Activity: Oppression
‘Conflict in Insider Groups’. Reflect and respond to these questions, and consider other artists working in your field who you feel may have emulated positive or negative styles of leadership.
Q. We can think about this at the scale of massive cultural groups, but we can also examine it in the power dynamics of any classroom or work environment. Who has the greatest power? Are they wielding that power responsibly? When you become a leader in a space, how do you ensure you are not oppressing groups or creating a space that is unsafe? Do your colleagues and co-workers genuinely get along with you, or are they simply committing acts of adhesion so that they can survive in the workplace? Think about the last time you silenced yourself at work because you can’t risk losing your salary.
Reflecting on my current work situation as a creative textiles teacher aide/department assistant at a secondary high school, I am well aware that it is the teacher who is the leader of the classroom environment and it is my role to offer support to both the students and teachers. I am also aware that there is a hierarchy of power within the classroom, with the teacher being at the top, the support staff (myself) sitting below them and then students sitting at the bottom in terms of behaviour management. However, in some classes (dependent on the individual teacher) student voices are encouraged, welcoming open dialogue, sharing ideas and offering feedback which I feel helps to generate a more authentic engaging learning environment for students. Some other teachers, however, prefer to dominate students in the learning environment, utilising lots of stern directions which in my opinion is not effective at all as it disengages the students by restricting their self-agency and voice.
I am not a leader in my current role; working under teachers and our Head of Department and as such, I am aware of a few times when I have had to adhere to situations or fall into line and carry on with the job despite not being happy with methods taken. I do however have the confidence to voice my concerns through the appropriate channels when I am not happy with certain matters and present my ideas for change and these are always taken on board and mostly initiated which is reassuring. I do believe I genuinely get along well with the majority of my colleagues and enjoy respectful professional relationships with them. I am however aware that my reserved nature and hardworking ethic can sometimes be misinterpreted as not being particularly interested in others, so I do make a concerted genuine effort, to listen and engage with my colleagues regularly to maintain healthy relationships.
Q. Think about a famous person in your creative field. If you had the opportunity to work with them, wouldn’t it be fair to say that you would feel intimidated by their work and likely adhere to their methods of working, rightly or wrongly?
If I had the opportunity to work with someone I admired in my field I feel there would be an initial period of working out what style of leader, they are and then understanding where I sit within that and how I feel about it; do I feel good or not? I am at a certain age now where after spending so much of my life working under others being ‘oppressed’ and now studying an in effort to shift my career, I feel that once completing my studies I won’t settle working under a dominating structure.
