Standing On the Shoulders of Giants: Inspirations Shaping Arts Education Exchange
Introducing Our Reflections Series
At Arts Education Exchange, we are learning to hold space for uncertainty, understanding that organisational culture is never static but constantly shifting through relationships, reflection, and practice. This year, to reflect this, we have been collaboratively developing new ways to be together as a team, including monthly anti-racism peer circles; art based activities exploring our values and testing out various grounding exercises.
This new blog series opens our internal conversations to peers who are also experimenting with non-traditional approaches to organisational development…and anyone else interested in growing out of racial capitalism.
Rather than offering fixed models or polished outcomes, these posts share what we are noticing as we go: attempts, questions, and moments of discomfort that are teaching us something about how power, emotion, embodiment, and culture intersect in our work. We hope these reflections invite dialogue and mutual learning across organisations committed to relational, trauma-informed, and anti-colonial practice. Who’s wisdom has influenced the ways you work? (comment at the bottom).
As a starting point we thought we’d share some of the thinkers, practitioners, and movements whose insights are shaping our commitment to anti-racism, embodied practice, and justice-driven organisational change. The influences below underpin our evolving culture, helping us interrogate and transform our ways of working.
Here’s some of the people inspiring and shaping our organisational culture…
The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture: Tema Okun
Our anti-racist peer circle, refers to Tema Okun's influential analysis of white supremacy culture, which identifies how everyday organisational behaviours, like perfectionism, sense of urgency, individualism, binary thinking, and power hoarding, reinforce inequity and hinder collaborative transformation. Each month we examine 3 new characteristics and reflect on her suggestions for dismantling these patterns. Specific blog posts related to each session will be published in this series.
Tema Okun – White Supremacy Culture Characteristics
bell hooks
The radical love and truth-telling of bell hooks guides our work, reminding us that justice and transformation begin with honest self-reflection and relational care. As hooks writes:
“The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want it to be. More than ever before we, as a society, need to renew a commitment to truth telling.”
We seek to embody this ethos in every aspect of organisational life, recognising that love is a transformative force when enacted through genuine action and accountability.
Ruha Benjamin
Ruha Benjamin’s powerful advocacy for imagination as resistance inspires us to reimagine our structures and relationships:
“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.”
Her call affirms our need to build liberatory futures, not simply react to the present.
Resmaa Menakem is a pioneering trauma specialist, therapist, and bestselling author whose work centers the healing of racialized trauma through the body. His influential book "My Grandmother’s Hands" has been a crucial guide for those committed to anti-racist practice, reminding us that true healing must be embodied, communal, and attentive to the legacies we carry and pass on.
“The body is where we fear, hope, and react... And what the body most cares about are safety and survival.” — Resmaa Menakem
Menakem shows us that settling and healing our bodies is central to anti-racist practice.
This reminds us that art and activism are rooted in the lived, felt reality of our bodies. Its a lifeless idea so reclaiming embodiment is essential to anti-oppressive transformation.
Combahee River Collective Statement
Our understanding of anti-racist, anti-oppressive practice draws from the Combahee River Collective, whose foundational statement declared:
"...we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives."
Black Feminist Thinking
Black feminist thought challenges us to address the entanglements of racism, patriarchy, and other power structures through relational, embodied, and intersectional means. These frameworks, rooted in the work of hooks, Benjamin, Johnson, and the Combahee Collective, urge us not only to examine inequity, but to actively co-create new processes and ways of working with our team and young people.
We acknowledge our current status as an all-white and cisgender leadership group, and we are committed to transparency, shared decision-making, and ongoing critique of our structures. Collaborating across lines of difference, we aim to center marginalised voices and foster an environment where anti-oppressive, relational practice can flourish.
Resource Links & Further Reading
These thinkers and many more to come are informing our compass as we strive to create just, creative, and inclusive arts learning spaces. We invite dialogue and reflection, and we remain committed to evolving alongside the collective wisdom of our whole community.
Next in the series we will be sharing our collective thoughts about slowing down as an act of care and resistance, a theme that has emerged as a strong guide for us at AEE.