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When a tree says no: Towards a more-than-human consent notion for design
Increasing calls to decolonize the university brought forward by student-led movements have raised the question regarding how to reassess the canon of European social and political thought. This article offers a critical but appreciative reading of Gurminder Bhambra’s and John Holmwood’s Colonialism and Modern Social Theory, based on the first chapter titled “Hobbes to Hegel: Europe and Its Others.” It discusses the strategies of intervention into the canon proposed by the authors and argues for complementary strategies of transformation if decolonizing the canon means to move beyond the myths, metaphors, fictions, and false universals of modern European thought.
An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.
What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world.
This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival.
The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Knowledge Unlatched and the MIT Press Frank Urbanowski Memorial Fund.
p>La historia social del Chaco santafesino en tiempos de La Forestal ha sido escasamente investigada. Más allá del clásico ensayo de Gastón Gori y algunos estudios específicos, los pocos relatos existentes han sido reiterativos y descuidaron aspectos importantes de la vida social de los poblados forestales. Este artículo, parte de una investigación más amplia, busca echar luz sobre algunos de estos aspectos. A partir de numerosos y variados testimonios poco o nunca explorados (informes oficiales, cartas de lectores, crónicas periodísticas, novelas y, principalmente, un folleto escrito por un delegado sindical en gira), buscamos representarnos muchas de las circunstancias que fueron configurando, durante las primeras dos décadas del siglo XX, un particular y asfixiante régimen social. No es de extrañar que las precarias características de la vivienda, la salud y la alimentación, la inexistencia de verdaderos servicios públicos, la complicidad de los agentes de justicia y seguridad y la falta de canales genuinos de participación cívica, animaran, hacia fines de la década de 1910, un inédito movimiento de protesta y un singular proceso de sindicalización.
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Published in: Somatechnics vol 8 no 2:
Abstract:
In the Western cultural imaginaries the monstrous is defined – following Aristotelian categorisations – by its excess, deficiency or displacement of organic matter. These characteristics come to the fore in the field of bioart: a current in contemporary art that involves the use of biological materials (various kinds of soma: cells, tissues, organisms), and scientific procedures, technologies, protocols, and tools. Bioartistic projects and objects not only challenge the conventional ideas of embodiment and bodily boundaries, but also explore the relation between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, as well as various thresholds of the living.
By looking at select bioartworks, this paper argues that the analysed projects offer a different ontology of life. More specifically, they expose life as uncontainable, that is, as a power of differentiation that traverses the divide between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, and, ultimately, life and death. In this way, they draw attention to excess, processuality and multiplicity at the very core of life itself. Thus understood, life always already surpasses preconceived material and conceptual limits.
Finally, while taking Deleuzian feminisms and new materialism as its theoretical ground, the paper suggests that such a revision of the ontology of life may mobilise future conceptualisations of ethics that evade the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences.
available at http://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1253806&dswid=-6130
This roundtable was conducted by the eight founding members of Decolonising Design Group in October 2017, using an online messaging platform. Each member approached design and decoloniality from different yet interrelating viewpoints, by threading their individual arguments with the preceding ones. The piece thus offers and travels through a variety of subject matter including politics of design, artificiality, modernity, Eurocentrism, capitalism, Indigenous Knowledge, pluriversality, continental philosophy, pedagogy, materiality, mobility, language, gender oppression, sexuality, and intersectionality.
The scope of someone’s consent is the range of actions that they permit by giving consent. This book investigates the underexplored question of which normative principle governs the scope of consent. To answer this question, this investigation involves taking a stance on what constitutes consent. By appealing to the idea that someone can justify their behaviour by appealing to another person’s consent, this book defends the view that consent consists in behaviour that expresses a consent-giver’s will for how a consent-receiver behaves. The ultimate conclusion of this book is that the scope of consent is determined by certain evidence that bears on the appropriate interpretation of the consent.
In this article, I ask how anthropology can adopt a decolonial approach that incorporates and acknowledges the critical scholarship of Indigenous thinkers whose work and labour informs many current trends in Euro-Western scholarship, activism and socio-political discourse. I also query how to address ongoing structural colonialism within the academy in order to ensure that marginalised voices are heard within academic discourses.
Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In "Speculative Everything," Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be -- to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose "what if" questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). "Speculative Everything" offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more -- about everything -- reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures. © 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Nepantla: Views from South 1.3 (2000) 533-580
What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process
that began with the constitution of America and colonial/modern
Eurocentered capitalism as a new global power. One of the
fundamental axes of this model of power is the social
classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a
mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial
domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global
power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. The racial
axis has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be
more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was
established. Therefore, the model of power that is globally
hegemonic today presupposes an element of coloniality. In what
follows, my primary aim is to open up some of the theoretically
necessary questions about the implications of coloniality of power
regarding the history of Latin America.
