The New EquityXdesign Framework: Part One
EquityXdesign, our framework for re-designing systems that foster racism and inequality, was published approximately 2 weeks after the 2016 election at a time when the equity discourse in the education ecosystem was taking center stage.
Much has happened in the past 5 years. We have experienced a wired racial reckoning while isolated in a pandemic. Living rooms became schools, with the most privileged of us forming our own local learning communities and units. Schools reopened with instructional leaders trading in their pedagogical skills and acumen for public health credentials, becoming experts at contact tracing, testing, and quarantining simultaneously.
As society changes, so must our framework. In order to move forward stronger, wiser, and more connected and integrated than before, we must continue to re-design for equity in order to solve problems rooted in systemic oppression. The reprise of the equityXdesign framework will offer tools that can help us accelerate equitable design at this moment in time.
In Part 1 of the equityXdesign revision, we explore how designs for equity must become designs that heal, restore, and repair. The new equityXdesign framework must include healing and the attention it brings to the restoration and repair of individuals, who have the ability to transform relationships between people.
Part 1: Historical context matters for radical inclusion.
See: The past is present in people, things, and systems of oppression. The past was designed, and the present is being designed. We are all designers.
Which edges have I inherited?
Where are my bleeding edges?
How have I moved at my edges?
Design at the Margins by Starting with Self
The previous iteration of the equityXdesign framework proclaimed designing for equity required the designer to see the impact of the historical context and that the past lives in people, things, and systems of oppression. In the first iteration of the equityXdesign framework, the framework was designed as a “technical tool for moral work.” And in its inception and conceptualization, it was designed to unify the Public Body. The Public Body is the membership of all bodies—the interdependent network of all us bound and rooted in the earth.
With that humble acceptance, we must now bridge the gap between healing the private body and the relationships between bodies that make up the Public Body. Expanding the concept of designing for equity to include healing brings attention to the restoration and repair of the private body, its well-being, and its ability and capacity to transform the relationships and interactions between bodies. The dialectical relationship between the Public Body and private body reveals the personal edges of truth that can only be seen by an evolved design process. Designs for equity must become designs that heal, repair, and restore.
Evolutionary science tells us that the most beneficial traits survive; we are the recipients of the genetic legacy of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Social inheritance mimics this genetic inheritance: We inherit the traits, characteristics, and habits of legacies of privilege and oppression. However, when identities have been designed in the backdrop of white male supremacist and oppressive ideas, then many of the traits, habits, and ways of survival must be interrogated, especially when they have been designed in this frame. It stands to reason that exploring and imagining identities unencumbered by oppressive systems and relationships is a thought experiment worthy of pursuit. Interrogating the survival tactics that evolved in oppressive systems and that were passed down as a part of our cultural inheritance is a design task that should be encountered with tenderness and care. Starting with self means that when traits and habits emerge as relics in the healed self, thanking them for their contribution, and releasing them welcomes the emergence of the healed self. The new self moves forward with scars but without the pain or the ways that we inflict pain on ourselves or each other. The consistent practice of healing reveals how to maintain range of motion through the scars. We can move forward with new ways to treat ourselves and others.
This requires courage, psychological safety, and physical safety. We must see both who we were (our historical selves), who we are (our current selves), and who we need to become (our future selves). In order to understand the present time and space we occupy, we must understand the inherited legacy surrounding the relationships we are designing, the place we are designing in, and the community we are designing with. While it is easier to look externally and see systems of oppression at work in our broader social systems, the convenience of the external and the anonymity of scale can overshadow the intimacy of the internal. Developing flexibility in how systems of oppression provide a lens into how we perceive and make sense of the world without attending to the impact of oppression on the physical body, is not incorrect. It is insufficient if our goal is to heal, reconcile, and repair the relationship between oppressors and oppressed. It is insufficient if our goal is to unify the Public Body. Developing flexibility and fluency in both is required.
