening debriefs have changed over time to the point where I now represent my sister and I as comrades in arms. I’m proud of the film and the healing catharsis that it invoked between my sister and myself.
I screen the film in workshops because it is illustrative of both the good and the bad of making oneself vulnerable in public. In discussion about the production and distribution process, I describe familial and digitally mediated negotiations around identity, belief systems and relationships. I use the unexpected ramifications of public self exposure, and unintentional identification of third parties as an opportunity to speak about the risks and rewards of privacy and publicness. I make it clear that these are not binary oppositions but an emergent continuum; they are meanings that change shape through storytelling over time. If my sister were ever to read this essay, the original story would accrue yet another layer of significance.
Like many other people, I have fallen more than once into the over-sharing trap. My public self-study and storytelling can cause unintentional offence. In reflecting upon collective experiences or anecdotal turning points, there is an inevitable distillation or simplification of detail that can be alarming for other ‘stakeholders’. Who owns a shared memory? Who has storytelling rights? Beyond authorial perspective, something else happens when the context for reflection shifts from ‘private’ to ‘public’. All the multitude of possibilities of ‘what will they think?’ can be overwhelming. Every narrativised anecdote has potential to be misconstrued. How can one story (mine) be articulated for both known and unfamiliar, let alone antagonistic, audiences? How can it be accurate both now and in the future?
These reflections on selective sharing are pertinent because they represent teaching and learning opportunities. When I am challenged by people who are close to me I am pushed out of ‘my comfort zone’ and I become unexpectedly vulnerable. These experiences shape the way I work with marginalised community activists/storytellers/research participants/students and my daughter.
In transition from film and community-media maker to doctoral candidate, I tried using the same self-study methods to capture my scholarly entanglements and breakthroughs. I undertook intermittent ‘think-pieces’ on my previously established professional media-maker website. To some extent, I hoped that an ‘accidental’ audience would get distracted by the colourful moving pictures and not click through to my academic musings. Despite this veiled entry to the space, knowing that my supervisor or one of my illustrious Oxford peers might be reading made me timid about expressing philosophical concerns. I believed I should offer citations and I thought too much about pertinent hyperlinking of articles and Google book entries. Sometimes I took weeks to post a dry summary of an academic conference, one that could cause no offence to any participants or potential reviewers. There was no joy, no vulnerability and no personal, political or professional discovery. When my personal and professional worlds intermingled (because I was scrutinizing the private in public), my storytelling became self-censored and less joyous. It became less likely to reveal vulnerability, and less able to learn or teach. The takeaway: while public sharing, whether blogging or digital storytelling, is enlivened by spontaneity and vulnerability, ramifications of sharing also need careful consideration.
Social convergence and audience expertise
My use of ‘audience’ in the above section is inclusive of the three cohorts I am oriented towards in this essay: students, community members and my daughter. When I teach from my own experiences of navigating privacy online, I also need to assess the expertise of any one of these audiences. How much am I challenging conventional thinking and how much am I stating the obvious? When prompted, most audiences have stories of non-recuperable #fails to share and compare.
Modern networked life means representing ourselves digitally, and, by implication, our intimate others, in the public sphere in unprecedented ways. Our identities are transformed into data online, a dense digital trace that shadows the original. A rich body of scholarly internet theory, influenced by critical, queer and cultural studies, documents the impact of ubiquitous social media. Concerns about surveillance are countered by benefits of connection while a middle path between utopian and dystopian perspectives argues that digital technology is neither good nor bad. Jurgenson (2011) introduces ‘digital dualism’ as an out of date precursor to ‘augmented reality’ and thoroughly dismisses the binary opposition between IRL (in real life) and being online. The common experience of unintentionally revealing an aspect of self online (invoking vulnerability) and the intersections between diverse publics or audiences is now well-known as ‘context collapse’ or ‘social convergence’ (boyd, 2007; Lange, 2008; Livingstone, 2008).
When I introduce this internet scholarship to my students, some central tenets seem like self-evident truths. Every student can recall in vivid detail the risk averse codes of practice instilled in them at high school, designed to minimize any possibility of discomfort or disorientation. Common cybersafety acronyms include THINK and SMART. ‘Before you post, Think!’ asks: is it True, Helpful, Inspiring, Necessary, Kind? SMART, meanwhile, summarises five online safety rules as Safe (don’t share personal details), Meet (only meet online acquaintances with parent or carer present) Accepting (don’t accept emails, messages, files photos and so on from people you don’t know), Reliable (check that information is reliable) and Tell (tell a trusted person if you feel uncomfortable or if you know someone else is being bullied). While safety acronyms can only really act as a prompt for a more complex suite of responses and strategies, it is nevertheless evident that, in some cases, these risk-averse messages lag some way behind emergent social norms.[3]
My cohort of predominantly white middle class students will generally acknowledge that different people have different perspectives and cultural insights into notions like privacy. While undergraduates may not be well versed in intersectionality, they understand the influence of class, race, gender, geography and age upon online sharing practices. Various internet researchers explore the ways marginalised communities circumnavigate visibility with selective self-representation (Lingel and boyd, 2013; Vivienne and Burgess, 2012). By limiting access to the personal information that may attract stigmatization, they can speak as activists in the public sphere.
