Tools for Conflict + Accountability: Colorado Acro Fest Report-Back
Last weekend was the 5th (!!) Colorado Acro Fest, and even though each year has different offerings and a few different faces, the range of skills and levels of offerings, the array of communities represented, and the emphasis on connection remain the same.
I've had the opportunity to facilitate several social justice "acro chat" lunchtime talks at festivals and intensives over the years, and I've always appreciated the folks who show up curious, engaged, and ready to practice not just their acrobatic abilities but also their community engagement and communication skills. This year at CAF was no different — I'm grateful for the group that took time away from their Saturday lunch to sit with each other and dig in to how we shape processes of accountability within our acro spaces. The broad subject for the talk, tools for conflict and accountability in acro, was a huge undertaking for just one brief session, but hopefully laid some initial groundwork for ongoing discussions. As a partner and group practice, acrobatics isn't really possible without navigating conflict, and our trust in each other to engage in high-level skills that risk emotional or physical injury is contingent on how well we're able to navigate that conflict and also repair from it—that is, to engage in accountability.
We kicked off the chat by revealing and setting expectations — what made each of us show up to this particular topic, what types of issues we're dealing with in our own lives and acro communities, and what we thought the conversation would be about. The range of expectations and needs for this conversation was truly impressive — everything from how to have better communication skills with each other and how to step in to conflict rather than avoid it, to how to manage serious ruptures like navigating racial and gender-based power dynamics, assault, and injury. Notable among the responses, though, was how outward-facing they were: many, if not most, showed up to the conversation hoping to find out how to hold others accountable for their actions. The hope was to do this with kindness and tact, certainly, but nevertheless, this reflected one of my main goals for the talk itself, which was shifting our mindsets from considering accountability to be an other-facing activity, and instead beginning that practice with ourselves.
Holding Yourself Accountable
Accountability is such a loaded concept, but for the purposes of our conversation, we focused on the ability to recognize one's participation in harm, and to do so with some amount of healthy emotional distance—empathizing with others' experience of a situation and respecting it, while having some amount of self-knowledge about our own patterns and behaviors.
Many other organizations and individuals have written at great length about what accountability entails and how to engage in accountability processes through transformative justice frameworks. To distill those insights down into a few steps, though, accountability entails:
Recognizing what I did
Recognizing the impact of what I did on others
Cultivating genuine remorse
Working to make it right, in ways defined by and aligned with those who were harmed
Becoming a person who does not do that same harm again
Critically, the first step of "recognizing" is where many fall down in this process, and it's important to recognize that we cannot engage in accountability without being able to recognize and understand when harm has occurred, and to understand its impact irrespective of our intentions at the time. This step is where defensiveness often arises in order to deflect perceived responsibility for harms, and makes it challenging to engage in conversation, let alone repair. But the good news is that recognizing where and how we might be perpetrating harm, and eliciting feedback about our behavior, is a skill that we can practice just like any other.
Barriers to Accountability
At this point in the chat, we took a moment to do some personal accounting, reflecting on a time when we each had harmed someone, or were given critical feedback. We considered how we felt at the time, what we "heard" in that feedback or around the harm, and how we reacted, as well as how we might have reacted differently. What resources or information would we have needed to show up differently, if we weren't proud of how we handled the situation initially? These self-reflection questions highlight a few critical components of the accountability process that are under-discussed but often sabotage our efforts to move through conflict with each other.
For those who named their conflict aversion or desire to avoid confrontation or withdraw from engaging on these issues, I offered a reframe as a thought experiment: we often think that the "natural" state of existence is one of peace or harmony, but what if instead we believed we were in conflict with everyone, but just had not yet discovered its dimensions and contours? What feels uncomfortable about conflict is suddenly realizing that you aren't aligned, either with yourself or with others, and the "surprise" of that moment sometimes catches us off guard. But if we recognize that there are many places where we will not "naturally" align with everyone in our communities, we can realize that we are already navigating conflict constantly, and recognize that conflict being made explicit and obvious is inevitable, rather than an aberration. We already have tools to manage it, but we can practice with them to wield them better.
Underlying this self-reflective moment is the feeling of vulnerability that arises when we have to recognize our role in harm. This feels especially acute in North American contexts and White culture—we are told that admitting when we've made mistakes, or participated in a harmful practice, can get us "cancelled" or worse, subject us to legal action and liability. That fear of social isolation or significant legal and financial consequences can prevent admissions of harm or mistakes, and actually impede repair from conflict. Knowing that this fear and vulnerability blocks our accountability processes also has an important implication for the tools we use socially to manage conflict, notably around using language and actions that instill shame. Shame is a social tool, and it is a tool of control—we shame others in order to communicate a violation of group norms and punish behaviors that don't align with expectations. Shame is a way of instilling fear of ostracization and loss of social connection, both of which are critical to our survival and wellbeing as humans. Imposing shame, though, not only stokes the fear that prevents us from acknowledging our participation in harm, it also interferes with our ability to build the genuine remorse for our actions that is required in taking accountability. When we're shamed instead of being invited into a process of accounting and addressing harm, our entire framework for conflict is one of attempting to avoid punishment and negative feelings, rather than one that recognizes transgressions and negative feelings as inevitable, and as opportunities for us to engage in repair that strengthens our social bonds.
