Society & Culture
Guest: Stella Saliari
STELLA SALIARI is a feminist researcher and social justice consultant who works with institutions that strive towards achieving intersectional justice.
Throughout her work she applied feminist research practice and an anti-racist lens. She collaborates with both organizations in the Higher Education realm as well as the not-for-profit sector, presenting on topics such as Eurocentrism and knowledge production, diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging in international education, and the politics of positionality.
She curates and moderate events ranging from topics such as Inclusion and Diversity in the Erasmus+ program to training on feminist knowledge production.
HIGHLIGHTS & TAKEAWAYS:
- STELLA: The red thread behind all of this or the driving force are actually three things that are interconnected to each other. It’s feminism, it’s academia and it’s my own life story, let’s say my own experiences.
- STELLA: By moving through the world, this concept of how I’m being perceived changes. But these kinds of boxes that represent power relationships follow me everywhere that I go. And that was something that I became aware of from a very very young age. And in between all of this pain and trouble and the racism, the sexism, and this feeling of not belonging, academia showed up. So that’s my second driving force. And it’s still showing. And academia, for me, has been a true source of inspiration and change. It has liberated me and it has become my constant companion. And the last one is feminism. Feminism gave me a home. And suddenly, I felt I belonged, and when I say home, I don’t mean this cozy space. I really mean that very deep political space that allows me to enter into solidarity with others, that is characterized by coming together where we want to kind of break established injustices.
- You travel the world, you work across different sectors and domains and you are yourself a highly skilled, educated expert, when you think about the ethical dilemmas and the likely tricky challenges you’re navigating through your professional and personal lives, can you share with us what those terms mean to you in terms of ethics and integrity.
- STELLA: Every time I feel that something unethical is happening or I’m not true to my principles, I get really restless. I cannot sleep. I have this feeling in my stomach. I feel paralyzed and I’m not well. So ethics and integrity is something that is crucial to me. They are part of who I am. And of course, that doesn’t mean that I’m perfect or I never make mistakes. Of course, it’s part of learning. We are all in a process. But I’m also not scared of saying sorry, of saying I made a mistake, of recognizing a shortcoming. I’m not afraid of conflict, of difficult conversations, because I think if, and that’s also inextricably linked to ethics and integrity, to be open to say, okay, that was wrong what I did, or okay, let’s have this conversation. Let’s learn from each other. Let’s unlearn. Let’s learn something new. So that goes hand in hand with it. And I’m very, very open to it because I don’t think we can be, we can practice integrity and ethics if we don’t see these things being part of each other.
- KG: Indeed it’s a visceral reaction. You feel it in your body when you know your values clearly and you’re in tune with your body. When you are in situations where your values feel in jeopardy, you can actually feel it physically as well. And perhaps one of the tricky things about everyday life, is that it’s so fast-paced, and we have been almost encouraged to distance ourselves from the work we do and who we are outside of work that many people are either out of tune or they’ve grown into a habit of neglecting themselves, neglecting who they are in that equation.
- STELLA: (About Navigating Ethical Dilemmas) So what happened, there was a gathering in my kid’s school about an educational trip to go abroad, a trip that involves money that not everybody might have. And because of this, certain children will be excluded from this trip. A trip that probably will be amazing for the kids and maybe a trip that will probably remember forever. But not everybody will be able to participate because of finances. Then again, and here is also that we need to acknowledge that we need to always look at things from an intersectional perspective and that then the people who might be able to participate because of finances might also belong to certain ethnicities because racism is real. And because of this, I decided that my kids will not attend this educational trip because it would go against my ethics. So my decision, together with my partner, was right from the beginning. If certain kids will not be able to be part of the trip, our kids will not be part of the trip. And if the school is not willing to do something about it, to include these kids, I will not participate in that trip. And I also want to make a statement with this and also teach my kids that. For us, it’s important to stand in solidarity with others and to make a statement towards the establishment of the school and not to be part of this trip. And it was very easy for me to take this decision. And I was happy because I immediately responded and I didn’t freeze, you know because I have this feeling inside of me, was boiling. Of course, I wanted to say so much more in that moment, which I didn’t do.
- STELLA: Everything we do starts in our home. Like, I consider myself a feminist activist, right? But that doesn’t mean that you’re an activist by going into the street and protesting. Yeah, it’s something that you can do, but maybe not everybody likes it, or maybe you don’t have the opportunity to do it wherever you’re based because of security, because of, I’m in a very small village on an island. People don’t really protest here. There’s a lot of other stuff that you can do. It’s about what kind of conversations are you having with your children? How are you raising your children? What kind of books are you reading? How do you speak with your neighbor? Like, what kind of topics are you bringing up? There’s so much that we can do towards making a change. You use the words ethics, becoming ethical, and it concerns us all. And we all have a responsibility here and we all can do something even if we think, that’s so small. No, it’s not small. Imagine all of us would do something, you know, how things would change.
