Using Paper and Cloth Dolls to Interrogate Whiteness, Gender, and Professional Practice in Graduate Education

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: Activism, Interrogation of Oppression Using Arts-Based Educational Research

Abstract

Dolls have the power to provoke, unsettle and evoke strong reactions. In addition to their uses in religious rituals, children’s play, and healing, doll-making can afford individuals an opportunity to embody and record a process that alters one’s subject position, explores the unspeakable, or enables different ways of knowing. This paper describes the use of paper and cloth dolls as methods for surfacing, interrogating, and reshaping emerging professional identity around issues of whiteness, privilege, and gender. Based in an MA cohort classroom, this presentation details how the use of dolls dug out invisible dimensions of racial/gender privilege which shaped and warped student intervention work in communities and organizations. Doll-making created pathways to professional practices that were more intersectionally-aware and socially-just.

Author

• Rosemary C. Reilly, Concordia University