Walk into Your Season
The Art of Cultural Work
by
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Walk into Your Season examines the role of the cultural worker and four related factors: (a) cultural work, (b) free space, (c) discursive communities, and (d) empowerment. Cultural work is an art form built from the experiences that the community members share. It unites a group’s words, narrative(s), images, visual art, music, film, and other cultural legacies of voice in an effort to inform and inspire individual and collective transformation. Cultural workers explore the empowering features of a setting or organization, carve creative spaces, and build a repertoire that renews people, rejuvenates people, re-energizes people, empowers people (individually and collectively) or if necessary starts from scratch to do a new thing in a new place in a new way. The necessity for cultural work resides in creating environments that nurture opportunities for community building, healing, identity and cultural transmission, wisdom transmission, and social capital.
Peyton McCoy began by illustrating the role of the “cultural worker” (conceived as a scholar artist) in two public programs entitled “Walk into Your Season.” She conducted these two events as cultural work using methods of creativity and repertoire building taken from the work of bell hooks and Cornell West and personal dimensions of knowledge, tacit knowledge and reflective practice.
“Perhaps,” says Dr. Richard Couto, “we need a new concept of leader, if not a new word. That word would be more related to socially purposeful leadership as Greenleaf and Burns suggested. As you read the many sources that inform the concept of conceptual work and the ten principles of effective cultural work, ask yourself if they are not excellent foundations and principles for the insightful study and improved practice of leadership that we seem to seek and desperately need.”
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About the Book
The significance of “Walk into Your Season” is that it ponders whether a cultural worker can renew the role of free spaces of empowerment to address power differentials utilizing key contributors such as the traditions and language of a culture; the cultural worker’s potential to facilitate action and transformation; and the intentional effort to make the hidden transcript of resistance public. By illustrating how free spaces are effective in discursive communities affected by the aftermath of historical dominance and still vulnerable to the ploys of power, “Walk into Your Season” illustrates cultural work in two different settings, one with a history of free spaces (Thirty First Street Baptist Church) and one without a history of free spaces (older youth transitioning from foster care in the Richmond Department of Social Services).
By uniting a group’s words, narrative(s), images, visual art, music, film, and other cultural legacies of voice in an effort to inform and inspire individual and collective transformation, cultural work creates a repertoire that exposes empowering features of the group’s free spaces. Tacit knowing, reflective practice, and creativity, that is, the artistic, tacit, intuitive processes that practitioners bring to situations of problem solving are explored.
Cultural work as repertoire building and creating free space is central to democratic progress and important due to its work in (1) identifying, engaging, and illuminating, the empowering features of free space (2) discerning the gaps between reality and the democratic ideal, (3) facilitating a creative space in which recognized gaps can be explored, (4) building a repertoire that empowers individually and collectively through renewal and initiation, (5) making hidden transcripts public when appropriate, and (6) celebrating the emergent creative repertoire in the community. A set of principles for effective cultural work is revealed.
About the Author
Peyton McCoy holds a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Interdisciplinarity with a concentration in cultural work and ethical leadership. She works with issues surrounding diversity, empowerment, and post secondary education and training. She is an author, speaker, workshop facilitator, and consultant and is pursuing a Doctor of Education Degree. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.