But thinking and talking in this way is sometimes hard. Developing this flexibility and range of motion in our thinking requires consistent practice. We tend to reduce to simplify the complexity of problems, because reduction and simplification eases analysis. However, reducing to simplify without expanding into complexity could lead to reductive, atomized approaches to problems and challenges that are expansive and transcend time and space, and are complex—impacting whole bodies and various ways. Designing at the margins requires the proximity to the bleeding edge as well as its systemic abstraction.
One Body, One People, and Defining Problems
The equityXdesign framework hinges on the fundamental logic in these statements ''Racism and inequity are products of design. They can be redesigned.” This reasoning continues to position people in the experience of racism and design as the designers. But if one considers the brutal impact to the physical body and the mechanisms of separation employed to maintain the separation of different bodies, the body and its importance to understanding systems of oppression and designing relevant and transformative responses moves into our field of vision.
With this sharper focus, we can see equity challenges, problems, and their responsive therapies. They are promising spaces of embodied contradiction—a tension or sensation, revealed in ourselves, our relationships with each other, our relationships with the earth, and any cultural habits and ways of living when we are stretched, challenged, or fearful. With this lens, two bodies come into focus. First, the private body—the intelligent system of chemicals, fascia, bones, muscles and animated matter—that we all have. This is easy to see. We look at it daily and sometimes spend a lifetime learning to take care of it and love it. The second body is harder to see because it requires a different lens and perspective. The Public Body—the interdependent network of all bodies bound and rooted in the earth—creates a dynamic cosmic accountability that requires us to emerge as better humans for ourselves and our progeny. It stands to reason that if we are members of a bigger Public Body, rooted on the same earth, we then see equity challenges as assaults on the private body and understand the impact on the Public Body. We see methods that are used to tear and weaken parts of the Public Body and their impact on private bodies. Especially when those methods are justified, incentivized, and endorsed for one part of the Body at the expense of another part of the Body. With this understanding we see that equity problems and challenges are those that tear the Body apart and willfully accept and justify the destruction of one part of the Body for another. Employing this metaphor unlocks new ways to see equity challenges, solutions, and inform the ways we define problems. There are incredible implications to conceptual understanding of equity centered problem definition.
Problem definition through this lens holds the impact on the private bodies and the Public Body and sees the edges of separation. Incorporating these thought routines when attending to equity challenges and designing solutions with others is critical. It allows us to hold the experiences of systemic interdependence when making sense of gaps and disparities enumerated by numbers and the atomized, basal experiences of the microaggressions, assaults, insults, and direct harm upon the private body. Problem definition must hold both. And if the problem definition holds both impact on the body and the exacerbated systemic experience, then it is only fitting that a design at the bleeding edge must see and attend to our blood first as a requisite for the equitable design—for the appearance, movement, and flexibility of our bodies create our lenses for the world, our biases, and how we make sense of it. When then the private body is rigid and unable to to move, how it thinks, dreams, and speaks is limited. The same analogs are seen in the Public Body. When parts of the Public Body are restricted by edges either inherited, imposed, or created, it distorts its cosmology—its ideas about itself, its relationship to others, and its relationships to its home—Earth. The word cosmology is used intentionally. It is derived from the Greek kosmos meaning order and harmony and logos, meaning discourse and word. The harmony that the body experiences internally within itself and externally with the earth. Internal distortion, misalignment, separation, and violence that we see in the Public Body outside of ourselves, is also within ourselves. Hence, the underlying rationale of a healing discourse as both integral and essential to an equitable design process.
Designing A Healing Discourse
This acknowledgement is not new. Early adopters have centered somatic teaching and practices in their equity work, but healing discourses are just now being integrated into the discourse of equity. And they are rarely integrated into the design discourses. But as we are designing solutions to attenuate the impact of harm upon the private and Public Body, leaning solely to the same ways of thinking and doing that created the harm to create the solution only puts us all at risk of creating more harm. It stands to reason that if the designer is not healing the impact of inequity and oppression in themselves, they will only create experiences and products also that do not heal. Thus, incorporating a healing discourse when designing at the margins is not only necessary for the designer, it is required.
