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WSCA 2006 presidential address: cultural positioning, dialogic reflexivity, and transformative/third spaces.

Article Excerpt
I'm extremely honored to be here. I want to focus my remarks on three principles that involve moves we can make as scholars, teachers, practitioners, members of WSCA, and as human beings with hearts and minds and spirits. The principles are recognizing cultural positioning, engaging in dialogic reflexivity, and negotiating transformative/third spaces. I address these as potential openings in our lives and work that include a wider circle of voices, enable us to negotiate diverse options, encourage us to cherish our time together, and call us to promote social justice.

First I'll speak to recognizing cultural positioning. How we talk everyday about cultures and groups of people matters a great deal. For example in WSCA when we talk about our own and others' disciplinary orientations, interest groups, roles of officer, paper reviewer, journal editor, and "old buffalo" in the Executives Club, we position ourselves and others into particular locations of group membership and these include relationships with each other. These group categories are positions that have ranking, higher and lower relative status, and more and less voice. Our everyday talk, not to mention policies and norms, position group members into hierarchies, into relationships where some are "better," "more valued," or "have more" than others. Talk, discourse, and texts about cultures have consequences.

Another important point about cultural positioning is that people aren't mono-cultural. Though popular discourse emphasizes grouping people into singular cultural categories, like nationality or ethnicity, the idea here of cultural positioning calls for addressing cultures with a small "c" and an "s" to emphasize plurality. Each cultural grouping includes lots of different voices, some marginalized voices who struggle to be "inside" and other voices struggling to get away. Every individual voice is comprised of multiple cultures.

Here's an example of a "Profile" essay in the Accent Magazine, an insert in the Albuquerque Journal, from Feb 2006. The title is "The Hyphenate." Brenda Hollingsworth-Pickett is described by the author as: a restauranteur-storyteller-blues/ jazz/gospel singer-puppeteer, dancer-arts activist. Brenda adds "I'm a librarian by day, restauranteur by evening and, on weekends a poet, actress, model, director, mother of five, grandma of three, foster mother of 25, dancer and instructor, martial artist (karate and kung fu) and story-teller." The author notes later in the article that

Hollingsworth-Pickett's own story is also hyphenated: she's of African-American-Cherokee-European descent.... Her mother introduced her to stories of Mississippi sharecropping at an early age, providing a rich tapestry that was absent in Hollingsworth-Pickett's early years growing up in all-white Salt Lake City.... Says Hollingsworth Pickett 'In some ways ... Salt Lake City was similar to New Mexico, the countryside is beautiful, blacks are a minority, there's feeling of the West, and religion is strong. The difference is in who's at the top of the power structure.'

So cultural positioning is also meant as a reminder to recognize multiple locations of speaking and acting. Even when "we" are talking about "us" there are multiple "uses." When "we" refer to "them" they...

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