Embodying cultural sensitivity, the path to embedding it: Applications for researchers
Grace paused with her hand on the glossy black paint of the scrolled iron gate. She could see the foxgloves and lupins, the rhubarb and the plum tree beyond. And a lilac, a big lilac. All looking so relaxed and rustic. She had grown up in a rural landscape and knew the amount of effort that would have gone into creating the structure that made such an apparently casual cottage garden feel as if it had always been like that, and as if it could maintain itself forever with no external help. She resented being here.
Why had she come, giving up her Saturday afternoon because of an email from someone she’d once worked with? Someone she’d bumped into by a river? Someone who happened to be white?
Overview: November 2023
This month’s fiction is: On being culturally sensitive – you couldn’t make it up!
This month’s application posts are:
Cultural sensitivity: So much bigger than the words: Applications for practitioners
Embodying cultural sensitivity, the path to embedding it: Applications for researchers
Working with our cultural insensitivity: Acknowledging reality: Applications for educators
In August, when I was writing about the Theraplay core concept of being interactive and relationship-based, I came up with a visual representation of motivation to research that was based on but grew from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It keeps coming back to me this month as I contemplate the impact of the core concept of being culturally sensitive on our actions as practitioner researchers. In particular, how the fiction brought me back to the idea that at the base of cultural sensitivity, or addressing cultural sensitivity, our bodies play a significant role, more of a role than our logic. The piece by Valarie Kaur referenced in the practitioner post helped me crystallise this centrality of bodily and affective connection in addressing cultural sensitivity.
The title of the piece in August was Merging back to earth. In the fiction this month, Graham hits the ground in pain, right where Viking is buried, bringing into my felt sense the masculinised aspects that I am working on in relation to tacit maternal knowing. I can't escape more contemplation of where the manstream fits into that particular gaze on our practice and on our research into that practice, any more than Val can escape interacting with the man who has intruded into her space.
I’ve updated the image slightly and included it again, because I am still puzzling about how these ideas fit together. I wonder how I can integrate the manstream with something that is more earth-based and grows from my sense-making about how that manstream can communicate and develop a relationship with indigenous research methodologies without being acquisitional, colonial, and downright rude. Where does the tacit maternal knowing position lead me to connect and develop the most appropriate research paradigm for the work we do?
The fiction brought to my conscious attention how the failure to connect with others, because of lack of cultural sensitivity, pushes the narrative back into the earth/body connection, leaving me grappling with the corporeality of researching our Theraplay (or other clinical) practice and how that relates to survival.
I have long argued that if our practice is relational then, for our research to be valid, defensible, and applicable, the methodology we use to support that world view (ontology) and our way of looking at that world view (epistemology) must be congruent with our practice. We are practitioner researchers. Our research position and infrastructure needs to be messy and loose enough as this is what we do to expose the gaps (although I think I would question who defines messy, and question myself as it holds a value-laden feel for me of messy = bad).
If we locate ourselves in the realm of tacit maternal knowing, messiness is actually an acute, highly-refined responsiveness to the less powerful other, following their lead by our intentional desire to understand and facilitate their growth/change. If our research practice conforms too much to manstream ways of researching, then there are no gaps to understand the voice that hasn’t yet worked out how to speak, and so there can be no change to make space for that voice.
So I am drawn to the gap between the earth and the body in my image, to a place where if my model does make sense and ‘works’ in terms of motivation to research, there is the biggest gap between change and safety. It’s a pretty scary place, a venture into un-safety, just as Val/Grace are going to need to venture to the unsafety of addressing the reality of racism between them to help Joe. They will have to acknowledge both the embedded and multigenerational racism they were raised in, as well as the personal and interpersonal racist actions that leads to.
And Val/Graham – well, in the fiction that feels the most unsafe place for me, and maybe this month I can only tell, not show, what the nature of that integration and change may be. I can’t feel into the interface between the human body and living earth, but it is the freshly dug earth of grief and the roots of a beautiful lilac tree that brings about a rupture/breakage in Val’s self-positioning of excluding the masculine. If I am going to stick with my Heuristic Inquiry research methodology and trust the process of fiction reflecting back to me what I do already know at my own deeply embodied interface with the world I live in, that is where my research focus needs to be. I must embody the insensitivity or ignorance I am stuck in to draw out into some sort of light from its roots so change may be possible – the personal is utterly entwined with the practitioner research process.
This is about searching again. Literally re-searching. Being immersed in the puzzle again, talking about the process of seeking answers again, again writing fiction when I have no idea where it will go or what of myself will be exposed, being ready to be as non-defensive as I can be in the face of what emerges. I have to immerse myself in this question I have – how does tacit maternal knowing fit with paternal, masculine and male aspects of care? How do I extract a connecting, communal aspect of that from my own experience of misogyny, patriarchy, and sexual violence, to bring this aspect of human relationship to my research practice?
That has led me to another image, because at this point I have to engage with the question from my multisensory, embodied, and non-linear place. Hand drawn, my scrappy-writing-ME, my messy identity grappling with the image my tacit maternal knowing has thrown up as knowledge via the fiction. In this research process of exploring how the core concept of being culturally sensitive fits with research, I find that the circle of thinking, feeling and doing, reflection, reflexivity, and embodied action all must come together. Exclude one element, and you go off in dead end loops – below I call them the ivory tower loop, the head loop, and the inaction/reaction loop. Each of them have reduced effectiveness, because they are not rooted in all aspects of human engagement. It is the combination of all three processes that enables us to critique our own positionality, and so our own potential to be empathetically available to the other and to know our limits in representing their lived experience.
Graham has to fall under the lilac, no doubt crushing the rhubarb, lupins, and foxgloves (Clever tacit knowing! Aren’t they all poisonous if not handled with care?), to become connected to Viking’s burial place.
How am I going to be culturally sensitive to myself and my own hurts while being culturally sensitive to the position of maleness? How do I handle this potential poisonous (to me) material? In the fiction this month, I tried to give Grace a voice. I feel uncomfortable giving a voice to a Black woman, and I’ve tried to find words from my own experience of being assumed about and being seen as less-than. It is fiction that I hope that gives enough space for Black women to disagree with individually or collectively, and for us to find connection at the intersection of our experiences of being women.
But Graham? Maleness? I think I have my work cut out for the next piece of fiction as I search again, as I re-search, go back, dig around, and use my model of working with the body, my body, the body of the earth, to try to illuminate the personal space. As Moustakas says, “heuristic process is autobiographical yet with virtually every question that matters personally there is also a social – and perhaps universal – significance”, and as de Beauvoir continues, the personal is political, and as Lorde inspire, I can't dismantle the master's house using the master's tools. Thank you, my community of research practice, for encouraging me to merge, meld, and melt my internal cultural insensitivities to find new, helpful, and healing knowledge.