The technological and material conveniences of the modern era and colonization that are mostly celebrated as hallmarks of civilization came at the expense of the Public Body and the earth. Colonization did not happen sporadically. It has been a consistent and deliberate tear for hundreds of years. A healing discourse of this magnitude thus sees the problem as chronic and persistent, thus our treatments are routine and daily. Incorporating a healing discourse means that our approaches to the work are not acute—a remedy prescribed when there is a symptom in the Public Body like disparities in achievement, discipline, or visible public harm. Adopting a healing discourse acknowledges our shared membership in a universal Public Body, thus therapies for healing are not just for those at the bleeding edge, they are for everyone.
A healing discourse also understands the impact and mechanics of segregation, the disease that holds oppression, inequity, and when it comes to white supremacy, racism. This discourse understands how it employs distance and proximity to dull our awareness and sensitivities to the suffering of others on the bleeding edge. Our numbness does not heal the tears experienced in the private and Public Body, it simply makes us unaware. The lack of awareness creates little urgency for meaningful response. Again, it further stands to reason that if the sustained injury of oppression and supremacy numbs our sensitivity to the suffering in the Public Body, our treatments become not only routine and daily, they are designed for a sensory experience that is wholly embodied, immersive, integrated, and most importantly, connected.
Holding the historical context when designing healing solutions means acknowledgment of the ways people repair, stitch back, and make themselves whole again. Elevating ancient and indigenous wisdom and healing practices as privileged expertise can create more flexibility and movement in the Public Body and should be explored even when they stretch us beyond our inherited boundaries of belonging. This requires an integrative approach, one that acknowledges interconnectedness and integration between the mind, body, and spirit, the centrality of the design of our physical and energetic bodies, the organization of our nervous systems—both sympathetic and parasympathetic systems—and the ultimate acknowledgement that we can’t just think our way through a journey as if our minds travel without our bodies.
This also requires respect and acknowledgement of the reverence and sacred nature of healing practices and White Supremacy’s cultural habit to rip the secular from the sacred. Further, it begs us to also see how the need for control, redacts, constricts, and bounds ways of thinking, being, learning and moving. This need for integration can help us integrate ourselves—the material and immaterial, the secular and sacred, the oppressor and the oppressed.
Instead of appropriating, commodifying, and objectifying the practices of other cultures, they serve as sign posts and reminders that our existence occupies and is purposed in realms beyond the physical. An informed healing discourse informs us that the diversity that exists in healing practices leads back to the self—reminding us that stories and practices of healing exist in our own family traditions. We go back to the self.
Again, this not a new acknowledgement, the proliferation of social and emotional learning, trauma informed practices, mindfulness practices, movement, and asana, have earned admission into the canon of sound pedagogical practice for students, especially students of color, and especially for students who have experienced trauma. However, we often fail to see that the trauma experienced by the most marginalized is our trauma too.
If we agree that past is in the present and its history’s present day manifestations are not just intellectual experiences, but embodied, and if we agree that trauma informed responses and social-emotional learning (SEL) is sound pedagogical practice for students who have experienced acute and chronic system traumas, then it is only fitting that our design and resistance practices for equity also integrate these ways of being for the adults as well—centering them as core and integral to enabling Radical Inclusion. Defining problems at the margins with deeper integrity requires that the stories of trauma and oppression are not only balanced by the stories of joy, resistance, and resilience but also underscored by the routine and regular methods, practices, customs, and ways that heal and restore the private and the Public Body. When the private bodies move differently, they think differently. When private bodies move and think differently, the imagination of the Public Body emerges unbounded, unleashed, and free. Our work and our practice moves from transformation to transcendence. We all get free.
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