Chapter 2: Multi-dimensions of care: working across difference
For years, I have wondered how to create conditions to work across difference. This question guided my work at Girls Action Foundation, where feminist movements grappled with identity politics, and young women experimented with the issues. How to work across difference continues to be one of the guiding questions in my professional life today.
This challenge of creating the conditions to work across difference inspired us to convene an inquiry into centring care in systems change.
What gets disconnected when we bound a system?
In systems practice, we create spaces for ecosystems to “see” themselves. We use mapping and sense-making processes to understand the systemic and cultural currents undergirding unhealthy systems, and then we use this “seeing” to inform ways of moving forward, intervening and identifying acupuncture points or responsive action.
Paradoxically, we delineate a system by drawing a circle around it and calling it something like climate change, or poverty. Systems thinkers know that systems cannot really be bounded, because ultimately everything is connected. There are no limits, no contours dividing what is inside from what is out.
We draw circles because we need to establish a container to work in. What gets disconnected when we do this? What do we inadvertently silo? Do we lose our ground?
I worked at the intersection of gender issues and systems change for a long time, co-founding Girls Action Foundation and scaling it nationally in Canada. We addressed cultural contexts, like how to decode the media, helping girls build critical thinking skills. We also worked with gender-based violence, racism and poverty, working upstream with prevention. And this of course touched on mental health issues. We did work around the environment. Everything was connected. It was challenging to explain the work we were engaged in, and to put intersectional and interconnected efforts into linear frameworks and bounded-system terms.
We also worked from a feminist intersectional frame. Gender is not binary, and systems impact people differently depending on multiple and compounding identities and contexts. The feminist intersectional frame asks whose perspective is centred when we convene to shift systems. This is an important feminist practice.
What happens when we meet at the intersections?
What would happen if we hacked systems by convening across difference, including different contexts and issues like climate change, care and gender-based violence, or mental health, poverty and the economy? What might we see from this vantage point?
Perhaps it would change attitudes about working together. Rather than defining change efforts by organizational mandates and bounded issues, what if we focussed on the overlaps between mandates and issues?
What might happen if we turn intersectional feminism inside out? Rather than focussing only on the ways in which intersections of location and history inform our experience and identity, can we not convene across points of difference that we care about? What might we see or generate from these new perspectives and exchanges?
Meeting at the intersections is an invitation to flip intersectionality inside out, and to arrive, meet and exchange as whole living beings. Situated by our contexts and locations, our histories and our stories, we human beings are whole and complex. We can transcend individual identities, labels, titles and land in our humanity. Intersections seem like a fruitful place to begin our inquiry.
They also invite us to listen and exchange across our experiences with a belief that this exchange can move and deepen us; and that together we can each be enabled to see differently. This is a posture of learning which assumes that my perspective is not enough. Individually, I cannot have all the answers. A collective insight might emerge to inform our actions.
What might we see, what might we learn when we meet at the intersections?
The spaces in between
I am inspired by practitioners and thinkers who challenge the ways in which we draw boundaries. These innovators speak of the “spaces in between,” and the “interstitial.” These spaces are exciting because we step out of familiar codes, scripts, politics and competing agendas.
The thinkers who have guided the framing for our care inquiry, many of whom have been guests in our dialogue series, are deeply inspiring to me. Every one of these thinkers is playing at the edges of systems change, many using a feminist lens.
Bayo Akomolafe invites us to meet the trickster at the crossroads as a means to disrupt the status quo. Instead of looking for access to dominant power, he invites us to come down to earth and to fall into the cracks, to try composting instead. And to de-center the human in order to see the agency beyond human agency.
Nora Bateson invites third (and fourth, fifth …) contexts to break the double binds that breed division and polarization. Her warm data process cracks professionalized performance open and invites people to plunge into a context where labels and identities wash away, and are replaced by a felt experience of interdependence.
Donna Harraway invites us to embrace complex understandings by “staying with the trouble” and “seeking attachment sites of odd kin where multiple ways of knowing are invited to coexist. She envisions “rebuilding attachment sites for the possibility on-goingness, and the possibility of love in place” and urges us to “destabilize worlds of thinking with worlds of thinking”
Our inquiry co-host, Terrellyn, who is grounded in Indigenist knowledge and rematriation, invites us to tether our spirits to the work we do, welcoming and acknowledging the human and the non-human into the process.
All of these people invite us to move from an anthropocentric (human-centred) way of seeing to something broader. They urge us to re-organize our understanding, and to combine and dissolve our identities in new ways.
This opens a space of creativity and possibility. It’s where life happens.
Our inquiry: Care and systems change
These are some of the reflections that have inspired the Care Dialogue Series, co-hosted by The Systems Sanctuary and Turtle Island Institute. Over this last year, we gathered every month with systems leaders to explore these reflections and questions, and to allow new insights to emerge as to how we might move forward together in new ways.
