“Embodied Infrastructures: Rehearsing an Otherwise Political Future,” Journal of Architecture Education, Infidelities Special Issue, 78:1, 2024
Infidel to academic disciplinarity, and employing a poetic, feminist reading of two vignettes and... more Infidel to academic disciplinarity, and employing a poetic, feminist reading of two vignettes and a case study, this paper presents “embodied infrastructures” as a fundamental grammar of prefigurative politics through which a redirected society rehearses an “otherwise” political future. Embodied infrastructures are identified in the people’s mic of the Occupy movement (2011), and the human chain and “home thrown in the mud” in the women’s antinuclear protest practices at the Greenham Common Peace Camp (1982-early 2000s). Acknowledging the interdependence of bodies, materiality, and democracy, and rejecting delegating their beliefs, morality, and intentionality to technologies, participants in prefigurative political movements are determined to become infrastructure themselves. Infrastructures of embodied resource circulation are seen in continuity with “corporeal infrastructures” found in communities of scarcity during which bodies are activated as social actants—evident in Chandigarh’s appropriation of autochthonous capacities of auto-construction, and a cautionary tale of the inherent vulnerability of bodily employment when co-opted by conditions of alienated social relations. Embodied infrastructures are radical in their transgression of the boundaries between collectivity and individuality, users and designers, labor and work, privacy and publicity, futures and presents. They bring “life making” and “thing making” together as entangled, mutually constitutive paths to collective emancipation.
Prototyping and Prefiguring through Law Reform: An Interview with Davina Cooper on the FLaG Sex and Gender Decertification Proposal, 2023
In an interview with Professor Davina
Cooper, we discuss her research project “The Future
of Lega... more In an interview with Professor Davina Cooper, we discuss her research project “The Future of Legal Gender” (FlaG), a four-year project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK (2018–22). Davina Cooper is Research Professor in Law and Political Theory at King’s College London and the author of several books, including Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces (Duke University Press, 2014). In the interview, we explore prefiguration, prototyping and analogies with design methodologies focusing on FLaG’s law reform proposal to decertify sex and gender.
Prefigurative politics are 'world-making' events. They enact alternative ways of being, knowing a... more Prefigurative politics are 'world-making' events. They enact alternative ways of being, knowing and doing in spaces of resistance and experimentation. What insights does prefiguration in design(ing) hold for the politics of prefiguration? In exploring this affinity, I dive into a photograph of my twenty-year-old self that pivots around the maquette of the 'Constellation'. In this memoir I delve into my experience of prefiguration as an architecture student and member of a counterculture in Greece in the mid-1980s. The maquette performs a double prefigurative. Like every design prototype, it acts in the present tense while it also signals a future desired change. Yet the project also manifests a prefigurative function via its countercultural affiliation, even if its political goals remained elusive. The courses of action encountered in this memoir defy the entrenched dualities of collectivity/individuality, embodiment/language, users/designers, futures/presents. The memoir contributes to the study of prefigurative politics by underscoring the assembling of matter into form as a capacitor of a prefigurative imaginary at work.
This special issue on Material Displacements explores the intersection of materiality, design, an... more This special issue on Material Displacements explores the intersection of materiality, design, and displacement, conceived of as rupture, transition, and traversal of borders, boundaries, and forms. This introduction outlines the role of displacement in various disciplines and theoretical approaches, highlighting those of new materialism, critical urbanism, deterritorialization, and border thinking. It then presents work published in the Journal of Design History by design historians and theorists who have envisioned design's relation with displacement through diverse perspectives. Each author contributing to this issue reveals the power and role of materiality in inducing movement in/out of the borders broadly conceived, as well as materials' susceptibility to external forces of displacement.
Editors’ Introduction to Special Issue (free access)
This special issue of Design and Culture eme... more Editors’ Introduction to Special Issue (free access) This special issue of Design and Culture emerged from a call released in May 2020 while we were still in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Noting that the pandemic had radically altered our relations with things, spaces, and one another, we called for dispatches that would register and articulate its immediate and unfolding experience. In particular, we wanted to pay attention to the dramatically deepening systemic social and geopolitical inequities and new territorial divides it created, seen through design perspectives, approaches, and sensibilities. Our editorial brief was not specifically geared to collect examples of design “solutions” to identifiable (and obvious) design “problems” related to the pandemic. Rather, we aimed to convey a more nuanced and expanded notion of design as a social sensitivity, critical lens, and proposition of tangible values and aspirations. We were also interested in experiences from various subject positions, from those who spent the quarantine working or studying from home to essential workers and frontliners, aware that the virus was far from a “great equalizer” and that “risk is not equally distributed” (Jones 2020). In terms of format, we sought a variety of responses – from text to audio and visual work – that would capture the different affective and material dimensions of the pandemic experience.
