CALL FOR PAPERS DISEÑA #26: Affirmation? How to Learn to Live with 'The Others' Through Design

GUEST EDITORS:

Enrique Nieto Fernández | Universidad de Alicante | enrique.nieto@ua.es

Ester Gisbert Alemany | Universidad de Alicante | ester.gisbert@ua.es

 

Submission Deadline: July 31, 2024

Expected publication date: January 2025

 

Affirmation? How to Learn to Live with 'The Others' Through Design

How do emergent creative practices question creative disciplines and how do they occupy their positions of authority? By asking these questions, we propose to approach creative practices not for their final products, but as an exercise of constant recomposition in the design of encounters between entities with very heterogeneous lives, interests, risks, scales, and temporalities. Endangered animals, cultural management policies, invasive plants, ancestral knowledges, regulations on materials, viruses yet to be known, human communities, changing climates, environments, and publics that, all together, design a 'we' always embedded in the process of becoming, that affects the places where we work, the studios where we design, the classrooms where we learn, or the project itself as a unit of production.

Therefore, we seek case studies and theoretical insights into the founding capacities that are deployed in the process of becoming that takes place within creative practices, as well as the role of materials and technologies in it. We want to imagine to what extent these encounters constitute rehearsals of political forms of resistance, in broken times where creative practices are called to account as shapers of worlds; or in what sense these encounters propose a redefinition of disciplinary limits and scopes. We are convinced that it is 'through' these untimely encounters that we design the granting of variations of importance to things—maybe also some better futures to come.

We want to meet again in relational spaces that emerge from the crossings between different fields of knowledge, and test our joint capacities to deal with these other matters that have become important to us. Thus, we will be interested in learning about the scope of transversal methodologies that, beyond promoting a certain 'indiscipline', aim to recompose what we call collaborative research in the Humanities and creative practices. We want to rehearse their ability to broaden our political imagination. To this end, we shall be inspired by all those conceptualizations that question our places of authority in order to imagine others: from Karen Barad’s 'intractions' to Marisol de la Cadena’s 'being in Ayllu'; through Isabelle Stengers’ 'ecologies of practices'; Vinciane Despret’s 'territorial importance of beauty'; Arturo Escobar’s 'design in autonomy'; Donna Haraway’s 'sympoietic practices'; Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s 'baroque economies'; Tim Ingold’s 'creative undergoing'; Erin Manning’s 'minor gestures'; Rosi Braidotti’s 'affirmative practices'; AbdouMaliq Simone’s 'screens'; María Galindo’s 'poor people's tricks'; Walter Mignolo’s 'decoloniality of knowledge'; or Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s imperative to 'decolonize methodologies'. We will also be delighted to learn about the scope of other conceptualizations that allow us to improve our understanding of the overflowing of creative practices.

In the end, we aspire to expand the ways for socializing research, so we encourage the submission of variations in format that are capable of broadening the places from which research is articulated (commissions, clients, work hierarchies, professional associations, design techniques, collaborations, relations with institutions...), as long as (1) they acknowledge the recompositions that take place 'through' design practices that are able to be more attentive to our present times; and (2) share our desire of and excitement for taking a collective leap towards affirmation.