Intentions 

      I just came back from a short lecture from the Equality and Diversity Officer for the University of Oxford’s Humanities Division. I stayed afterwards to ask questions specifically around hiring practices and what kind of language could be used, what kind of process could be followed, and what kind of data needed to be gathered in order to hire a diverse faculty body without specifically ring-fencing positions for candidates from diverse backgrounds which (I guess, I still need to research this) might raise an alarm re: “positive discrimination” laws. Our conversation ended with speaking about how people on these committees and on these boards have the intention to do work diversifying the faculty and the student body, but they come up against institutional structures that make this process slow (if not impossible- my words).

I remember intentionality coming up in my conversations with Gordon Hall and Greg Bae. While Gordon and I were speaking about interdisciplinary, they said,

      … they feel very interconnected, like these questions of like, “Are you an Artist or an Academic?” is very similar to all kinds of other questions of reading. And honestly, I think it has to do with laziness. Or a nicer term is just, the amount of additional, not just mental energy, but the kind of practice it takes to really inhabit that space of accommodating inbetweenness. Or just kind of delaying of making a solid read. It’s just it’s a lot of energy to cultivate that. Like, you’re really changing how your vision is working, you know? How your perceptual faculties are working, and that’s hard. You can’t just like decide to do it one day. As hard as reorganizing huge, huge institutions; so all the offices have to get collapsed, and everybody gets hired and fired and it all gets moved, right? Like, it’s hard, you know? So that’s my sympathetic take on it. Which is, rarely do I meet people for whom the intention to not support this kind of work, or these different forms of reading, where the intention isn’t there, but the actual work you have to do to back up the intention is a lot more complicated and it involves other things no longer being supported, which nobody wants to do that, you know? Especially if something is very established and old and has value. So…

      I think it’s a fight that’s worth fighting, but it’s quite complicated. And, you know, things that are easy to do get done quickly, and things that are hard to do take a long time. Or never happen.[i]

            And intentionality came up in my conversation with Greg, specifically the professors’ intentions in terms of what kind of material they are teaching, and the students’ intentions in terms of what kind of material they want to learn. He said,

      I don't think any of these teachers are like, consciously like trying to like do like, “Yeah, I'm like, instilling white supremacy on you!” [Laughter] Like, I don't think anybody like, is like actively thinking that when they're doing it, you know what I mean? But there is a lot of like, you know, mechanisms that are at play, and that's kind of what I'm talking about, I'm not questioning people's intentions, or like, you know, anything that’s good or bad. And, of course, there are plenty of young students who don't even realize they go there wanting to learn these things, you know, they want to… But, um, you know, I kind of asked them like, ‘Why do you think this is the thing to learn?’ And it's like, what we're talking about. It's like, ‘Why do you think this is the way that you gain recognition, that you gain self-value? What is it about learning this white world?’ And a lot of it has to do with that.[ii]

What does it mean to consciously and actively work against reorganizing institutions to facilitate interdisciplinary learning and cultivate a patience for in betweenness, including a patience for understanding and supporting a diverse group of people? What does it mean to consciously and actively propagate white supremacy through your teaching; and what does it mean to actively, consciously, pursue learning, recognition and self-value in “this white world”?

How is it that we excuse people’s actions by being sympathetic to the calcitrant institutional structures that they contend with, and the white supremacy they have endured in their own educations which has obscured even the possibility that anything exists outside of “this white world”? Why is it that to question people’s intentions is seen as judgmental? What is that phrase… to know someone’s “true intentions”. It’s like someone’s intentions are something outside of words and actions, like a separate intangible thing, but you know them when you see/hear/feel them?

I remember talking to Nick Tudor about care, specifically in collaborative working and learning environments, and he spoke about intentions. He said,

      And I think that for me and these projects, the care is all about the genuine intentions of the people that are taking part in them, and that that feels like that's really missing from the more professional art world in which I inhabit as a worker. And it's something that feels frustrating because there's actually a lot of people obviously in there that do care. But the mechanisms of it don't allow for that very much because they're not very financially lucrative to spend a long time or to care a lot.[iii]

I find it difficult to deal with the effect of people’s actions (and inaction) when there is no one to explain and no one to blame. It makes me paranoid and it makes me feel like I don’t know the people who I thought I knew, and I can’t trust the people who I thought I could trust.

When someone’s intentions were not enough, is there a place to say, just because you didn’t intend for this to happen, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, and that you’re not responsible for it. And just because I hold you responsible for it, doesn’t mean I don’t understand some of the mechanisms which are working against you and us. What do you do with someone’s intentions, genuine or otherwise? 

Kelly Lloyd

[i] “Interview with Gordon Hall” Kelly Lloyd. February 15, 2021. http://www.thisthingwecallart.com/podcast/gordon-hall

[ii] “Interview with Gregory Bae” Kelly Lloyd. February 9, 2021.  https://www.thisthingwecallart.com/podcast/gregory-bae

[iii] “Interview with Nick Tudor” Kelly Lloyd. October 7, 2019. https://www.thisthingwecallart.com/archive/nick-tudor