- KG: Do you have any observations on ethical dilemmas most relevant today to this field? And what is your advice to practitioners and interested observers.
- STELLA: I decided and very consciously to center care in everything that I do. And I will never stop centering care. Again, I want people who listen to understand that it doesn’t mean that I don’t make mistakes. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have moments where I freeze. It doesn’t mean that there are no moments. May be I say only half of the things that I actually wanted to say because in that moment maybe I got too emotional or my body was too strong or something, you know, so but it’s like I will never stop centering care in everything I do, whether it’s my work, whether it’s my family, whether it’s my friends. And when I say care, I’m talking about compassion. I’m talking about empathy, attentiveness, being in solidarity with others and acknowledging that we are all interconnected. yeah, care is an ethical principle that really guides my actions.
- STELLA: And then they played this game musical chairs. And I guess the listeners know it, but you have always one chair less and you have to dance around the chairs and then the music stops and when the music stops, you need to find a chair and whoever doesn’t find a chair is out. It’s like losing the game. and it’s always one chair less. And that to me always was a game that really stressed me out. I hated it so much. And then when the kindergarten said, okay, now we’re to play musical chairs, I was like, why? But then he said, our musical chairs are different because we are being inclusive. And the goal in this game was that everybody needed to find a space to sit. So they would take away chairs but the kids needed to find a way to make every body fit. And he was saying, we win when everyone has a place to sit, when we embrace each other and when we invite everyone into our nest. So the kids were holding each other, kids were sitting on top of each other, hugging each other. And that was so, so beautiful. And that was like an example of how we need to look for the beauty in our daily life in order to be able to center care, to have compassion and keep doing the ethical work, you know.
- STELLA: So the second one is actually a quote by Paulo Freire and he says in that quote that “Education as the practice of freedom as opposed to education as the practice of domination denies that we are abstract, isolated, independent and unattached to the world. It also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from us.” And this is a quote that shows us that we are all connected to each other. It doesn’t matter where we live, what our sexuality is, our gender, the borders, the location, race, religion, because we do not exist as these hermetically scaled borders, you know. And because of this, we have a responsibility for each other. So what happens to you or what happens in one place is not a reality apart from me. And I think once we recognize this, we will live differently. And I also always say if we all were in love with justice, you know when you’re in love? You don’t care if you don’t sleep. you will, I don’t know, go the extra mile.
- You get really excited. you want to see the person you’re in love with. So imagine we were all in love with justice, we were all in love with nature, we are all with these things. Our world would be so much different because we would be so intrinsically motivated. Our purpose would be so much higher to do something.
- KG: How do you combine this wisdom that there is my truth and there’s your truth?
- KG: And in, for example, the lady who’s probably suggested that game musical chairs might be super excited about the way she’s organizing things. In that moment to step up with honesty and also combine it with care is tricky. Can you share a little bit about how you manage these things? Because that’s very powerful to do all three things at the same time.
- STELLA: Like I said before, we make mistakes. All of us make mistakes, it’s a process. We have to learn to listen to each other, to truly listen to each other and to also engage with people who are maybe very far away from our beliefs because it’s easy for me just to talk to my comrades, just to talk to my partner, to talk to people that maybe agree with me. That’s easy. We also need to have these conversations that are not easy with people who disagree with us.
- STELLA: Through our conversation today and also really powerful concepts of being patient, that things take time and being patient with ourselves, with others, there’s always tomorrow, not every battle needs to be fought today and to trust the process and as long as you have baseline values and clarity. It plays out.
- STELLA: We also and I think that’s another thing also in the world we live in. We want things fast, they have to be linear. Okay, I’m going now into this training and I have to train 30 people and they all have to learn this and this and this. No, it doesn't work like that. Everyone will take something else from and everybody is part of this process and processes sometimes are messy, you know, and nonlinear. And maybe someone will realize in six months something that they heard at that moment and they will feel like, okay, let me check that out. Let me buy that book. Let me go back to that, you know?
- STELLA: There’s a book, it’s called HOLDING SPACE. It is by AMINATA CAIRO. And it’s a storytelling approach to trampling diversity and inclusion. And it is also about some of the things that we discussed today. It’s about holding space. It’s about doing the love work, as she calls it. It’s about dismantling the relationship between the dominant and the other. And Aminata in her book, she’s very kind-hearted, but also unapologetically honest. And she shares so much wisdom in the book in a very beautiful and in a very accessible way. Because sometimes we might share things, but the language that we use, we exclude others with it because it might be too academic or too niche. But she does it in such a beautiful, honest and accessible way.
REFERENCES & LINKS:
STELLA’s LinkedIN page
STELLA’s Suggested Book
HOLDING SPACE by AMINATA CAIRO
The Human Conversation Podcast Channels