Community Agreements & Principles

• Don't assume anything about anyone.
• Give each other the grace to be vulnerable.
• We challenge the idea or belief, not the person.
• Trust that we all hold a piece of the puzzle and we need each other’s pieces to understand the whole picture.
• We assume best intentions and take responsibility for the impact of our words and actions.
• Give others your attention generously. Share your truth from your heart and mind.
• We embrace mistakes as opportunities for growth.
• We take care of ourselves, others, shared spaces, and the natural world.
• Be specific and ask questions.
• We will show respect in all exchanges. This includes being present with all your energy.
• We use language thoughtfully to help make spaces more welcoming to all.
• Calling in instead of calling out.
• We will stretch, nourish, and hydrate our bodies as needed.
• We do not harass or engage in abusive or bullying behavior.
• We will presume good will and be committed to change.
• We will respect what is shared confidentially in the room.
• We W.A.I.T (W.A.I.T = Why Am I Talking? Or Why Aren’t I Talking?)
• We will engage anew and with curiosity.
• We will think, communicate, and engage beyond the boundaries of what we were taught to believe and feel in the past.
• Discovery is a shared goal.
• We share one at a time and give each other our full attention.
• We expect unfinished business and commit to following up.
• We will engage in meaningful work individually and together.
• We use I statements:  “I feel, I think, I believe."
• We will make the way we work together an example of what is possible.
• We will focus on the big picture, which is the well-being of the Low-Res MFA community, yet we will value all parts of the whole.
• We apologize with a commitment to further growth.
• We explain why a statement or action is hurtful then share a better alternative.
• We use names not acronyms.
• We communicate and ask questions.
• We are honest with each other.
• We allow space for each other.
• We are not here to reach consensus.

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow 
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, 
that is not mine, but is a made place 
[...] 
that is a place of first permission, 
everlasting omen of what is. 
– Robert Duncan, 1960

Our Low-Residency program brings students together from very different disciplines, histories, and places. We enter with distinctive artistic and professional aspirations. As a result, the program engages deeply with questions of belonging. How do we gather? What kind of community is possible?

SAIC’s Non-Discrimination Statement, Faculty Handbook, and Student Handbook outline important rules of conduct concerning discrimination, harassment, and bias. The Low-Res MFA Program builds on this foundation with community principles that we use for organizing our time together. We understand anti-bias work as praxis: an active practice of critically examining the conditions that constitute us. This is a shared project integral to our pedagogy.

In Low-Res, the concept of poetics frames our interdisciplinarity. Poetics names the different ways we make things and discuss ideas. It asks us to account for the multivalence of language, the meaningfulness of composition, and the power of interpretation. These ideas are useful in relation to both aesthetic and community-building practices.

In the scaffolding of our program, poetics is articulated through attention, sensation, and perception. These terms contribute to how poetics provides a framework for Low-Res MFA community members to engage in meaningful, ongoing community-building work.

Attention

A first step to building community is attending to the biases we bring with us. Bias derives from the French biais: “a slant, a slope, an oblique.” In the 1500s, the term was used in the game of bowls to describe balls purposefully weighted on one side so that they curved obliquely when tossed. It has come to mean a one-sided tendency of the mind, an undue propensity or prejudice. Bias is a disproportionate weight in favor of or against a concept, thing, group, or person. Recognizing and naming bias is complex and valuable work. There is explicit bias which is openly visible or outwardly direct. There is also implicit bias, embedded deep within our psyches and within larger systems. When bias manifests, the results can be corrosive or divisive. Anti-bias work requires our active attention to the explicit and implicit biases we carry.

Sensation

Sensing the weight of bias as we strive to build community can lead to intense feelings. Thoughtless expressions of feeling can cause pain. Pain can collapse discourse. In the Low-Res MFA program, we want our expressions of feeling to buoy discourse. We commit to recognizing our feelings, holding them, and naming them before expressing them. Sometimes our feelings are ambivalent, which can make this practice difficult. That is okay; acknowledging that we do not understand is often the intelligent course of action. Articulating knowledge or non-knowledge of our feelings—and our intuitions about others’ feelings—helps us understand whether or not we will express them. This is a vital step in reckoning with bias. 

Perception

Our attention to the ways bias manifests and the sensations it produces prepares us for finding ways to relate to each other. At its core, anti-bias work is an examination of one's self in relation to others. It is the action of critically calibrating the weight of our histories and habits of thought in order to be part of something larger than ourselves—community. Perception, as a relational practice, negotiates that distance between yourself and the world. To perceive is to account for how we impact others. This is a technique for recognizing how bias directly affects our communities. Sometimes things go awry and we cause harm. In LRMFA, we commit to staying with the consequences of our language, actions, and affects. We commit to each other. This is poetics in practice. 

A Place of First Permission

Low-Res is an experiment in pedagogy and community. When conceiving of the structure for the Low-Res MFA program, inaugural director Gregg Bordowitz was inspired by Robert Duncan’s poem, “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”—particularly the idea that this is “a place of first permission.” The Low-Res MFA program is a place to think, try, and do things that you cannot do elsewhere. Experimentation involves risk, and at times, conflict. Our question is not how we will avoid these, but how we will learn from them. We ask you to engage in the ongoing work of learning how to be together, and in the face of conflict, commit to entering back into this space of discourse and learning. Together, we actively co-create this program, this community, this meadow as a horizon of possibility—“an everlasting omen of what is.”