My participation in the MSVU Master’s Cohort has truly been a blessing. It has afforded me an incredible opportunity to explore Afrocentrism, critical race theory and the processes of continuous learning. I am interacting and learning within a collection of communities of practice that promote exciting and culturally relevant ideas, understandings and reifications. This new negotiation of meaning has real-life implications for the participants and the conversation about these emerging social constructs. Unfortunately, we’re only in this particular learning environment three times for a total of thirty hours over a span of three months. This is an insufficient amount of time to understand these important concepts which challenge current hegemonic paradigms and established negotiated meanings, applying a critical analysis to the world.
It has been my experience that when I leave the institution and participate in my collective continuum of communities of practice, these counter-theories are marginalized and indeed opposed by well-established reified conventions and shared agreements that have little tolerance for dissent. As I attempt to negotiate new meanings and understandings of social constructs, I am bombarded with scripts and narratives and imagistic-perceptual responses identity bearing beliefs, which fail to validate this philosophical shift. It has been difficult integrating this knowledge and perspective into my individual identity in a practical and sustained way.
As Bracher states, “ The most fundamental need is the need for recognition, the need to be validated, or at least acknowledged, taken into account, by others”. I only have a very limited number of individuals and communities of practice where I can attempt to engage in meaningful conversations about by new learning experiences. My most significant relationships extended family and friends aren’t afforded regular opportunities to participate in socio-political debate except in very superficial ways. For a host of reasons, there are only limited opportunities to ‘get together’ where important discussions about race and ethnicity, power and privilege or community involvement take place. When you can’t derive support and validation for new ideas that are directly related to the Afrikan/African Nova Scotian community from the most important influences in your life, it makes it much more difficult to integrate these concepts into one’s life. Even worse, individuals can be critical of change because it threatens their identity and individual belief system. A family member recently told me not to get ‘all Malcolm X on them’ after I asserted that African Nova Scotian professionals have a responsibility to find ways to contribute to our community(i.e provide leadership or participate in volunteerism). Additionally, Corrections Service Canada, the organization where I’ve worked for the part eleven years, is a highly hierarchal collection of communities of practice with an inordinate level of reification and limited participation by individuals. The individuals who comprise my personal workplace are not receptive to new ideas and are not familiar with Afrocentrism, communities of practice theory or contemporary critical race theory. I have been interacting within this institution on a daily basis for seven hours for five days a week for the last decade; and for the foreseeable future.
