A Review of: ‘A black feminist narrative enquiry of the outsider-within positionality of black women K-12 art educators’
- Nana Oguntola
- May 11
- 3 min read
The article was by Indira Bailey and submitted as part of her doctoral thesis.
Entitled ‘A black feminist narrative enquiry of the outsider-within positionality of black women K-12 art educators’, it presented the experience of black women within the K-12 art education curriculum.
She discussed how as an art educator, it was difficult to find black women’s work included in the curriculum which meant most students did not know about the contribution or work of black female creators within art education.
She stated that to counter this dearth she had to intentionally purchase content outside of the curriculum in order to introduce students to black women in art.
She also noted the difficulty in quickly identifying art by black women for use within the curriculum for students. This related to an article I had read from the book Racial Fatigue by Martin. Jenniffer L.,2015 and an article by Safiya Umoja Noble, 2013: ‘Hyper-visibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible’, in which they discuss the difficulty of finding works by black academics in academia or in search engines.
Indira also discussed the intersectionality of being black and female within a curriculum that was based on being white and male. Even at times when females were highlighted it excluded black females and when black was included it was black men and not black females.
The article focuses on the gap this causes in art education within the K-12 curriculum art curriculum for students situating a single way of seeing, learning and doing art.
As an article suggested by my supervisor as part of my doctorate I have to reflect on how this impacts me or relates to my current positionality as black, female and African doing my doctorate and running a Film Academy.
Definitely, as a doctoral researcher, it is a fact there are very few black academics that come to the top of a search engine when information is required about anything.
Secondly there is definitely a lack of mainstream black females within the AI in education or AI in the creative industry spaces. If there are any, and it is a fact there will be many, they are not featured on TV, on the radio or in the mainstream press: One would think that black women do not understand or know anything about AI.
Thirdly of course this way of being, in which society operates translates into AI itself which is highly biased in its absence of black women when asked to make outputs of any kind.
How does this impact me: Firstly as an author of a book based on African Queens I have been able to see how the absence of the stories and lives of these queens from any kind of mainstream education has led to a lack of understanding of Africa’s past and history in order to deliberately perpetuate a narrative of a continent that was underdeveloped and required western deliverance. A narrative which is untrue but which underpins all relations with blackness today in the 21st century: It is clear that once your history is identified in a specific way the interactions of all systems with you will follow this pattern hence the story of exclusion of black people permeates most sectors including academia: Personally I believe until history is retold the future will remain skewed and difficult to correct.
Additionally, for me, it was because of this lack of black presence and anticipated lack of support that I set up the film academy in the first place: to create a space where I would not be ignored but in which I could be free and accepted as I am as a creative practitioner and others could be too. This positionality impacts my doctoral study.
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References
Indira Bailey, 2020, A BLACK FEMINIST NARRATIVE INQUIRY OF THE OUTSIDER-WITHIN
POSITIONALITY OF BLACK WOMEN K-12 ART EDUCATORS
A Dissertation in Art Education and Women’s Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies
Martin, Jennifer L., Racial Battle Fatigue, 2015 - Bloomsbury Publishing
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