Dr Efie Galiatsou is a critical care consultant working in an Intensive Treatment Unit (ITU) in ... more Dr Efie Galiatsou is a critical care consultant working in an Intensive Treatment Unit (ITU) in a hospital in north-west London. This interview was conducted on April 12, 2020, near the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the interview, we talk about the spatial re-organization of the hospital during the pandemic; the problem of supply shortages; and questions of solidarity, activism, and multi-disciplinarity in the context of the pandemic. This interview gives an insider view of the immediate responses of healthcare providers to the pandemic.
Chapter in Halter, Regine and Walthard, Catherine, eds. Cultural Spaces and Design. Prospects of ... more Chapter in Halter, Regine and Walthard, Catherine, eds. Cultural Spaces and Design. Prospects of Design Education, Librum Publishers & Editors, Basel, 2019.
A conversation with Zoy Anastassakis, Marcos Martins, Lucas Nonno, Juliana Paolucci & Jilly Traga... more A conversation with Zoy Anastassakis, Marcos Martins, Lucas Nonno, Juliana Paolucci & Jilly Traganou (2019): ,
In Encyclopedia of Asian Design: Transnational and Global Issues in Asian Design by Christine Guth, Hilary French and Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Bloomsbury (Design Library) , 2018
“Embodied Infrastructures: Rehearsing an Otherwise Political Future,” Journal of Architecture Education, Infidelities Special Issue, 78:1, 2024
Infidel to academic disciplinarity, and employing a poetic, feminist reading of two vignettes and... more Infidel to academic disciplinarity, and employing a poetic, feminist reading of two vignettes and a case study, this paper presents “embodied infrastructures” as a fundamental grammar of prefigurative politics through which a redirected society rehearses an “otherwise” political future. Embodied infrastructures are identified in the people’s mic of the Occupy movement (2011), and the human chain and “home thrown in the mud” in the women’s antinuclear protest practices at the Greenham Common Peace Camp (1982-early 2000s). Acknowledging the interdependence of bodies, materiality, and democracy, and rejecting delegating their beliefs, morality, and intentionality to technologies, participants in prefigurative political movements are determined to become infrastructure themselves. Infrastructures of embodied resource circulation are seen in continuity with “corporeal infrastructures” found in communities of scarcity during which bodies are activated as social actants—evident in Chandigarh’s appropriation of autochthonous capacities of auto-construction, and a cautionary tale of the inherent vulnerability of bodily employment when co-opted by conditions of alienated social relations. Embodied infrastructures are radical in their transgression of the boundaries between collectivity and individuality, users and designers, labor and work, privacy and publicity, futures and presents. They bring “life making” and “thing making” together as entangled, mutually constitutive paths to collective emancipation.
Prototyping and Prefiguring through Law Reform: An Interview with Davina Cooper on the FLaG Sex and Gender Decertification Proposal, 2023
In an interview with Professor Davina
Cooper, we discuss her research project “The Future
of Lega... more In an interview with Professor Davina Cooper, we discuss her research project “The Future of Legal Gender” (FlaG), a four-year project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK (2018–22). Davina Cooper is Research Professor in Law and Political Theory at King’s College London and the author of several books, including Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces (Duke University Press, 2014). In the interview, we explore prefiguration, prototyping and analogies with design methodologies focusing on FLaG’s law reform proposal to decertify sex and gender.
Prefigurative politics are 'world-making' events. They enact alternative ways of being, knowing a... more Prefigurative politics are 'world-making' events. They enact alternative ways of being, knowing and doing in spaces of resistance and experimentation. What insights does prefiguration in design(ing) hold for the politics of prefiguration? In exploring this affinity, I dive into a photograph of my twenty-year-old self that pivots around the maquette of the 'Constellation'. In this memoir I delve into my experience of prefiguration as an architecture student and member of a counterculture in Greece in the mid-1980s. The maquette performs a double prefigurative. Like every design prototype, it acts in the present tense while it also signals a future desired change. Yet the project also manifests a prefigurative function via its countercultural affiliation, even if its political goals remained elusive. The courses of action encountered in this memoir defy the entrenched dualities of collectivity/individuality, embodiment/language, users/designers, futures/presents. The memoir contributes to the study of prefigurative politics by underscoring the assembling of matter into form as a capacitor of a prefigurative imaginary at work.
This special issue on Material Displacements explores the intersection of materiality, design, an... more This special issue on Material Displacements explores the intersection of materiality, design, and displacement, conceived of as rupture, transition, and traversal of borders, boundaries, and forms. This introduction outlines the role of displacement in various disciplines and theoretical approaches, highlighting those of new materialism, critical urbanism, deterritorialization, and border thinking. It then presents work published in the Journal of Design History by design historians and theorists who have envisioned design's relation with displacement through diverse perspectives. Each author contributing to this issue reveals the power and role of materiality in inducing movement in/out of the borders broadly conceived, as well as materials' susceptibility to external forces of displacement.