Meanwhile, in my community arts practice I continue to facilitate digital literacy and advocacy. Building on the demonstrable success of the Rainbow Family Tree stories and a desire to pursue further research in curated social media self representation, I applied for and won a government grant. This enabled development and facilitation of an initiative called ‘Stories Beyond Gender’, working with the trans and gender-diverse community in South Australia. I started attending trans community social events and youth drop-ins and gradually made some friends. I simultaneously became acutely conscious of my privileged status as a white, middle class, educated, queer-identifying, ostensibly cisgender community member. I began to understand the tensions between those who had battled to cross a binary gender barrier and those who refused to recognize the binary or the barrier. Older community members have often endured limited access to sympathetic and skilled health providers, lack of understanding (or open hostility) from family and work colleagues, and misrecognition from the queer community. There are divisions between drag and cross-dressers. While one may seek attention in flamboyant performances of gender, the other may desire to pass unnoticed and almost invisible. There are frictions between people who aim for medical and/or surgical intervention, and those who don’t see the need or can’t afford it. On the other hand, younger members, with access to the multiple nominalisations of Tumblr, sometimes refuse gender categories altogether and claim they/them/their pronouns in a way that confound education systems, health providers and public infrastructure. Battling for gender-neutral or unisex toilets and identification forms that offer more than two boxes for gender identity are nevertheless central issues in activism that encompasses safe school places and anti-bullying, anti-transphobia programmes.
‘Stories Beyond Gender’ is a wide-ranging initiative that includes creative workshops, training, community forums, many online spaces and an exhibition. Our social media storytelling workshops combine creative self-representation and advocacy in a very unstructured fashion. Initially the participants and I explored how well-known trans people represent themselves via social media. Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox were just achieving celebrity status in mainstream media and 14-year-old trans girl Jazz Jennings was vocal about her journey into adolescence, articulated in a 12-part TV series (Goldner, 2015). Aydian Dowling was gaining publicity as a candidate for the cover of Men’s Health magazine and his frequently posted selfies featured his very toned and buff torso (Calderone, 2015). While there is some diversity in this handful of celebrity trans representatives, they are nevertheless singularly attractive and they have achieved social capital and mainstream respect. It is easy for people earlier in their journeys to consider these people as ‘final products’, unattainable in their carefully curated shiny perfection. In contrast, the ‘Stories Beyond Gender’ group seek inspiration by looking at everyday representations collated via Tumblr hashtags ranging from #enby to #genderqueer and #trans. We experiment with various forms of self-expression from twitter haiku to face-paint, cutting up magazines to make collages and ‘getting material’ with pencil and paper. We make memes and try a variety of free apps. We play with phototaichi, by setting our smartphone cameras to ‘panorama’ and intentionally working in reverse to what algorithms predict. By moving in and out of a depth plane rather than panning across a horizon, we produce random sliced and diced assemblages. We write about how these abstract images can represent fragmentation and fluidity.
A portion of our funding enabled trips to South Australian regional centres with established ‘Quiltbag’ groups in Mount Gambier and Port Lincoln. The intention in this case was to share an overview of creative social media storytelling and to forge connections between geographically dispersed communities. One of the opportunities central to online community engagement is to facilitate meaningful interaction between communities who are not able to meet often face to face. While these connections can be difficult to facilitate without any face to face engagement, once trust is established, following up online is not so difficult.
My responsibilities as facilitator of ‘Stories Beyond Gender’ include booking space, providing catering, nominating dates, promoting community engagement and, finally, designing activities for each workshop that are shaped around community interests, with flexible objectives. The project maintains momentum by a combination of regular and ‘fly-in fly-out’ participants and a mix of younger and older people with a variety of perspectives on gender. A large part of ‘facilitation’ in this case is about holding a space.
Holding a space for vulnerability, with authority
By my definition, vulnerability comes upon you; it is unexpected and uncontrollable. Routine and planned pedagogical practices of mutual vulnerability and personal storytelling are therefore disingenuous. Performing vulnerability in a classroom is not the same as being captured in a completely unavoidable and uncomfortable moment. Arguably, the performance space at the front of a classroom elicits a degree of preconceived artifice – a smoke and mirrors simulacra or reconstruction of an earlier moment of vulnerability. It is resurrected and projected with the intention of enticing an audience into a ‘shared’ awakening of new knowledge. Moments of genuine teacherly vulnerability – as manifest in a bad day, or poor preparation – are more likely to induce the classroom distrust described by hooks and Scapps. When witnessing extreme anxiety in a presenter, I too have experienced a sense of discomfort in being held captive on a rudderless boat.
