October 6: The Audacity To Occupy Space
The Audacity to Occupy Space
Yesterday, as we began our week celebrating The People Who Make a Community, we explored the idea that influence does not always come with a title or formal position. It can develop quietly through the way people support one another, create opportunities and make it a little easier for those around them to find their place. Today, that conversation continues in a slightly different direction as we welcome Lisa Shoko to the Cultural Calendar Club with her Black History Month event, The Audacity to Occupy Space.
It is a title that feels particularly relevant to the theme of Honouring Our Communities, because although occupying space can initially sound like something very individual, our confidence to do so is rarely developed entirely on our own. The spaces we believe we are entitled to enter, the opportunities we feel comfortable pursuing and the confidence we have to use our voice can all be influenced by the people we have encountered along the way.
For some people, being visible in the spaces they enter has never required much thought. For others, particularly those who have historically been underrepresented within certain professions, institutions or positions of influence, simply being present can carry a different weight.
Throughout British history, Black people have entered spaces where very few people shared their background or experience, sometimes finding themselves as the first or only person in the room who looked like them. Those individual experiences are important in their own right, but their influence can also reach beyond the person experiencing them, because seeing somebody with whom you identify occupying a space in which you have rarely seen yourself represented can quietly change your understanding of what might be possible.
Representation alone cannot remove inequality or the structural barriers that people may encounter, and it should never be treated as though it can. What it can do, however, is create a point of reference where previously there may not have been one. As more people become visible, what once appeared unusual can gradually begin to feel less so, and the person arriving next may enter knowing that somebody has already stood in that space before them.
In this way, individual progress and community progress are often far more connected than they first appear.
Occupying space is also about much more than simply gaining entry to a room. There can be a considerable difference between being present somewhere and feeling able to participate fully once you are there, particularly if part of your attention is being spent considering how much of yourself it feels safe or acceptable to bring with you.
The people around us can influence how firmly we feel able to stand in our own place. Knowing that somebody believes in your ability can matter at the exact moment you are questioning it yourself, while seeing another person navigate an experience similar to your own can provide reassurance that you are not the only one finding it difficult. Sometimes the confidence to occupy space begins with another person making it clear that there is space for you.
Over time, something else can happen too. The person who once needed that encouragement can find themselves in a position to offer it to somebody else, and this is where occupying space can begin to become something much more powerful than individual achievement.
Someone who has already navigated an unfamiliar environment may be able to make that journey less difficult for another person. They understand the things that were never explained and the moments when support would have made a difference, and that knowledge can be passed forward. The route does not necessarily become easy, but it can become a little more visible.
That process has always existed within communities. Knowledge and experience move between people, and one generation can make use of what the previous generation had to learn for itself. Sometimes progress happens because somebody reaches a place that once seemed inaccessible, but sometimes it happens because that person then turns around and helps somebody else reach it too.
This is part of what makes today's Cultural Calendar Club conversation with Lisa Shoko so fitting within our October series. The Audacity to Occupy Space creates an opportunity to explore visibility and confidence through lived experience, while also recognising the wider context that shapes how comfortable different people feel taking their place within the world around them.
At Powered by Diversity, lived experience sits at the heart of these conversations because there is a depth of understanding that can come from hearing somebody describe something they have actually experienced. A concept that appears straightforward when written down can become far more nuanced when we hear what it has meant in somebody's life, particularly when that experience is different from our own.
No individual story can represent an entire community, nor should we expect it to. Instead, each story allows us to understand another perspective and adds something to the much wider picture of human experience. During Black History Month, creating space for those different perspectives is an important part of recognising the diversity that exists within Black communities themselves.
As we continue Honouring Our Communities, today's conversation also reminds us that the people who shape communities are not always doing so through obvious acts of leadership. Sometimes their contribution comes from being willing to be visible in a place where visibility has not always felt comfortable, and from showing somebody coming behind them that there is room for them too.
The influence of occupying a space can therefore travel much further than the individual moment. What begins as one person's determination to stand firmly in their own place can gradually become an example for somebody else, and when that experience is shared rather than guarded, the space itself can begin to change.
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