Editor’s Notes

By Patricia Ki, RCAT, RSW, Doctoral Student
Toronto, ON
Editor, CATA Envisage

Welcome to a brand new platform for Envisage. We hope that this online format will make it more accessible to view and share the articles, artwork, and resources that have been generously shared by members of our ever-expanding art therapy community.

When the pandemic began we invited content for a special issue that focuses on flourishing. We asked our community to respond to the question of how do we cultivate soul-enriching spaces for ourselves and others in the face of uncertainties, anxiety, and grief. What we have received cumulated in the largest collection of articles in a single issue. We are tremendously grateful for the enthusiastic responses from across Canada as well as Singapore, Brazil, Germany, and the United States. Each story and each image is rich with reflections, insights, and creativity. And together we make a crowd, making loud and vibrant noises about art therapy, about creativity, about our social realities, about our hopes for a different future.

To say that the future needs to be different means that there are many wrongs in our world in the present. Ongoing colonial oppression, disability discrimination, heteropatriarchal norms, homophobia, transphobia, gender-based violence, racist police practices and brutality, and the exploitative incarceration industry are but a few of such wrongs that make life unlivable for many in our communities while maintaining white, ableist, cisheteronormative privileges for others. I am a person who benefit from such privileges, especially in my gains from education and employment within systems that are inherently colonial. And like many I have been thinking about how I can be made accountable for my complicity in oppression. What does it mean to take actions, or what forms can our actions take? Might Envisage be a place of action also?

I have been working with this publication since it was a newsletter. With your support and contributions, it became an online magazine, and it is now on this new platform where each article can be shared easily and virtually without bounds. More than ever, Envisage is now a platform of knowledge production. More precisely, when we write about something we often cite the work of others and therefore replicate and help extend such knowledge into the world. In other words, we produce knowledge through reproducing certain existing knowledges. As such, what knowledge we put on here, and therefore out there, matters.

I am therefore suggesting that we attend to and question who we cite, whose voices we listen to, whose knowledge we prioritize, whose words we have been taught as truths, in our writing, in our reflections, in our research, in our practices. Following Sara Ahmed (2013; 2017), I am suggesting that in our various practices we centre the politics of citation. There have been a lot of talks on social media particularly about ‘doing our own work’ to learn about racism and oppression. To me, part of doing my own work means reading and engaging with the works that have long been shared by writers and artists of colour about the intersectionality of race, colonialism, sexuality, gender, disability, and class. Doing my own work means drawing on these knowledges in my art therapy and teaching practices. It means intentionally citing particular authors in my writing and conversations to resist the replication and entrenchment of a very selective, Eurocentric history about human thoughts and lives, thus questioning what taken-for-granted ideas I hold about what counts as a life worth living. It means subverting the field for the flourishing of previously subjugated, silenced, and erased narratives and knowledges.

This platform is a call to action. And this issue is a tremendously generative beginning. We’re grateful for Dr. Chioma Anah for initiating a collaboration with us in the beginning of 2019 for an ongoing column specifically dedicated to anti-racism and social justice advocacy in art therapy. As well, we thank the many contributors who shared their thoughtful, creative work in this issue. Phuong Nguyen, Shae Anthony, Katie Hanczaryk, Amanda Gee & Virginia Jahyu, the CiiAT Virtual Art Therapy Clinic team, and art therapy students from LASALLE College of the Arts share their work on cultivating mutual care in communities facing challenges and social disparities exacerbated by COVID. Lisa C. Gignac, Caralyn Randa, Andrea Carlson, Nicky Shaw, Lin Liu, Karen Stevenson, Laura Brown, Taylor Bourassa, Morgan Coulson, Lisa Nackan, and Brenda Valiaho share artwork, reflections, and narratives that sustain creativity and hope. Jane Halverson, Marie-Eve Caron & Caroline Beauregard, Stephanie Thorson, Oona McClure, and Rebecca Montgomery discuss continually renewing our practices to better support the different communities we work with in our quickly changing social contexts.

My hope is that Envisage can continue to be a place where we can learn, connect, collaborate, and support one another in actualizing our collective commitment to social justice. Perhaps we can review books about histories and contributions of people not told from the perspective of whiteness; perhaps we write about what these authors teach us about our complicity in racism and oppression. Perhaps we can write and make art about our experiences, contributions, and hopes as art therapists who are BIPOC, disabled, queer, trans, gender non-binary, gender non-conforming. Perhaps we can collaborate and put together a list of books and resources (this may be a good place to begin); perhaps a reading group can form from this. Perhaps we will make mistakes. But we will support each other to try again. So please feel free to get in touch with us for collaboration or sharing of ideas. I believe that knowledge production is one form of action through which we can help shift the landscape and dislodge white supremacy and its interlocking structures of subjugation and oppression. And together we will persist.

A sincere thank-you to the colleagues and fellow CATA members whose sharing of knowledge and feedback in our conversations over the past month have informed the writing of this message.

References:

Ahmed, S. (2013, September 11). Making feminist points [blog post]. https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.