I’m in the third week of my eight-week intensive course, Critical Hope & Self-Preservation in Contemporary Librarianship, which I’m teaching to currently enrolled Dominican University School of Information Studies students. A Special Topics course (LIS 805) within the school, this course includes an introduction to the concepts of Critical Hope and how it may be used as a practice and care ethics framework in modern library practice and workplaces. Dr. Kari Grain’s book, Critical Hope: How to grapple with complexity, lead with purpose, and cultivate transformative social change, is a core text.
Following a core tenet of Critical Hope, a primary community activity we do is explore positionality. After reading the positionality statements of practicing librarians and considering the importance of acknowledging multiple positionalites and the outcomes/impacts of those layers, I shared the Positionality Wheel you see below and added shared my own positionalities on the Wheel. I then invited students to “map” their positionalities (students have given me permission to share the included image).
These placements highlight self-perceptions and realities of identities for the students, and students noted that even seeing these identities mapped, they still considered the multiple presumed and unknown experiences that are connected to these placements. As graduate students, several noted the privilege inherent in accessing spheres of higher education, and they also recognized that some of these terms are not standardized (e.g., body size and wealth).
As in earlier sections of this course, this group of students noted the challenges and benefits of reflecting on positionality:
Challenges: grief and anger; concerns about hegemony among course learners and how it may affect future community-building efforts with library users.
Benefits: enjoyment of doing this exercise anonymously and bearing witness to the positionalities of classmates; noting how privilege in one area may be subjugated in another; or how subjugation in one area may be nuetralized in another (early practice of non-binary thinking – a skill needed for Critical Hope praxis).