Editors’ Introduction to Special Issue (free access)
This special issue of Design and Culture eme... more Editors’ Introduction to Special Issue (free access) This special issue of Design and Culture emerged from a call released in May 2020 while we were still in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Noting that the pandemic had radically altered our relations with things, spaces, and one another, we called for dispatches that would register and articulate its immediate and unfolding experience. In particular, we wanted to pay attention to the dramatically deepening systemic social and geopolitical inequities and new territorial divides it created, seen through design perspectives, approaches, and sensibilities. Our editorial brief was not specifically geared to collect examples of design “solutions” to identifiable (and obvious) design “problems” related to the pandemic. Rather, we aimed to convey a more nuanced and expanded notion of design as a social sensitivity, critical lens, and proposition of tangible values and aspirations. We were also interested in experiences from various subject positions, from those who spent the quarantine working or studying from home to essential workers and frontliners, aware that the virus was far from a “great equalizer” and that “risk is not equally distributed” (Jones 2020). In terms of format, we sought a variety of responses – from text to audio and visual work – that would capture the different affective and material dimensions of the pandemic experience.
Dr Efie Galiatsou is a critical care consultant working in an Intensive Treatment Unit (ITU) in ... more Dr Efie Galiatsou is a critical care consultant working in an Intensive Treatment Unit (ITU) in a hospital in north-west London. This interview was conducted on April 12, 2020, near the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the interview, we talk about the spatial re-organization of the hospital during the pandemic; the problem of supply shortages; and questions of solidarity, activism, and multi-disciplinarity in the context of the pandemic. This interview gives an insider view of the immediate responses of healthcare providers to the pandemic.
Chapter in Halter, Regine and Walthard, Catherine, eds. Cultural Spaces and Design. Prospects of ... more Chapter in Halter, Regine and Walthard, Catherine, eds. Cultural Spaces and Design. Prospects of Design Education, Librum Publishers & Editors, Basel, 2019.
A conversation with Zoy Anastassakis, Marcos Martins, Lucas Nonno, Juliana Paolucci & Jilly Traga... more A conversation with Zoy Anastassakis, Marcos Martins, Lucas Nonno, Juliana Paolucci & Jilly Traganou (2019): ,
In Encyclopedia of Asian Design: Transnational and Global Issues in Asian Design by Christine Guth, Hilary French and Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Bloomsbury (Design Library) , 2018
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Cooper, we discuss her research project “The Future
of Legal Gender” (FlaG), a four-year project funded
by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK
(2018–22). Davina Cooper is Research Professor in
Law and Political Theory at King’s College London
and the author of several books, including Everyday
Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces
(Duke University Press, 2014). In the interview, we
explore prefiguration, prototyping and analogies with
design methodologies focusing on FLaG’s law reform
proposal to decertify sex and gender.
This special issue of Design and Culture emerged from a call
released in May 2020 while we were still in the early stages
of the COVID-19 pandemic. Noting that the pandemic had
radically altered our relations with things, spaces, and one
another, we called for dispatches that would register and
articulate its immediate and unfolding experience. In particular,
we wanted to pay attention to the dramatically deepening
systemic social and geopolitical inequities and new
territorial divides it created, seen through design perspectives,
approaches, and sensibilities. Our editorial brief was
not specifically geared to collect examples of design
“solutions” to identifiable (and obvious) design “problems”
related to the pandemic. Rather, we aimed to convey a
more nuanced and expanded notion of design as a social
sensitivity, critical lens, and proposition of tangible values and aspirations. We were also interested in experiences from various
subject positions, from those who spent the quarantine working or
studying from home to essential workers and frontliners, aware that
the virus was far from a “great equalizer” and that “risk is not equally
distributed” (Jones 2020). In terms of format, we sought a variety of
responses – from text to audio and visual work – that would capture
the different affective and material dimensions of the pandemic
experience.
Cooper, we discuss her research project “The Future
of Legal Gender” (FlaG), a four-year project funded
by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK
(2018–22). Davina Cooper is Research Professor in
Law and Political Theory at King’s College London
and the author of several books, including Everyday
Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces
(Duke University Press, 2014). In the interview, we
explore prefiguration, prototyping and analogies with
design methodologies focusing on FLaG’s law reform
proposal to decertify sex and gender.
This special issue of Design and Culture emerged from a call
released in May 2020 while we were still in the early stages
of the COVID-19 pandemic. Noting that the pandemic had
radically altered our relations with things, spaces, and one
another, we called for dispatches that would register and
articulate its immediate and unfolding experience. In particular,
we wanted to pay attention to the dramatically deepening
systemic social and geopolitical inequities and new
territorial divides it created, seen through design perspectives,
approaches, and sensibilities. Our editorial brief was
not specifically geared to collect examples of design
“solutions” to identifiable (and obvious) design “problems”
related to the pandemic. Rather, we aimed to convey a
more nuanced and expanded notion of design as a social
sensitivity, critical lens, and proposition of tangible values and aspirations. We were also interested in experiences from various
subject positions, from those who spent the quarantine working or
studying from home to essential workers and frontliners, aware that
the virus was far from a “great equalizer” and that “risk is not equally
distributed” (Jones 2020). In terms of format, we sought a variety of
responses – from text to audio and visual work – that would capture
the different affective and material dimensions of the pandemic
experience.