Who Keeps Us Accountable, and How
These barriers to accountability highlight its fundamentally social nature: we engage in accountability for the betterment of our communities and relationships, and our communities and relationships can help create conditions for accountability. At this juncture, we took another brief accounting moment to consider some questions:
Who are some people in your life who hold you accountable? What allows you to trust them, and do those people actually give you critical feedback/engage you to be accountable? Why or why not?
What is the nature of your relationship with those people who hold you accountable? Are they peers? Are they mentors?
For whom are you the accountability partner? What tools do you use to do that, what makes that possible to do (e.g., trust, experience with each other, etc.)?
Having considered these questions, we began to "map" our social spaces and relationships, and consider where there might be gaps that we need to fill in order to create a more robust accountability atmosphere. If we lack people in our lives to help hold us accountable, where can we begin building those relationships, and how? If the only accountability relationships we have are ones of unequal power, how can we start to build peer relationships of trust that undergird our accountability efforts?
A key element to creating social and community accountability is practice—not just practice holding each other accountable, but first, practice holding ourselves accountable. When we are able to acknowledge ways that we have fallen short of our own values and expectations, and able to do that out loud, we invite others around us into a similar practice of being able to acknowledge mistakes and harms, and ask for social support to course-correct. This means that if we hope to have fruitful accountability processes in our relationships and communities, we need not just the tools to recognize and acknowledge harm but also the supportive structures to hold that acknowledgment and scaffolding for building repair. If our personal networks for receiving loving but critical corrections is lacking, we won't be able to summon the bravery to overcome our fears and continue acknowledging when we fall short of our values and expectations.
Concretely, who holds us accountable is ourselves and each other. And how we do that is by practicing, often, and out loud. For example, if I'm an acro teacher offering a class, I can acknowledge to my students the things that didn't go well or according to plan, and ask for reminders next time or for folks to speak up in the moment: "I didn't do as well as I wanted today in making sure everyone got enough time on their turns—please remind me next time if I've missed your opportunity to base or fly." But this also extends to our interactions with each other outside of the structured class environment, within or outside acro. For example, our society is rife with negative commentary about body size and fatphobic rhetoric, and it creeps into our acro practices and shapes our expectations. We can each take time to acknowledge when that's overtaken our language or behavior ("I shouldn't have said that person is a 'bigger flyer'—what I meant was..."), but can also invite others into our learning process out loud ("I'm really working on being kind and specific in the way that I think and talk about my own body, so it'd help me out a lot if you were able to avoid saying things about people's weight when we're working together. Can you help me with that?").
Homework and Take-Aways
Obviously all of this work takes time and investment, and most importantly, practice. We ended our discussion with an invitation to pick an area to practice holding ourselves accountable even just in the context of the festival weekend, and to assess what resources we would need to engage in that accountability. For example, if we had a goal of breaking out of our social bubble to work with someone new, or to make sure we got reps of our dream skill that is still feeling scary, what support might we need? A buddy to make asks with us? A super spotter to help us feel grounded? Someone to remind us that we wanted to say hi to someone new each day? Or if we had a goal of increasing our own awareness and practicing receiving corrections, could we practice asking for feedback at the end of each session or work with each partner? And could we find a friend to listen afterward for anything uncomfortable that might arise?
These are tools and tasks that we can begin to implement on a day-to-day basis without waiting for huge moments of conflict to attempt to assemble our toolkit. Just the same as you wouldn't try to stack a hand-to-hand on a 3-high, cold with no lines or calibration, and without having spent a while honing your stability in two-high, you also can't expect smoothness and success in creating community accountability if you don't first begin the practice small, and with yourself.
Even though it was brief, I appreciated everyone who came out to the conversation and showed up vulnerably with questions and comments and examples to begin refining their own accountability work together. I had several opportunities to engage one-on-one with folks after the chat and talk through complicated and thorny community dynamics—and as always, this is something I'm happy to support exactly because I know that these processes of accountability take time and resources, and our investments in them as a community are what ultimately make us stronger. While I'm not always physically present for every festival, intensive, or community acro gathering, I'm also happy to support these practices from afar, just reach out.
