If We Were Mirrors: Positionality And Our Lives | Hsin-Tse (Steven) Lin | TEDxLeidenUniversity

0:06 let's begin today by a little mentor exercise for all of you so close your eyes you know take a restful from the all those speeches and take a deep breath and imagine you are someone else someone from a distant culture a place you have never been to and this person speaks a different language a different food and believes different things compared to you all right now let's come back and how did you or how would you begin to imagine being that person now i don't know about you but for me it was so difficult to accurately capture

0:51 everything the person every characteristics of the person i was imagining and the truth is is that i would confidently say that this person doesn't have to be some distant individual you would face the same difficulty imagining being the person next to you or even your best friend or a family member but why is that and the reason is quite straightforward is that we are conceptual beings with the ability to internalize experiences into abstract ideas and knowledge and this makes each of us so unique and so different and although how we are different is quite a fascinating topic this is not what i'm here for today today i want to invite you on our reflecting journey on something related to that to think about how we make sense

1:39 of our differences using positionality so what is positionality positionality is a concept used in the academia by researchers and it's used to mix help the researcher make sense of their social position within their research so includes say your background your race your age your gender et cetera and how that influenced the study you're conducting and this is used in various fields like gender study and other social sciences to theorize how different positions affect different topics of discussion and although this is used mainly in academia what if we can take this reflective practice and

2:24 use it in our everyday lives and so one of the fundamental claim positionality makes is our i our identities are not fixed but a result of a complex social network that interacts with each other which is why the word position is used in the first place that demonstrates the idea that we occupy some unique social space based on our experiences and backgrounds and all these social space interact with each other so recall how difficult it was to imagine being another person that you've never met from a different culture it's so difficult because it's hard for us to actually capture all those things a different a person a different person would be and how complex the social world is and now to take that even further

3:12 think about how our our social world collide and form what we call the society so the question arise how could we make sense of this complex world well one way i visualize this is first by think of us as mirrors and all of us have this unique size unique shape reflectivity or we weight different at the same time we reflect images off of each other constantly and because we are different in shape size reflectivity the same images doesn't get reflected twice or never if you take this even further and in this sense perhaps we can say that our social position

3:57 just like that is in reflection of each other so take this mirror for example take this here for example if we don't know our own characteristics within the social world and we try to make sense of it if i was a mirror i don't know i look at myself i don't know who i am but i look at this mirror which i don't know it's exact parameters but based on some loose conception of a circle i know it's a circular mirror and i look like myself through it and say well i'm taller and wider than it so i'm probably not a circle but i'm not quite sure i might be and through this we can group each other using some common characteristics you

4:43 might be a squarish mirrors if you're not a circle you might be a postmodernist mirrors for example or if you're like me a long-haired asian young guy who likes philosophy mirrors you never know but remember we are not quite the same and what are the implications of this framework of understanding the world basically why why would you do that and so if we need each other in order to understand our position in the world consider this no matter how far one's belief are from another person they're both essential to each other in a way that they always reflect each other's social position let's delve into the mirror again but

5:29 this time we stand in a different position if i stand close to this mirror now i can see the line of my microphone very detailed but i don't see the whole picture i don't see my face i don't see my legs but if i start standing far away from it i get to see the whole impression of me a little bit give or take um if that was too imaginary for you let me translate this to a more realistic setting that's something you might consider based on some loose categorization that liberalism is more open to progressive ideas i am probably a liberalist compared to my friend a who is very conservative but compared to my friend b here who's a lot more progressive than i am to open eye to new ideas i'm probably somewhere

6:16 in the middle based on my two reference points note how similar this is to how a researcher positioned themselves in their research against whoever or whatever they're studying just like looking at mirrors in a different position another example i have has is more of a personal one i'm a christian and i started going to church by choice not by my parents not by my friends but after being introduced to it in my school back in when i was in middle school and i loved going to churches i learned a whole lot about my life about myself but there's something that i've come to dislike about churches or at least in my church is that we are so quick to dismiss anything other than christianity if it's

7:03 related to another religion sometimes it's cast as demonic or satanic for example and i take problem in that the reason is buddhism for example when i start looking at buddhism from position of a christian i get to see some things i don't see when i'm within my comfort zone within within my comfort zone with my christian friends i start moving away and start seeing myself in that position i get to i get a completely new perspective things like how similar it is between when a buddhist meditates and when a christian prays how similar that is or fascinating things like how the difference between the conception of love have completely different outcomes in

7:48 different religions things like this i would have never thought of that if i was continuous staying in my comfort zone looking at myself only through this at this close range so what does this mean well so i encourage you today you know to take positionality into your lives to think about what if questions to place yourself in different positions in the world and consider different positions because at the end of the day all these different positions make up the world we live in just like when you imagine when you are another person all these different perspectives merge into one in a big social world in a society so maybe at the end of the day we are not so different we are always constantly reflecting each other

8:34 to try to make sense of who we are so all of us are valuable valuable mirrors and that's the message i want to leave with you today thank you [Applause] you