WAI model
WAI Palmerston North has been up and running since early 2013. This founding collective has offered an opportunity to document the very different ways of thinking and working that we have developed as a collective.
The WAI Spirographic model of practice based on our journey is pictured, and the elements of this are discussed here.
Response Based Practice
(RBP) is a way of thinking about violence developed by Alan Wade, Linda Coates, and Cathy Richardson. RBP underpins our WAI kaupapa.
Anti-Oppressive, Social Justice Approach.
The WAI collective’s Anti-Oppressive approach “compels us to recognise and unlearn the everyday practices, assumptions, approaches, and methods that help maintain the status quo” (Baines, D. 2011, p.71).
Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999, p. 120) Kaupapa Māori ethical research principles.
These guide the relationship and community approach to the WAI project. They offer dignity in this space.
“Flipping Deficits”.
The term flipping deficits is an important one as it describes the way that WAI challenge and respond to the many, many deficit representations and negative social responses made to us, as women who have experienced violence.
Seccombe. (2017). The WAI Spirographic model of Practice.
Collective Art Making.
We are a collective of ‘insiders’ or ‘survivors’ (not professionals or outsiders ‘working with’ survivors), we seek to share power through a mutual process of art making as advocacy for social change. Working in this anti-oppressive way upholds the dignity of our members as it challenges traditional and modern models of practice which individualise, pathologise, and ‘help victims’.
Insider facilitation.
The WAI collective approach offers an ethical opportunity for power relations to be considered and addressed.
Manaakitanga.
We offer care and concern to others in the collective. The WAI model of practice relies heavily on manaakitanga – it sits around and beneath everything we do.
Being.
Working within an understanding of ‘being’ allows us to be us – and, like any person, we are complex and fluid.
Self-representation.
Representing ourselves offers us the opportunity to transform the way we are seen and understood by those outside of our experiences, and to reclaim our bodies, our identities, our autonomy, and our dignity.