At odds with postmodernism and critical pedagogies that position knowledge as always contingent and in the process of always emerging, power hierarchies in the classroom can reinforce the infallible expertise of a teacher. Acknowledging the vernacular expertise of students does not necessarily alter these dynamics. While I am eager to acknowledge the expansive digital literacy of some students, I am nevertheless their guide and must call on an expanse of wisdom that is simultaneously personal, political and academic. But I do so with erratic confidence. Regardless of having earned my scholarly stripes, my chief offering as an educator, whether it be in home, university or community, is a passion for critical analysis, including analysis of self-representation. Taking risks in learning and teaching is thus a process of opening up, being present and articulate in what one does and doesn’t know, affording mental agility and an inquiring mind. Rather than claim mutual vulnerability, the framework of pedagogical relation asserts that a teacher’s tactfulness effectively ‘holds a space’ for student learning, and underpins their acquisition of intellectual independence. When they are adept at arguing their point, and are no longer subject to evaluation by grades, the asymmetry of the relationship can begin to dissolve.
In this essay I have discussed the intersections between personal storytelling, online advocacy and teaching/learning as a catalyst for social change. I considered the ongoing demands of teaching, activism, research, community arts practice, and parenting. This analysis has grown from uncertainty about bringing together discrete bodies of personal and political experience. It has also emerged from an awareness that while anxiety accompanies me across contexts, the open spaces I can create result in the expression of vulnerability in many different forms.
Why invite students or community members to share their embodied and vulnerable experiences? Why is ‘personal as political’ and progressive pedagogical practice more pertinent now than ever? Hooks argues that, post-9/11, a fundamental tension emerged between globalization and the local or personal:
While the academic world became a place where humanitarian dreams could be realized through education as the practice of freedom via a pedagogy of hope, the world outside was busily teaching people the need to maintain injustice, teaching fear and violence, teaching terrorism. The critique of ‘otherness’ spearheaded by progressive educators was not as powerful as conservative mass media’s insistence that otherness must be acknowledged, hunted down, destroyed.’ (hooks, 2003: 9)
The fear that emerged around terror and otherness in North American higher education over 10 years ago has sustained and morphed into new forms of moral panic. Social convergence has resulted in everyday digitally mediated self-representation that is imbued with fear of being called out and shamed in proportion to increased opportunities to engage in advocacy. A simultaneous shift towards economic rationalism and an increased focus on job-readiness challenges the pre-eminence of critical discourse analyses and activist pedagogies. In this context I have been warned about ‘wearing my activism on my sleeve’, especially when it takes the form of classroom sharing, because vulnerability is the antithesis of authority.
I have also been advised not to come out to students, because ‘there are still some homophobic nutters out there!’. This is indeed the case, although I am happy to say that nearly 18 years after the brutal anti-gay murder of Mathew Sheppard, famous for catalysing mainstream critique of homophobic hate crime (Shepard and Barrett, 2009), acceptance of homosexuality has increased. I do not experience fear equivalent to Jonathon Alexander’s real concern for his personal safety. While sometimes I still feel vulnerable about coming out, most of the time I feel privileged. My everyday identity is not a red flag for violence, unlike the stigmatised identities of many transgender or gender-fluid people (alongside visible racial or religious identities). Every year the International Transgender Day of Remembrance calls attention to violent murders perpetrated on gender diverse people, and celebrates the resilience of trauma survivors. The point is, whether in workshop context or undergraduate tutorial, I choose when to play my card; I choose when to barter performed vulnerability, an act that is without doubt privileged. I can only do so in a relatively safe space, but my decision to share a personal disorientation holds a space for others to share alternate perspectives.
Exploring a journey from community practice to classroom, informed occasionally by parenting, has taught me much about what Van Manen calls ‘tactfulness’ (2015): offering calm skippering of the enterprise of mutual learning. For my part, I am learning to stride the decks with authority, demanding of respect and offering vulnerability on my terms only.
Notes
[1] My background is in social justice documentary production, before moving into facilitated Digital Storytelling workshops for a variety of sexual health agencies. The theoretical and research oriented dimensions of several initiatives are described in detail in ‘Digital Identity and Everyday Activism: Sharing Private Stories with Networked Publics’ (Vivienne, 2016)
[2] This acronym generally connotes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and same sex attracted or sister-girls. Another more humorous version favored by some community members is ‘Quiltbag’. It stands for queer or questioning, undecided, intersex, lesbian, transgender or transsexual, bisexual, agender or ally, and gay or gender-queer or gender-fluid.
[3] For example, there is now a substantial body of research that suggests that young people’s experiences of sexting (sending, receiving or sharing sexually explicit photos or messages, punishable with child pornography charges if the subject of the photo is under 18) is not universally damaging and in some cases represents sexual agency and personal development (Albury and Crawford, 2012).
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