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anextremelyonlineG wrote

An ideology usually has a metanarrative, which is a story of how the world one inhabits came to be, where it's going, and what creates purpose and value within the world according to the story. For example, communism is a (very broad) ideology.

A positionality is more limited, and grounded in specific context. It is how you relate to the world, and is harder to boil down into a word.

Perhaps you are a teacher, who wants to create a free school by unionizing with other workers at the school you work at, liberating the students from impediments on their ability to self-organize, and ultimately challenging the managerial class that extracts value from, and implements authority on, the school you work at. You might come up with terms for where you are (high school teacher), what you are fighting (neoliberalism), and what you want (a free school, free association, post-pedagogy). While your words might sound great to a self-described a communist, instead of calling yourself this immutable identity which is divorced from most context, you have specified a sense of self for yourself that exists where you actually are.

This is a significant difference, and can be very helpful for clarifying and enabling your politics, and your agency in general, to be as effective and least-recuperable by the system as possible.

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