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The Social Location Room: Interrupting the Internalization of Oppression

Sun, April 15, 2:45 to 4:15pm, Sheraton New York Times Square, Floor: Second Floor, Metropolitan West Room

Abstract

In this presentation, we share our collaborative work to design and develop of an interactive civic space to intervene on vectors of oppression. The social location room is a pedagogical tool that consists of an installation of images, graphs, and charts depicting various realities of intersectional disadvantage and privilege. The social location room has served to interrupt, in schools and public spaces, the ways that inequality is internalized by providing a dynamic learning space for youth of various backgrounds to engage with themselves and each other. In the social location rooms, youth are invited to deprivatize how inequality simultaneously affects different groups and how various forms of inequality interact with each other. It is an interactive space for participants to explore, connect, and extend on various social locations through the use of images, quotes, and statistics that illustrate the structures and identities that influence interrelated opportunities and experiences in society.

Inequality affects society along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, economic status, migration status, and ability. With roots and maintenance in myriad socioeconomic, political, and historical factors, inequality’s incremental and cumulative effect is to erode a shared civic reality and possibility of wellness. One of the ways that inequality is upheld across these vectors is that population-level realities of oppression are seen as merely natural and then internalized, with individuals believing that they are simply not smart enough, beautiful enough, good enough (Carter & Reardon, 2014). Although the specifics and contexts differ importantly in how racial, gender, class, and ability minoritization takes place, what all of these lived experiences share in common the surreptitious pattern of internalizing and individualizing largely societal processes into individual narratives of worth and lack thereof.

Furthermore, individualized narratives of lesser worth forestall confronting the ways that multiple vectors of disadvantage intersect to erode the common and collective interest in well-being (Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1991; Spade, 2013). These internal narratives cauterize how people understand themselves and society, and the narratives become an obstacle to youths’ agentic civic power in reducing inequality. Put most simply, to change the structures that create inequality, we also have to change the narratives that normalize and render those structures invisible.

The social location room was first designed and put into practice in the summer of 2015 at a youth leadership retreat for over 100 youth in New England. Since then, two youth-serving organizations in Pittsfield, New Hampshire and Providence, Rhode Island have created similar spaces, with differing iterations of their respective social location rooms. Findings of the various uses of the rooms point to the need for permeable curricula about inequality, multiple ways to interact with intragroup and heterogenous groups, and a strong need for youth workers to be educated about pervasive and persistent inequalities. After sharing the design and the ensuing interactions from the social location rooms, we will provide session participants with findings of our participatory evaluation of the rooms that point to the need to revise how and when civic engagement occurs and for what purposes.

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