America and the New Model of Global Power
America was constituted as the first space/time of a new model
of power of global vocation, and both in this way and by it became
the first identity of modernity. Two historical processes
associated in the production of that space/time converged and
established the two fundamental axes of the new model of power. One
was the codification of the differences between conquerors and
conquered in the idea of “race,” a supposedly different biological
structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to
the others. The conquistadors assumed this idea as the
constitutive, founding element of the relations of domination that
the conquest imposed. On this basis, the population of America, and
later the world, was classified within the new model of power. The
other process was the constitution of a new structure of control of
labor and its resources and products. This new structure was an
articulation of all historically known previous structures of
control of labor, slavery, serfdom, small independent commodity
production and reciprocity, together around and upon the basis of
capital and the world market.
Race: A Mental Category of Modernity
The idea of race, in its modern meaning, does not have a known
history before the colonization of America. Perhaps it originated
in reference to the phenotypic differences between conquerors and
conquered. However, what matters is that soon it was constructed to
refer to the supposed differential biological structures between
those groups.
Social relations founded on the category of race produced new
historical social identities in America—Indians, blacks, and
mestizos—and redefined others. Terms such as Spanish and
Portuguese, and much later European, which until
then indicated only geographic origin or country of origin,
acquired from then on a racial connotation in reference to the new
identities. Insofar as the social relations that were being
configured were relations of domination, such identities were
considered constitutive of the hierarchies, places, and
corresponding social roles, and consequently of the model of
colonial domination that was being imposed. In other words, race
and racial identity were established as instruments of basic social
classification.
As time went by, the colonizers codified the phenotypic trait of
the colonized as color, and they assumed it as the emblematic
characteristic of racial category. That category was probably
initially established in the area of Anglo-America. There so-called
blacks were not only the most important exploited group, since the
principal part of the economy rested on their labor; they were,
above all, the most important colonized race, since Indians were
not part of that colonial society. Why the dominant group calls
itself “white” is a story related to racial classification.
In America, the idea of race was a way of granting legitimacy to
the relations of domination imposed by the conquest. After the
colonization of America and the expansion of European colonialism
to the rest of the world, the subsequent constitution of Europe as
a new id-entity needed the elaboration of a Eurocentric
perspective of knowledge, a theoretical perspective on the idea of
race as a naturalization of colonial relations between Europeans
and non-Europeans. Historically, this meant a new way of
legitimizing the already old ideas and practices of...
Design, formulated as a discipline concerned with form and problem-solving, may seem preoccupied with matters other than those of politics and the political. Traced through a history of the fine arts, for example, the concerns of design include aesthetic expression and material form. As a liberal art, design is arguably a discipline that synthesizes knowledge from across the natural and social sciences and applies it to solving complex technical and social problems. These dimensions of design are apparent in its expanding roles in sustainable development—for example, in expressing life cycle information about products, changing energy consumption behavior, rethinking transportation or food services, and steering decision-making processes in communities or companies. Amended as ‘sustainable,’ design is repositioned from being part of the problem of unsustainable development. However, preoccupied with forms or solutions, design is not always attentive to its political dimensions. How, by, and for whom sustainability is formulated are political questions to be discussed within discourses and practices of sustainable development—and sustainable design...
...Such questions are at stake in critical studies and critical practices of design. Reflecting here on design examples from my own work and that of others, I articulate a series of such questions inspired by critical theory and political philosophy. These open a discussion of the roles of design in sustainable consumption and sustainable communities, in which it is profoundly implicated in the reorganization of everyday life. Combining reflections and examples, the graphic form of this article reflects an interweaving of theory and practice, the materiality of academia and the criticality of design.
We regularly wield powers that, upon close scrutiny, appear remarkably magical. By sheer exercise of will, we bring into existence things that have never existed before. With but a nod, we effect the disappearance of things that have long served as barriers to the actions of others. And, by mere resolve, we generate things that pose significant obstacles to others' exercise of liberty. What is the nature of these things that we create and destroy by our mere decision to do so? The answer: the rights and obligations of others. And by what seemingly magical means do we alter these rights and obligations? By making promises and issuing or revoking consent When we make promises, we generate obligations for ourselves, and when we give consent, we create rights for others. Since the rights and obligations that are affected by means of promising and consenting largely define the boundaries of permissible action, our exercise of these seemingly magical powers can significantly affect the lives and liberties of others.
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