A Situated Reading of a Design Practitioner: A Spiral Tale About Women Who Protest

• In Event: Situating Methods

Abstract

If academic writing can be read as a novel, where are those readers situated? Fiction writing as a method of engagement spans generations of writers many of whose work echoes across STS and the intersection of STS with design, philosophy and media studies. Works by Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and more recent scholars like Sarah Kember are a few examples of writing as a connective method. I will argue that by focusing on situated methods requires a shift of attention to our situated acts of reading. Where are art and design practitioners when reading texts aimed at those companioned to STS? This paper will approach these questions auto-ethnographically as a feminist designer of STS trying to read Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres: Foam (Vol. 3) and its subsequent STS literature (Sophie Houdart 2008, Nina Wakeford 2011), transnationally within spaces like agoras, airing cupboards, or while travelling in the air (Peter Sloterdijk, 2004). By doing so I remember the rallying and protesting of disagreeable and agreeable women from 1968 breast bearing student protestors at the Frankfurt School to the balaclava wearing of the Russian feminist punk band, Pussy Riot

Author

• Amanda Windle, London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London