Hi all,
and so each of you constructs your ontological and epistemological
positions. Drawing on your experiences and the ideas of the
meaning-making societies into which you have been acculturated. Using
language that is coded. As language names things as existing in the
world, through naming them, language works to exclude what can/is
not be/ing named. And so perhaps the possibilities for 'knowing'
through language close down.
And the meaning I make from the language used in these constructions
is one of a multitude of possible meanings. So, if meaning is not
fixed in language, and language is thus unstable, what have we done
here? Create a fiction that design is one thing and not another
thing? That knowledge is one thing and not another thing? Select
facts and draw boundaries around what is and what is not true in
these constructions? And in so doing, does this not exclude
possibilities for other constructions? And other knowledges. And
other ways of knowing through designing. And are these constructions
not writing that uses narrative convention, that selects, omits,
shows bias, and employs rhetoric? As language is central to
discourse, discourse is the means by which the doings of people
become observable in talk. And writing (re)produces the discourses
within institutions, coordinating 'the way we do things around here'.
And as readers, each of you will construct your understanding of what
was (re)produced in the stories of those who responded to my
provocation: all writing is fiction.
In institutional ethnography, Dorothy Smith draws on Foucault's
conception of discourse, whereby 'what can be said or written is
subject to the regulation of the discourse within which it is
framedregulating how people's subjectivities are coordinated, what
can be uttered, what must be excluded, what is simply not made
presentis discursively determined' (2005, pp. 17-18). And so our
stories become regulated within discourses that determine what gets
said, what counts as being worthwhile, who gets to say it, and thus
omits that which is not said, and in the context of an email
discussion, not written.
So again, I provoke: what of the women design researchers in this conversation?
cheers, teena
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