Unsettling the Settler: An Arts-Based Exploration

Mindy R Carter

doi:10.3390/soc12020046

Abstract

This article considers how meta-narratives can be created through arts-based educational research as a way to shift personal positions and values, using a monologue called Unsettling the settler, written by the author. The creation of meta-narratives that disrupt ideas of national identity, the safety and security of patriarchal and colonial regimes, and who gets to decide what knowledge is worth knowing are essential as antiracist solidarity processes that seek to create belongingness, care and responsibility. This article picks up a thread from a long-term research project in which the author learnt from her participants (actors, audience members and the production team) that performing anti-racist, decolonizing work necessarily begins with an examination of one’s positionality (i.e., body/position/identity/race/cultural background, etc.). “Doing the work” means that one must be committed to sitting with discomfort and accept that there are no easy solutions as a part of the process of change.

Highlights

Sing the brave song: This isn’t over! (STBS) [6] was a play that was created by four volunteer actors as a part of the larger research project written about in Smallest circles first; it articulates the importance of starting with the self when considering one’s responsibilities for redress in the decolonizing project in settler societies [7]
As I engaged with texts, people, ideas, and emotions during the six years of data collection that led to Smallest circles first, I turned to arts-based educational research (ABER) to make visible some of the invisible fears, assumptions, limitations and emotions that I have been confronted with while engaging in decolonizing and anti-racist work
Writing a monologue exploring my experiences with the challenge of being “unsettled” while learning more about the TRC and how pre- and in-service teachers could take up this work in their classrooms was an active experience for me, which—as I have described—helped me to move from feeling “stuck” to “unstuck”: Maybe we re-write this story together and the pain and the joy, and the being stuck and unstuck are all just parts of the larger narrative we learn to tell

Summary

Introduction and Context

(STBS) [6] was a play that was created by four volunteer actors as a part of the larger research project written about in Smallest circles first; it articulates the importance of starting with the self when considering one’s responsibilities for redress in the decolonizing project in settler societies [7] In this devised theatre example, arts-based counter-narratives were a way to shift personal positions and values, and to disrupt ideas of national identity and colonial ideologies. In Smallest circles first, participants (i.e., preand in-service teachers) in the various research projects discussed between 2015 and 2019 consider the privileges they hold as a result of the body/position/identity they inhabit, and how this may be re-inscribing difference in decolonizing/anti-racist work [8] In this way, a deeper understanding of how systemic racism and oppression in Canada are a politics of positionality [2] become clearer for settler and newcomer participants who experience sitting with discomfort and accepting that there are no easy solutions [9] when they are committed to reconciliatory praxis.

Arts-Based Educational Research

Arts-Based Exploration

Analysis

Reflections