3.1 Situating Yourself
Gemma Smyth and Tania Sleman
Situating Yourself
Students will experience placements differently based on their own identities, goals, experiences, and relationships. Understanding that “wherever you go, there you are”, professional practice requires bringing yourself to the workplace. How and whether this can and should happen is explored briefly in this section. We take as a starting point, however, that “oneself” includes the cognitive, emotional, behavioural and spiritual. The degree to which each aspect of oneself is welcomed in the profession, and how much the lawyer wishes to share are, again, complicated questions.
This coursebook touches on some ideas and tools regarding situating oneself personally before piecing together the personal-professional self. This is not an exercise in deep psychotherapy – although that may be of great use to many – but rather an opportunity to consider how a student’s personal identities interact with the burgeoning professional identity, specifically in the context of a clinic or externship.
A professional work placement asks students to actively step into the role of a lawyer. Before beginning to take on a professional role, many disciplines ask student to “situate themselves” – basically, to better understand their personal identities before delving into the professional. This is important for many reasons, including understanding one’s own biases, strengths, and weaknesses in working with clients and legal actors. There are many ways to begin this journey – journals, autoethnographies, discussion groups, religious and cultural ceremony, mentorship, meditation, and so on.
An initial way to investigate one’s personal identit(ies) is based on the work of Taiye Selasi, who introduces a first and important question for consideration that reframes the narrower and sometimes irresponsible question “where are you from.” Instead, she encourages us to engage with the question “where are you local?”.
“Where are you Local”
“Where are you from?” is a complicated question that often only scratches the surface of one aspect of identity. Watch the TedTalk Where are you Local by Taiye Selasi.
Selasi asks the listener to list the Rituals, Relationships, and Restrictions that compromise one’s existence, and that in doing so “your life in local context, your identity as a set of experiences, arises.”
Following her framing of Rituals, Relationships and Restrictions, consider how you are “local,” not limiting yourself to one specific identity or background.
Reflection Questions
Metis scholar and lawyer Professor Patricia Barkaskas also draws on Professor Darlene Johnston’s ideas of “situated relatedness” to draw attention to our inherent interconnectedness to one another, to the environment, our families (chosen and otherwise), and the many others we interact with and rely on for survival. In this vein, consider:
- Who am I in relationship to others?
- Who are the people who help form my personal identity?
- Who will be the people who help form my professional identity?
- How can I better understand myself in relationship to those other people? How will I rely on them to support me when I don’t understand my next steps, when I am confused, when I am in trouble? How can I be of support to others along this journey?
It might be useful to draw diagrams with yourself in the centre and the people around you who will support your personal and professional growth. There might be overlap in these areas (like in a Venn diagram), or there might be very separate people in each area.
