- Home >
- Top Stories
Navigating Systems of Power
February 06, 2009
Visit: LutePics Gallery
Last week, hundreds of staff and faculty from colleges throughout the South Puget Sound gathered for a diversity partnership seminar, “Navigating Systems of Power in Higher Education,” at PLU.
The featured program was presented by Leticia Nieto of Saint Martin’s University. She was recently named Outstanding Faculty of the year and has been a psychotherapist and trainer specializing in cross-cultural communication, motivation and creativity for a number of years.
During her program she took small groups through exercises of first identifying oppression, when it’s linked to something like societal rank, and other type of oppression, such as that which is linked to race or sex.
Small groups developed action plans for situations and acted out real life scenarios.
For example, a violent act may not be deep-seated oppression, like racism or sexism; it might be actually part of a status game, in many ways like an animal hierarchy. One indicator of a status behavior is that the act or behavior isn’t constant.
“When you are aware of something it’s because it starts and stops,” Nieto said.
Deeper socialization issues are constantly present, and vary depending on a person’s own social development and may not be readily identifiable, she said. These become societal values that develop based on life conditions.
Socialization that develops how society treats issues like racism and sexism have evolved based on how people interact with each other. Most of the time, the always-present rank is not true based analytical thinking, but is very real because of its established perception.
These conditions overvalue certain groups and establish a functional supremacy, that while false is actually very real, Nieto said.
When talking about systems of power in any situation, identifying and addressing those supremacy issues must happen to engage the issues of oppression readily, she said.
“Trying to figure out who the bad guy is depends on what lens your looking through,” Nieto said.
Campus Voice Editor Chris Albert compiled this report. Comments, questions, ideas? Please contact him at ext. 8691 or at albertct@plu.edu. Photo by University Photographer Jordan Hartman.
During her program she took small groups through exercises of first identifying oppression, when it’s linked to something like societal rank, and other type of oppression, such as that which is linked to race or sex.
Small groups developed action plans for situations and acted out real life scenarios.
For example, a violent act may not be deep-seated oppression, like racism or sexism; it might be actually part of a status game, in many ways like an animal hierarchy. One indicator of a status behavior is that the act or behavior isn’t constant.
“When you are aware of something it’s because it starts and stops,” Nieto said.
Deeper socialization issues are constantly present, and vary depending on a person’s own social development and may not be readily identifiable, she said. These become societal values that develop based on life conditions.
Socialization that develops how society treats issues like racism and sexism have evolved based on how people interact with each other. Most of the time, the always-present rank is not true based analytical thinking, but is very real because of its established perception.
These conditions overvalue certain groups and establish a functional supremacy, that while false is actually very real, Nieto said.
When talking about systems of power in any situation, identifying and addressing those supremacy issues must happen to engage the issues of oppression readily, she said.
“Trying to figure out who the bad guy is depends on what lens your looking through,” Nieto said.
Campus Voice Editor Chris Albert compiled this report. Comments, questions, ideas? Please contact him at ext. 8691 or at albertct@plu.edu. Photo by University Photographer Jordan Hartman.