THE POSITION OF WOMEN AND THE CONCEPT OF 'OTHER'
Virginia Woolf was writing about the position of women in England in the 1920s; and is sometimes criticised for not seeing beyond the privileged location of white middle class women. What she did articulate however, was the difficulty for disadvantaged groups as being more than simply a lack of resources (despite the title and thrust of the book).
For VW, the lack of 'a room of one's own' for contemplative creativity was exacerbated by being 'out-of-place' in the world at large - by being restrained and constricted in one's actions by the assumptions and beliefs of the dominant group. In these conditions, she argues, it is not possible to have a free and unimpeded state of mind needed for creative action, with "no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed" (p58).
Homi Bhabha, a post colonial theorist, takes this further. In the 'Location of Culture', he argues that dominant groups attempt to 'frame' the experience of others through stereotypes -aiming to locate then in a specific (and inferior) place. This can make it hard for those positioned as 'other' to articulate their demands and feelings. But it also indicates the anxieties of the powerful, which leaves them vulnerable to (and threatened by) 'others'.
Here, then, we are interested in what KINDS of spaces students from a wide variety of backgrounds, without artistic training, might want to articulate - potentially to CHALLENGE both the assumptions in "a Room of One's Own" and contemporary assumptions within artistic practice.