Due to the Cycle of Social Distance (Cartwright & Reeves, 2018), significant personal work must be undertaken to disrupt said cycle through meaningful engagement with DEI work. The Cycle of Social Distance (Cartwright & Reeves, 2018) adapted from Bucher’s (2014) work on positionality, is the common set of circumstances that leads to the development of identities that keep us “insulated” from those we, for any number of reasons, see as “outsiders”. As Bucher (2104) explains, the process is continuous and nonlinear, though it is discussed linearly for the purposes of this discussion. Each person is born in a particular time, place, and body; these embodied and cultural experiences create our positionality, or universal perspective. As with all perspectives, they are naturally bounded by a range of intrinsic and extrinsic elements. We can only see what we can see; we can only know what we can know. The Cultural Autobiography assignment is specifically designed to walk students through the process of understanding their own positionality so that they can identify the “filters” they use when evaluating situations. Specifically, students create a Cultural Autobiography to explore the sociocultural factors that inform their own positioning.

Speakers: Emily Reeves, Christina Janise Wickard

Published in: London International Conference on Education (LICE-2022)

• Date of Conference: 14-16 November 2022
• DOI: 10.20533/LICE.2022.0010
• ISBN: 978-1-913572-52-5
• Conference Location: Virtual (London, UK)