Design, Research, and Feminism(s)': at DRS 2018

CALL: As design research matures and interacts more extensively with other academic disciplines, design research communities are engaging more profoundly and reflexively with the nature of research itself and the particular “situated knowledges” (Haraway) of design and the design researcher. Feminist theories are increasingly prevalent as a critical modality in design research by attending to issues such as power, positionality, embodiment, relationality, materiality, territoriality and temporality. Feminist theories assert that things can be different and can extend beyond analytic modalities into practice-based, interventionist and activist modalities to propose, materialize and experience how things may become “otherwise”. This track invite contributions exploring notions of criticality and, or, feminism in design research. Possible topics among others may include:
• feminist perspectives on and approaches to knowledge-making and epistemologies in design research;
• design research work as a critical (feminist, intersectional, decolonial, etc.) position and/or practice;
• the agency of critical theory and/or critical practice, the research as activist;
• feminist critical theories in design research as an expansion/elaboration/challenge to ‘critical design’ and speculative design;
• cases of feminist design or design research practices, for example as speculative feminist fabulation and/or proposals of alternative futures and/or histories.